Most of all I love the people who meet me on the way. In this respect, Rio de Janeiro is one of the most unpredictable cities on the planet. Usually it all starts with the fact that you are already in line for the plane Paris - Rio, you meet amazing characters. During my four trips to Brazil on this flight, I met 20 Hells Angels bikers, a Scotsman who went to work on an oil platform for six months, a Portuguese rowing team coach and recently had rhinoplasty, and even an indigo-dyed head. who then turned out to be a man in her 50s with piercings all over her face. If during the flight you decide to overcome the language barrier, unprecedented horizons of knowledge will open before you. As one Brazilian grandmother, 75 years old, who, by the way, I also met on the plane, told me:if you speak Portuguese, Spanish and English, the whole world will be at your feet. “At least that part of it called South America” - I could only think about my dream at that moment.
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Marie Claire Archives
Be prepared for the fact that in Rio you will not only receive confirmation of all the famous clichés about Brazil, but at some point you will feel like an actress of a surreal film with a background in the form of magnificent sunsets and extras in the form of all these unrealistically rich and fantastically poor people around … This city is saturated with cinema - but not with Hollywood glitter, not nostalgia, but an almost physical sensation of the presence of cinema effects: street noises, crowds of people, heat, architecture.
For example, this might be the case. You lie in a sun lounger on the veranda of your room in a private artistic residence in the Santa Teresa district, built in the 1920s. The one-to-one room resembles the hotel room in which Angelina and Brad slept and swore in the movie "Mr. and Mrs. Smith". Lie down listening to local birds, samba melodies from the street and dream of love, of course! The hostess of my hotel went to yoga classes with the actress who played the slave girl Izaura in the world's most popular soap opera, and promised me to meet a star every morning at breakfast. And the black Norma, who looked like Mamushka from Gone with the Wind, who watched the house, with all her appearance, with her snow-white smile and no less snow-white turban, testified that I was in reliable and caring black hands. Then I found outthat Norma professes the local condomble religion and therefore always wears white, and that radiant smile appeared on her face after 40 days in the temple. I did not dare to photograph her, but I found graffiti with a similar turban in the city.
Street skateboarding competition
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In my opinion, there are two types of cities. There are realistic ones - New York, Tokyo, Sydney or Hong Kong. These are the cities that we cross at great speed, where the whole culture is concentrated within a certain virtual network, where people spend a minimum of time on the street. And then there is Rio, a cinema city with its 40-meter-high reinforced concrete Christ on top of the city's granite rock. Rio is an unrealistic city, its madness makes all other cities impossible. Or simply uninteresting.
A Hollywood summer resort in its perfect embodiment in the 1950s, Rio brought the model of the French Riviera to a new continent - magnifying everything a thousandfold. Someone successfully compared it to the Gardens of Eden - this caused a massive pilgrimage from the Old and New Worlds, and at the same time building hysteria and the development of a new urban culture. See for yourself - the coastline is lined with chic glass buildings abutting against each other, and at the same time favela slums are spreading like the flu throughout the city. But what makes this city really unreal is that half-naked bodies are constantly present in your field of vision. Despite all the obscenity of this situation in the culture of consumption existing in our world, people in Rio continue to walk in shorts and local Havaianas slippers in winter. They don't care, they don't know and they don't want to know,how to dress in other places. Rio's tropical modernity cautiously denies globalization and does not believe he can die - he always has the risen Christ in his winged splendor as an example.
Linda, 2.5 years old
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Rio is not a digital city at all, it fights against the virtual for the sake of vegetation and sensuality. Nobody is trying to resolve conflicts here, nobody is talking about politics. This city is like a mediator between the poor and the rich, between sleep and the beach, between night and day. Girls in thongs are lying on the sand - you can't guess in life who their dads are and how much money they have. Rio celebrates all the narcissistic manifestations of human nature: the beach, soap operas, football, music, games and endless parties. It is impossible to think that anyone here ever goes to work.
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