Huge numbers of retirees regularly travel over our northern and southern borders to buy medications, to have dental procedures, to have surgery performed, and to buy second homes… How long will it be until they decide it’s cheaper and easier just to move there? And what about the number of major corporations moving to foreign countries who will offer jobs in those countries? How long will it take young Americans to realize that an American salary goes ten times farther in a foreign country?

The mass migration has not only begun, it is in full swing. “Go west young man!” is now “Go South Young Man.”

I am back in Brazil to meet the expatriates who have already arrived. To get a feel for the land, the community, the culture, the politics, the economy, and ultimately to find out if Brazil is a place where I’d be willing to tie my horse.

So hang on. Here we go… back to Brazil.

Reality Bites

I’m pecking this out during a quick Internet café pit stop on an island called Ilha Grande just off the coast of Brazil, halfway between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. My son, his girlfriend and I have been sailing for two days among the 300 plus islands of Angra dos Reis aboard the Leo Louca, a private 42-ft. schooner owned by German expatriate Bernadette and her Portuguese husband, Reinaldo. 

Just moments ago, I read a headline online that indicated some kind of disaster - a storm perhaps? - has hit New Orleans. Not a word about it until now, despite the fact that Bernadette has received several birthday calls aboard the boat. 

It’s unsettling and a relief to know that it is possible to be out of the reach of CNN and BBC, if only for a few days. I am reminded once again, that the U.S. is not the center of the universe.

Robin In Rio

I was out till late last night at a huge street party in Lapa with Ryan and Jessica. Now this is what I didn’t get to do when I was in Rio on my own last year. There was olundum drumming and bossa nova and people crowded in the streets and fresh caipirinhas and dancing all night long. 

Rio is a city called Ciudad Marvillosa - Marvelous City – for a reason. You can almost feel it heave with vitality. It is winter and it’s hot - not too bad today as it’s overcast, but I can go out at night wearing sleeveless tops, shorts, and sandals and not get cold. Love it!

I´m having an entirely different experience in Rio this go-around because I’m in Copacabana among the tourists. We’ve decided to stretch our stay in Rio to a week. And so rather than remain in a hotel throughout my stay, I will move up the hill to Santa Teresa. It will be interesting to see if my experience of Rio changes with the neighborhood.

I now understand all the readers who wrote last year to tell me that they didn’t experience Rio as a dangerous city the way that I did last year. Even one of my female friends told me she had a blast when she visited Rio, partying until late in the night. What I am learning is that your perspective depends on what part of Rio you are in.

Next Day

Copacabana – It feels safe being on the streets at night as long as you keep your wits about you, completely unlike my experience last year in Santa Teresa, when even the taxi drivers didn’t like being out after 2AM. 

But just to remind me that this is Rio after all – on our first night in the city, we had strolled not two blocks from my hotel, when a bus lurched to a stop across the street. Inside, we saw people crowding into one another, pushing, arms and fists flying, jumping over turnstiles, pouring out of the bus, chasing someone down the street, probably a pickpocket. In less than five minutes, the passengers climbed back aboard and the bus resumed its route. 

Today I’m in artist-centric Santa Teresa among the old houses that crawl up the hills, the streets that snake around and around up the hills. This old bohemian hood, it’s houses walled off, guarded by rotweillers, is flanked on two sides by favelas. I ask Louis about the fireworks I hear going off.

“Oh that,” he says. “It means the drugs have arrived.” 

“What about the occasional firecracker I’ve heard?” I ask. 

“Those are to signal that the police have arrived.”

I don’t carry my laptop in outside. Nor anything that I don’t mind giving away at gunpoint or a shard of glass.

I ask my hostess, Adrianna, why the military doesn’t put a stop to the crime. She says that the favelas are as well armed as the military, perhaps more. 

“Some say that it is insiders in the military who are providing arms to the war lords,” she says. Two weeks ago, the heads of two warring favelas, duked it out from opposite ends of a major thoroughfare tunnel. Adriana says that Brazilians caught in the gunfight, panicked, abandoned their cars, and ran for their lives.

Rio de Janeiro, Marvelous City. Heart-stoppingly beautiful, heaving with life, and set to go off at any moment – in song or a shooting.

Oi. The Only Macs are at MacDonald’s

Oi! (Brazilian hello),

My Mac speaks a different language than Brazilian PC’s. Macs are as rare as glaciers here, so there’s no such thing as Mac support. The host of the castle I am staying in works in I.T., but since he has a PC, he doesn’t speak Mac-ease and I don’t speak PC. He speaks Brazilian Portuguese with a smattering of English and I speak English with a smattering of Brazilian Portuguese. We gotta a problem here!

Today I hired a taxi to take me to an Internet café, any Internet café, pronounced, Internetchi. Through tunnels, speeding along highways, down residential side streets. Our mission: to find an Internetchi connection.  He stopped in front of “Shopping” - the Brazilian word for shopping mall. And he assured me that this was where I would find what I was looking for.

I walked the floors of the mall back and forth, first floor, then the second floor, but no Internet cafe. I asked a security guard. He pointed me to a MacDonald’s restaurant at the end of the mall. Sure enough, when I stuck my head inside, there were three computers for customer use. Now that’s one way to get me inside a MacDonald’s!

Usually the more remote a city, the more Internet cafes it has. Perhaps the scarcity of Internet cafes in Rio is a sign that Brazil has climbed from third world to second, meaning lots of folks have their own computers, making Internet cafes superfluous.

And so I stepped under those Golden Arches prepared to sell my soul, thinking that maybe I could skip the burger. I snuck over to the bank of computers.

But no, a gal with a pointed paper hat told me I’d have to buy a Big Mac to earn 20 computer minutes. I probably could have been bribed - but there was a long snake of a line of eager Brazilians ahead of me. And there’s only so far I’ll go to get online. So I hailed a taxi and returned to I panema.

New Digs

I´ve just moved from a non-descript hotel room in Copacabana, to a Rapunzle room in a medieval castle complete with everything but moat (which once existed but has been filled in). Perched high atop a hill, you can see Valentin Castle from most parts of Rio and from the castle you can see almost all of Rio - a great place, I would imagine, to watch Carnival, as you have a dead-on view of the Sambadrome. 

There is a quaint, if noisy trolley car that jerks and squeals up the steep Santa Teresa Street past the castle’s front door. After entering through the heavy wooden door of the castle, you walk through a long underground tunnel, which ends at an old metal accordion-gated elevator. 

The castle has arched doorways, 16-foot ceilings, parquet floors, pointed gazebos, a pool, and verandahs… My hosts are Adriana and Louis, a young working couple, the latter the great-grandson of the artist who built Valentin Castle over 200 years ago. Louis’s mother, a social worker for the government, occupies the ground floor. She maintains the castle by renting out sections of the castle as apartments, including my room on the third floor of the flat of Louis and Adriana. 

The castle backs up to a mountain, and is surrounded by jungle foliage complete with monkeys who steal bananas from the kitchen. The neighborhood is Santa Teresa - bohemian, hip, teeming with artists, musicians, cafes, art galleries, and old houses. Charming, but flanked by favelas, which add an edge, especially after dark.

Cama e Cafe

Carlos, a 27-year old Brazilian, began the Santa Teresa-based bed and breakfast enterprise called Cama e Café. You can reach him online at camaecafe.com to book yourself a real room in a real house in one of Rio’s oldest neighborhoods. The idea is to funnel tourist dollars back into the community whose ambience drew tourists there in the first place, instead of foreign hotel chains. As the number of tourists increase in the area, the demand for more places to eat, shop, and sleep grow and the community thrives. It’s self-sustainable tourism at its best and the reason I’m now living in a castle for half the price of a room in Copacabana.

Carlos treats me to a late lunch at a popular Santa Teresa restaurant. It turns out that eating out on Saturday is a Carioca tradition - that and getting your car washed. Sudsy cars are parked all up and down the streets of Rio surrounded by kids wielding hoses and sponges. We share an amazing meal of fresh fish, carne del sol (sun-dried meat), feijadas (slow cooked beans with meat), farofa (a fried cassava grain that is to Brazilians, what ketchup is to Americans), rice, salad, and Bohemia beer. All around us are happy boisterous Brazilian families and friends consuming heaping quantities of food and beer. We top off our two-hour lunch with the traditional Brazilian aperitif, a shot of ginger juice. Then ever so slightly drunk in the middle of the afternoon and full to bursting, we tug and pull my bags up the hill to the castle at the summit. 

Carlos pounds on the big wooden door until Adriana rings us in. A long, dimly lit passageway under the castle leads us to the old elevator at its end. Up, up, up we creep, until the elevator jolts to a stop, dropping a few inches to the third floor. The gate will not open. Jammed. 

Now what? I am trapped in a tiny elevator with a 27-year old guy who’s been coming on to me since the last time I was here a year ago.

Which reminds me, Carlos asked me during our meal if I was a virgin. “What?” I asked nearly choking on my Bobo Camarao. 

“Well, are you?” 

“Why yes, I am,” I replied, getting what he was after. “I’m a Virgo.”

At last the elevator door opened, and Carlos emerged unmolested.