Amazonian Soups

Yesterday we made plans with Prof Mello (the Brazilian guy who also thinks Brazil is the most backward place in the world) to go to eat at a restaurant by a place called Santa Teresa. Supposedly this is very close to three different favellas. He said that we might be able to go see them. We were instructed not to bring anything with us when we went there. Just the bare minimum, no bags, whatever I can fit in my pocket. It is about an hour walk from downtown. This is very exciting. I will keep you posted on how it went come Tuesday's blog entry.

For dinner I warmed up a frozen block of leftover beans under the aegis of Doña Teresa. We chatted a little in very crude Portuguese and I learned she was going to a Gospel meeting thing that night. Upon learning this I had her listen to a couple gospel tunes I had to sing in high school Lincoln Park Singers choir. Pretty fun stuff, she seemed to like it, it's nice to connect in different languages. She has a very good voice and is always whistling a cool tune.

Following my rather large amount of food-coma inducing feijoada (the national dish of Brazil-pork&black bean stew served with rice), we went out to eat at the kilo shop and the most I could bring my self to have was a Guaraná soft drink- very popular here. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarana )

Immediately following dinner Dan and I went shopping to try to find a soccer ball for the beach. The cheapest thing we could get was for 40 reais (~ $24). Instead, daunted by the soccer ball task, we found a mall which had about 7 different hair salons all very close to each other.
Dan, Richard and I will go back today and get our hair cuts, Brazilian style.
Richards seems very eager to do this... :-) ( I suspect he wants to look nice for the birthday party we are invited to tonight; he might have a crush on Paula, a depressed Brazilian anglophone who's only desire is to go back to the states because she hates it here. She's a funny one...)

I hung out with Ana Luisa for the first time again. She's aight. Kind of a bourgeois version of a Brazilian though. She says that she lived in Dubai for a year when she was 16. Her mom was doing some research there for oil production or something like this. I don't reall believe her though. Plus when I met her she said she was 27 and yesterday she said she's only 26. But after all, as prof mello said (with his funny Brazilian accent) "in Rio everyone is 29! It's insulting if you say you are 21!" another funny thing he said was "in Brazil, noone goes to prison" (sorry, I'm not at liberty to include the context).
So I guess age doesn't matter at all here but still, she's maybe a little close-minded. It's just an impression I get. I might be totally off... Anyway, not the best night out, I don't think I will see her again.

In anycase, I'm looking forward to this weekend at the beach!

e pao e pedro, e o fin do camino

The first two lines of the song "Aguas de Marco". We've been listening to it and "Garota de Ipanema" a lot. Not to sound too cliché by Brazilian standards but lyrics, with a printed copy and translation, is a delightful way of learning a language.

Almost as good as having an attractive girl mouth you days of the week. In any case, better than Rosetta Stone, n´est-ce pas Dan? ;-)

Yesterday was uneventful besides my 50 minute talk with Thibault who called my from Haiti. At time our connection was poor but skype only charged him about 1.5 euros for an hour long call. Now that's globalization.

Dan went out again with his Garota. He said it was expensive (the dinner/taxi) but again, worth it as far as Portuguese lessons go :-)

Tomorrow I think I will go to a museum with the equivalent garota that I met last week at the scenarium. We might also do something tonight but I'm sure about that yet. Dan and I have both decided that we would actively seek better, more fun garotas to help pass our time here, but that these would do for now.

By the way Sophie, I am actively trying to make my writing less "Thibaud" :-)
can you hear me now?

Deep Rio Diving

So yesterday, from around 15-17h, Dan and I went out for a late lunch. We started walking in the general direction of the Scenarium and the Colombo restaurant because those seemed to be awesome areas with interesting, rather old architecture. We walked through these market type souks in the middle of dwtw Rio. The weird thing about them is that they were so makeshift and temporary. It was basically a huge open space covered with a roof that was made out of the cheapest material possible and then about a hundred different little shops squeezed into this space. Streets were filled with shops selling ANYTHING. We found this little place that sold hardware tools, like the equivalent of ace hardware in chicago, but only in rio and in a small shanty town like market. It seemed hugely inefficient. Another thing, while Dan was checking out some badass knives, I was waiting in the street observing some dvd vendors. All of a sudden they picked up all of their dvds and walked away from where they were. I was like wTf? turns out there was a cop on the corner, or something, maybe a police car. I didn't actually see exactly what or who they were afraid of but it was super shady. Conclusion: if anyone wants a pirated dvd, let me know. :-P

So this was really cool. We had never seen something that felt so local before. We are definitely going back to that market place.

Then, on the way back to ibmec, I was telling Dan about how McDonalds had to adapt to local tastes and preferences in order to succeed in foreign markets. In France for example, the McDonald's are much nicer than in the states. In China they're totally diffent they had to teach the Chinese how to wait in line. In Russia, people felt insulted when the cashier would smile at them- no it was the McDonald's way of doing friendly business, in the Philippines Jollybee, a competitor of McDonalds has special sauces with local ingredients and spices that tastes much better to the locals than a regular big mac. Anyway, I though we might want to test this, to see what a Brazilian McDonald's bigmac tastes like, to see if it is any different than an American one. We would also compare it to the local McDonald's equivalent -Big Bob's.
Big Bob's was started in the 60's by to two Brazilian Americans who thought they would import the McDonald's idea to Brazil. It seemed to have worked. I see more BigBob's than McDonald's here.
Anyway, the results of out empirical comparative study of the two will be posted on youtube in video form.
In sum, Brazilian BigMacs taste the same as American BigMacs take only about 30 seconds to produce on the counter next to the cash register.
The Big Bob - the Big Mac equivalent took maybe four minutes to produce- significantly longer but tasted, in my opinion, much better, far worth the extra wait. Dan would say otherwise I think.
I will post the links to these videos as soon as I can upload them to youtube.

We had a small dinner at the kilo place. Then we went to see the new movie Hancock.
This movie was hilariously awesome. Ridiculously funny and creative and witty. Not your typical superhero movie. Hancock is a superhero whose powers are very similar to supermans- the only difference is that Hancock wakes up with a hangover everymorning from having gotten wasted the precedent night. He's kind of the "im just a regula guy" supahero. And when he fights bad guys he gets into all this crazy kind of trouble and destroys stuff in passing. Awesome movie -I laughed a lot.

After that, Dan and I played chess for a bit, sang along to the lyrics of 'Garota de Ipanema' (girl from Ipanema). Went to bed around midnight and failed miserably to wake up at 6h30 to work out like we had planned. The fat cat keeps getting faaaater...

A breakfast Baer asked us to look up info for a talk he was invited to give a talk at some conference organized by the Central Bank of Brazil. We have to look stuff up about the US economy, its general status, economic indicators- pretty easy stuff to find.

Barra, petropolis, Felipe´s departure

Saturday we took this large mini-van to Barra (pronounced baha) beach, about 30 minutes south of Copacabana by car. This was a very interesting bus ride, almost like a rollercoaster with the winding roads along the coast, almost like a kidnapping with how we just jumped into it and sped off. It was operated by a driver and a guy who would sit by the door and yell at people the bus´ destination.
Barra had really cool beaches. The girls there were just amazing. The water had these crazy currents that would make it nearly impossible to swim back into shore. I just barely made it back, Richard had to get help from surfers or he would have stayed out there he said. We chilled there all day until it got too windy and cold. That night we went out with the lawyer girl that we met Thursday night at the Scenarium. She brought three of her friends with her, all law students as well. We met them by the rio sul mall and they took us to a rather large street party celebrating some saint- another excuse to party. That was a little crowded so we went to the group of bars called a cobal. there must have been about 15 bars in this square. We stayed there for a bit and endedup going home rather late. Not really worth it if you ask me. This whole time they were taking us on bus rides and we had no idea where we were going. They could have been taking us to some favela 30 minutes away from rio and I wouldn´t have known until it was too late... good stuff.

The next day, a rude 8am awakening. Breakfast, 2 reais bus ride to a large bus station, 14 reais bus ride to another large bus station outside of Petropolis, another 2 reais bus ride to downtown Petropolis.
Petropolis is the town where the king or Brazil would go to live in summertime. He would come back to Rio in the wintertime. By the way, to continue along Prof Mello´s backwardness rant, the king of Brazil was the king of Portugal´s son. His son, declared independence from his father. Essentially, Brazil declared its independence from one Monarchy and adopted another one. Not like in the US or France where independence meant no king and rule of the people (or something along those lines).
The king´s palace was cool. Nothing too special though. Not nearly as nice as France's...

yesterday (monday) the internet was not working so we just went back home early to see Felipe off to his taxi. Quite a sad sight. It will be interesting to see how dynamics change within our little group.

Dan and I then went to the beach, read some stuff from the economist, had some tea. We place beach soccer (the volleyball version of soccer) with these two random dudes on the beach. They were really cool and friendly and just laughed a lot at Dan and I falling flat on our asses when we tried to kick the ball over the other side of the net. good times. This evening we're going to go back there to work out a bit and hopefully play again.

And now back at the good old ibmec. We found some computers with facebook access. Quite the distraction. I haven't really done any research-related work for a whole week now. But I have a plan to get back into gear... it involves, hmm... well... doing something.

Night out at the Scenarium

Today I skipped lunch because I woke up late and got to Ibmec late. For some reason I was not very hungry anyway. I spent the whole day ignoring anything Brazil-related and only researched stuff on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This was the result of a discussion the previous night which was sparked by the news story of a Palestinian Arab who took control of a yellow Caterpillar demolition vehicle and went on a rampage attacking and killing Israelis on an express way in Israel. Anyway, I found some interesting stuff, especially a UN Human Rights Commission document documenting the Human rights violations the Israeli Army committs against Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank. The following is a small summary of the document as well as a link to it. Feel free to skip over it if you are not interested, Brazil stuff follows it.

Here is a report written by the UN Human rights committee.
http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/CCPR.CO.78.ISR.En?OpenDocument

The report is organized into paragraphs.

§4-10 mention the positive aspects of Israel in respect to human rights. This includes an positive increase in Women´s rights, rights for people with disabilities, improved education sysmtem as well as a law passed by the Israeli supreme court forbidding the use of torture on arrested people or prisoners (not really enforced or respected).

§13 addresses the witholding of Palestinians without access to lawyer within 48 hours of their arrest. Often they are withheld without any trial for several years
§16 As we talked about last night addresses the arbitrary destruction of Palestinian homes.
This is a tactic used to force the Palestinans to leave their land
§17 arbitrary raids on Palestinian homes.
§ 19 talks about the wall being constructed around Palestinian territories.
§20-23 deals with the racism towards Palestinians and Arab-Israelis living in Israel aka zionism.

The Human Rights Committee is the body of independent experts that monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by its State parties.

Thanks for reading this. I think I did a good job at summing it up. I hope that it is useful.


And nooooow BACK to Braziiiiiiiilllll!!!!

At 17h, professor Mello, a uiuc Econ phd graduate gave us a presentation on Brazil. I must say it was very interesting and he presented many many interesting facts on Brazil. It gave us an overview of the politics, history, demographics. His main arguement was how backwards Brazil is. There is a huge lack of human capital here; the literacy rate is only about 85~88% depending on how you measure it.
There is a common joke said of Brazil by the Brazilians. It goes something like this:

When God was creating the earth one of his angels noticed Brazil. The angel said´God, don´t you think this a little unfair? Look at Brazil, it has all the resources a country could ask for! It has huge forests, some of the longest and widest rivers, natural minerals galore, perfect weather, no natural disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes... There is nothing bad about this land! Don´t you think it is a little unfair that you´ve given so much good to one place while other countries don´t have NEARLY as much??´´
God says: ´´wait until you see the people I put there´´

Anyway, yea, yea Brazil is Backward and there is nothing we can do about it. That was the main gist of his presentation. After this Prof Mello showed us, allong with one of his students who is interested in studying in the US, a really cool restaurant called The Scenarium. It is located in a neighborhood close to downtown. The buildings there were very cool and old looking but many of them were abandoned. Some interesting real-estate prospects?
The Scenarium is an old place, rustic, and everything in there is very old and antique. When you first enter it is very impressive. You all these really cool antiques spread over three floors. After our waiter came, who was horrible, by the way (he was chewing horrible watermellon gum and only gave us two menus for the 6 of us. Also we had these annoying cards that he wrote our orders on. We had to keep the cards and pay at the door before we left. It was annoying to have to hold on to them the whole time.

Food was nice, after a while I realized that the place had no order. All the antiques were spread out everywhere in no particular theme. Then I learned that the place is an Antique shop in the daytime where you can buy everything you see.

There I met this nice 27 year old Brazilian girl who just graduated from law school. We chatted for about an hour on the balcony. Later we danced a little as well. I suck at dancing. Got her number, maybe I will call her today or tomorrow depending on what the guys want to do. Maybe we´ll go to the beach if it stops raining...

Talking to Mello was really cool. Richard and I learned a few things about Werner that we did not know. His external point of view/opinion was a welcomed change from the usual rhetoric surrounding Werner.

Overall I had a fun night. I enjoyed the food, the wine, the live music (3 different bands I think) and most of all, the company.
I took some pictures of the place but will upload them later, when my access to internet is a little better.

Maracanã soccer stadium

I don~t have much time to write this entry as we have to meet with professor marcello mello for a presentation at 17h. Prof mello got his phd from UIUC.

by the way, I don~t have daily access to facebook or anything else fun for that matter. That´s the reason I might not answer those as fast. The school we are at in the day time limits access to such sites.

Last night we went out to see maracanã. This is the largest latin american stadium (soccer) and the 11th largest in the world. Currently seat about 95 thousand although it originally seated 200 thousand for the 1950 world cup which it was originally built for. We only got in to the stadium after it ended-we did not have tickets... however, arguably, we had more fun outside, on the street with a street vendor -we~ll call him friendo... hehe. he warned richard not to wear his sweater because it had colours that might be seen as unfriendly to the local team.
It was an awesome experience. Got to practice Portuguese. Got back home around 3am... great fun! Dan and Felipe invented a game where they had to challenge each other to smell peoples´ hair. They would sneak up behind them and take a good waft/deep breath. It was hilarious to watch. Dan smelled this guy´s sideburn and then Felipe had to smell a girl who was sitting by the window and protected by her badass military-clothing girlfriend. They Felipe got Dan back with an idea of mine: ´smell that dog´ needless to say they were so drunk that they were very successful in all their hair smelling endeavours.
ate pronto!

first work out on beach all you can eat pizza

Yesterday I feel like we got some good research done. Richard and I have been working on the land for fuel v.s. land for food. He already has interesting regression data but I feelike we should add more variables into it such as price of crude oil among others. This is something we will do today, Tuesday.

Yesterday for lunch we went out to a restaurant across the street. I had probably the best fallafel of my life, for some reason I we found each other in Rio, far, far away from the Middle East. I have a feeling I will soon be meeting more of these ´best ever´ falafels... Even more interesting was our conversation at lunch. The five of us (Werner, Dan, Felipe, Richard and I) had some very engaging discussions, starting off, if I remember correctly, by an article Felipe was reading about Universities here in Brazil which were going public on the stock market. This meant they would be taken over by companies specializing in education and teaching.

I also learned a little bit about ethanol and it´s importance here in Brazil. Here almost all the cars run on both ethanol or gasoline or any combination of both. This is so instilled in the car culture that it is not even mentioned on the back of cars, as it is in the US, (flexfuel). Here, it is the norm. Pretty cool.

Upon our return to the apartment, Felipe, Richard and I went out to the beach (again less than a block away :-) to work out a bit. Dan came with but because his back rib was still hurting from having been crushed by a wave, he read at a caffe while waiting for us. We did a few sets of push-ups (sets of twenty), sit ups/crunches(25), and chin/pull-ups (ten). Then we went running for about twenty minutes along the water. I opted for the sprint, Felipe and and Richard opted for the long distance(either two or four miles, probably four). I kept on doing some push ups while waiting for them to come back and we did some more push-ups, again, when they returned... needless to say, today I am sore. We also went for a dip, Fe and I; the water never felt so warm. I think we might go back out again tonight. I hope Dan recovers soon enough.

After this, Dan continued to read at a caffe on the beach where he waited for us to tidy up a bit back at the apartment. Upon our return to the beach where he was reading and where our restaurant was located, we saw that he had gotten into a bit of trouble with a local. While reading his book at the beach caffe, a shoe-shiner offered to shine Dan´s shoes. Dan accepted for a price of 3.20 reais. Later, the shoe-shiner claimed to have agreed to a price of 13 reais. This is absurd given that a normal price would have been one or two reais. Nevertheless, the shoe-shiner, a boy about 19 years old followed us across the highway (LSD equivalent) and kept on saying ´you´re not going to pay me, eh?´ in a menacing way. Finally we retreated to our pizza palace sanctuary...
Ever thought of the ´all you can eat concept´ and added a pizza on top? well, it is quite cool. About every 2 minutes anothe waiter comes out of the kitchen with a different pizza and cuts you a slice, if you give him your permisson of course. I pigged out and had at least 12 slices. And that was before the dessert pizzas... WOW just imagine a pizza, minus the tomatoe sauce and cheese with a thin coat of melted chocolate and strawberries on top! I learned a new phrase: ´estou satisfecho´