Last edited by NJS (2011-03-03 17:04:44)

Hep - I realize that the fellow would have a very different perception of the situation than I do but there is a great deal of resignation and resilience in these people too.

Into our fifth year here, I think that I have concluded that it isn't that the culture is impenetrable it is that it is inchoate and incohesive and seeks to combine contradictory elements; for example, certain voodoo practices with Christianity. I am sure that your experience of RdeJ was typical and we would not dream of living in the city. The problems there are not the problems of small provincial towns. The public corruption is all just more open than it is in other countries but look at Italy - or do you ever wonder how the Blairs manage to do all that they do on: an MP's pay; her nearly non-existence practice; the proceeds of his book, and speaking engagement fees? They have several properties, including a £5m house in Buckinghamshire as well as a house in Connaught Square and much else, besides an enormous staff. Heath, on the other hand, was lent a London house by a rich member of the party and Wilson, in retirement, was so poor that he used to pitch up to the HofL just to get his expense allowance.

I have to say that your experience of Rio is valid but life in The Sleepy Hollow is far from grotty and fearful for people here. I have once seen a punch up between two youngsters over a girl on the beach and that's it. Our dustbin was nicked. The maids will pinch anything that they can get away with but never actual cash or anything really valuable and seem to operate on the basis that if you have two of something they can take one as you need only one. The driving is appalling and they routinely have terrifying smash-ups. In fact a motorbike came around a blind corner at great speed and ran into our friends' car. The rider's helmet hit the windscreen like a torpedo and I, in the front passenger seat, was covered in shattered glass; and I say - fortunately. The nutter rider broke a couple of limbs but his female passenger (somebody else's young wife and mother to two small children), flew 10 to 15 yards over the car and ended up in a 24 hour coma (as she was not wearing a helmet) from which she did not emerge, and we had to sit there later and watch her bewildered husband going thrugh her bag and 'phone, struggling to come to terms with what she had been up to as well as the fact that she was certainly dying. But no one threatens anyone here and everyone greets everyone else in a real community.

The food and music in restaurants here is not worth much and I am afraid that the youngsters seem to go in for a rather nasty favela rap, while the older people are fond of music which approximates to German drinking songs.

I have to say that I find it strange that you found India 'unrewarding'. It is difficult there, in the way that Brazil can be difficult, but even just watching the sunrise over the mountains of a snowbound Murree (Pakistan/Kashmir) is unforgettable. I fear that I think that it can get only better for Brazil and India but it is getting perceptibly worse in the west and the last economic crisis is going to have a profound and long-term effect, leading to demoralization and a consequential rise in crime, including gratuitous violence and organized crime.

Last edited by NJS (2011-03-05 11:24:01)

Last edited by meister (2011-03-05 18:00:18)

Stories of this sort simply confirm that my boring, provincial existence here in the 'burbs is not so bad after all ...

A Carioca friend of ours who had a business in Copacabana said that Rio had been fine before 1976; although she has never really explained the significance of the date.

Drugs do seem to be a problem (here as everywhere) and the wife in a couple that we know (she is Brazilian and he is English) was sniffing from an inhaler one day and I (rather innocently) asked whether she had sinus trouble. She then told me that it was Kettamine - and she was certainly flying - ironic that such an uncertain drug should be the favourite of a fitness freak, but there we are; later that day she told us that she had pro tem. crossed the floor of the house and that, in her own hilarious phrase, 'bananas aren't the only fruit!'.