Brasil: Dia 5 – The Day after the Wedding

Antonio drives fast (even for a Brazilian). We visited several sites including but not limited to: the JK bridge (pictured), the Presidential Palace, and Catetinho. Catetinho is the Presidential residence for JK’s use while he was overseeing the 3-year construction project of Brasilia. It is muito rustico—just a place to sleep and eat breakfast. In keeping with the speed of everything to do with the construction of Brasilia, Catetinho was built in 10 days. The interpretive texts indicated that JK would return to Catetinho each evening between 11:00 and midnight, and would be back on the construction site by 6:00 a.m. each day. The house is very simple—a row of bedrooms connected by a covered, outdoor hallway upstairs, and a kitchen and laundry on the bottom floor. Looking at the surrounding jungle, it was even more breathtaking to realize that to build the city of Brasilia, which now is home to 3 million people, they cleared an immense amount of vegetation. There were photographs that resembled the Grapes of Wrath showing the laborers flooding (often from the poorer northeast part of the country) into the new city for the construction jobs.

Antonio insisted on paying for every meal, every museum admission, every parking fee, even the beggar outside of Catetinho! Twice we managed to snatch the restaurant bill from the waiter before him, only to have it rapidly grabbed away. At one traffic lights, itinerants were selling boxes of açaí fruit. They resemble tomatoes and have something of the tomato’s fleshiness but are pear sweet. Antonio wanted us to experience them, called over the man, and gave him $R10. The man hadn’t the correct $R5 in change. “Rapido!” Antonio shouted, (which sounds like Happy-Do! and is Mary’s favorite Portuguese word) hoping to get his change before the traffic light changed. But, no luck—the light changed, and Antonio was swept along with the flow of the traffic without getting his change.

There were sectors of Brasilia that permit horse-drawn carts in the streets, right alongside the traffic. We never had the camera ready when we saw this, but it was always quite a surprising sight to see a horse and cart in the left turn lane, trotting forward when the light changed to green. (We’re not well-traveled)

Antonio took us to Restaurante Carne do Sol. “Carne do Sol” refers to a particular way of preparing the meat, and this particular restaurant is the one Antonio considers it the best in the city. We had farofa, some local grown sweet-potato tuber (I think but it looked like pear), feija (beans), arroz (rice), and mouth-watering beef. As a side accoutrement, they served a small pitcher of melted butter to drizzle over everything. The menu consisted of only drinks, as everyone always had the same dish (carne do sol, with its side plates).

We stopped at the American Embassy. I rolled down the window and Mary brought up the camera to take a picture. Antonio said, “No. No pictures. If you take a picture, they will phone the police with a description of our car, intercept us, ask us why we want to take pictures, and confiscate the camera.” As the former police commander of the embassy district, he knew whereof he spoke. Because Mary had raised the camera, he knew he had to go and speak to the guards. Then he had to speak to the guards’ superior. It took 15 to 20 minutes to straighten it out. I think that maybe, just maybe, our government has bounced out of being prudently careful into full-blown paranoia. I’m sure I can find the US Embassy on GoogleEarth and get a better idea of what the compound is like better than I could at a distance of one-hundred yards from the gate. You will have to go here to Wikipedia to see a picture of the US Embassy’s front gate.

We saw lots of mansions, ambassador residences, and embassies on our tour through “Mansion Sector, Park Way, North” and “Mansion Sector, Park Way, South”. They rival the streets of Beverly Hills. Each home seemed to have its own gate, and many of the streets had their own gate and guard.

In the evening, we gave Luciana and Sergio their wedding presents (ours and also Colleen’s and Brian’s). They (of course) also gave us presents: Sergio and Luciana gave us two Maria Rita CDs—a Brasileira singer who is huge in Brazil– and Rodrigo gave two medium-sized bottles of Absolut (he is a distributor) and baseball caps to match.

It was now 9 PM and we begged off going out to dinner with them, as we knew we wouldn’t return until close to midnight, and we had to rise at 4:00 a.m. to catch a ride with Serge and Luciana for our flight to Rio in the morning. On our way back in, there were teenaged kids hanging around at the gate. They heard us speaking English to Sergio, and as we were leaving, we heard their jibes of, “I love you! I love you!” I said, “I love you, too.”