100% Jesus

Take me with you! (This is a camera trick)

Happy 4th, everybody! AMERICA!

So I went to see the big Jesus on top of Corcovado (it’s the name of a mountain and it means “hunchback”) on Friday with some handsome kids before work. Brazilians love Jesus. Whether Catholic or Evangelical, they really get into this guy. I’m all for it because I love Jesus too, but I express it differently. The title of this post, 100% Jesus, comes straight off of a bumper sticker that I saw last week. I don’t know what it means, but the concept of 100% Jesus is certainly compelling no matter how you apply it.

I saw a series of pro Jesus graffiti slogans last Thursday as I drove into a favela to visit one of the schools set up by the group I’m working with. I didn’t catch all of them, but they all followed an “only Jesus” theme, in that they highlighted a few things that only Jesus can do. My favorite boasted that “only Jesus can exorcise demons.” I thought it kind of funny, but then realized that Jesus is in direct competition down here with several other voodoo type gods and saints who make similar promises. Anyway, it’s good that we’ve got some well-intentioned graffiti marketers working on His behalf.

The best example of Brazil’s love for Jesus, however, is the statue at Corcovado. It’s impossible to communicate the hugeness of the sculpture through any photo that I could take there. Just look at this pic. Carlos took that for me. To give you an idea of how big the statue is, take into account that I’m about 50 feet in front of the statue and Carlos is on his back taking the picture. It’s that big. Oh, there’s another long-haired rebel dude they love here and everywhere else in the world. His name is Bob Marley. Look:

100% Bob

I made it to the office before it was too late and went to lunch with some of my colleagues here. I’m lucky to work with people who don’t try to speak English to me. When I lunch with them, I’ll try my best to pay close attention and learn more of the language, but after a while I’ll invariably grow tired and stop paying attention. This is exactly what happened on Friday when I heard Livia say “bambambam.” Not quite Emiril bam! style bambambam, but a hasty Brazilian bambambam where the a sound is more of a short schwa.

Boggled, I asked “what does bambambam mean?” Apparently, if a person is famous, you can say that they are bambambam. Then Deborah mischievously told me that if someone is really famous, you can say that they’re boomboomboom. Apparently this isn’t true, but it was funny. Regardless, here’s a song called Bam Bam by Toots and the Maytals that I offer in celebration of this new knowledge.

That’s not the end of the story. This bambambam person turned out to be none other than MIT Media Lab co-founder Seymour Papert and he was being discussed because he’d be speaking at the PUC that night (Pontifical Catholic University pronounced pookie). No better way to start the weekend so I went to hear the guy blow my mind. I took extensive notes which I will soon post over at PushSamba. I’ll just say that the man got me thinking hard, and that’s a very good thing.

Later, I met up with a friend from UCSD who was passing through Rio on his way up to the northeast to study Portuguese. It’s always nice to meet up with someone in a faraway land. He and I were escorted about town by a Carioca girl named Renata—who had also studied briefly at UCSD—and her boyfriend. They took us to a little bar with two floors of live music. We had a guy playing R.E.M. downstairs when we got in. I got a picture of him playing CCR. This is it:

Have you ever seen the rain?

I spent all day saturday on the beach with Carolina and Lauren (previously mentioned) in Barra, the neighborhood west of downtown Rio. It’s unseasonably hot for the middle of winter down here and it was a perfect beach day. I got a good tan that just barely missed becoming a burn and I got to eat my first biscoito globo.

The biscoito globo is a curious snack that is, as far as I can tell, the quintessential Brazilian beach food. Really, it tastes like nothing and is, in fact, mostly nothing. It’s an airy mini bagel shaped piece of nearly flavorless starch. AWESOME! Walking vendors haul them up and down the beach all day selling bags of them for about 65¢.

The girls and I hauled ourselves all the way back into Rio to go to their favorite gnocchi place in Copacabana. Well worth the trip, but it knocked me out and I ended up spending the rest of the evening at home reading East of Eden and making sure I wasn’t sunburnt. Oh, I also didn’t want to go out because I didn’t have any underwear thanks to last week’s lack of water in the apartment.

Jeez, I’ve got so much I want to write. Deal with it.

Across the street from me.

I went to church on Sunday morning at my new ward. I met an American guy named Guy and a Brazilian kid named Loris who told me all about why he wanted to visit Los Angeles. These are his reasons:

1. It’s a rich city
2. It has famous beaches (Venice)
3. Hollywood
4. Disney
5. It is a city of art
6. It is the city of martial arts

I kept telling him to skip LA and go to San Francisco or San Diego, but he wouldn’t listen. Still, city of martial arts! I had no idea!

I also met a British kid who had arrived in Rio yesterday. This is his story…

STORY ALERT

The kid (I don’t know his name) had planned his trip to Brazil to visit a Brazilian Mormon girl who he had been corresponding with via email. I don’t know how they met. She invited him to come stay with her family and he, having time off from school and the money for the trip, decided to come on down. Well, he receives an email from her just a few hours prior to his departure. Except it’s not from her. It’s from a Brazilian guy who tells him that he has been intercepting the British kid’s emails to the girl and deleting them because he (the Brazilian guy) is in love with the girl and doesn’t want the British guy getting in his way!

So, the British guy was at church trying to find anyone who could point him in the right direction. Ha! I got to translate for him as he asked around. It’s good to be part of a community.

I went to the beach at Ipanema on Sunday afternoon with Patricia, Carlos and Jorge. Carlos and I swam around among hundreds of tiny fishes that glinted like silver just below the surface. We rode a few waves. The sun set behind the city and we joined Patricia and Jorge to drink the water out of cold coconuts.

I stopped and shot some pictures of a fascinating sport on the way to the beach. Look!

This is a new sport.

This is how you play.

I’m so impressed. Not just with these guys playing volleyball with everything but their hands, but with the people who play with their hands too. I’m thinking I’m going to sign up for beach volleyball school next month and take classes in the morning before work. I’m serious. It’s a real thing, this beach volleyball school.