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De 9 a 16 de outubro de 2012 • Edição 1109 • ANO XXXII • www.operumo lha do.com.br

O MAIORJOR NAL

BÚZIOS

YOU HAVE THE NERVE

TO CALL THIS A

CONVENTION CENTER?

Búzios, Brazil - the BEST convention center!!! (for incentive travel - unbeatable!)

De 6 a 13 de outubro de 2012 – O Perú Molhado2

Con se lho edi to rial Bri git te Bar dot, Clau dio Kuck, Ivald Gra na to, Jomar Pe rei ra da Sil va, Fi no Quin ta ni lha, Re na ta Deschamps, Ota vi nho, Umberto e Clau dio Mo dia no, Er nes to Za bo tinsky, Tra ja no Ri bei ro, Re na to Pa cote, Jor ge Te des co, Clau dio Co hen, Lau ritz Lach man, Gui lher me Araú jo, Pe dro Pau lo Bul cão, Pau lo Maria ni, Al ber to Fan ti ni, Ma rie Anick e Jac ques Mercier, Ara guacy da Sil va Mel lo, Luis Ed mun do Cos ta Lei te, Mar cos Pau lo, Elie Sha ye vitz, Jo nas Suas su na, Gló ria Ma ria, Ruy Castro, Heloisa Seixas, Márcio Fortes, Luiz Fernando Pedroso, Lula Vieira, Antônio Pedro Figueira de Melo, Eduardo Modiano, Ancelmo Góis, Etevaldo Dias, Joaquim Ferreira, Thomas Sastre, Adriana Salituro e Armando Ehrenfreund.

Fun da do res Ma rio Hen ri ques e Pe dro Luis Lar ti gue

Ge rên cia de Ven dasTráfego Publicidade & Marketing Ltda.(21) 25321329 (21) 91007612

Me ce nas Umberto Mo dia no

Im pres são Ediouro

Diretor de DistribuiçãoMuchacho Bicho Doido

Depto. JurídicoDr. Ulisses Tito da Costa

Di re tor Mar ce lo Lar ti gue

Editor AdjuntoJanir Hollanda

Jor na lis ta res pon sá velHamber R. de Carvalho(reg. prof. 13.501 DRT/RJ)

Editor de fotografiaTaxista João de Nair

Re pór terSandro PeixotoMônica CasarinAlessandra CruzDenis Kuck

DiagramaçãoCaroline Moreira

Diretora Comercial Alessandra Cruz

O Pe rú Mo lha do / Edi to ra Mi ramarCNPJ: 02.886.214/000132

Rua Alfredo Silva, 226, casa 4 Cep 28 950000 – Brava Ar ma ção de Bú zios – RJCelular/redação: (22) 81283781 / 92163361 / 26231422Comercial: (22) 78142441Email: operu mo lha [email protected] [email protected] te: www.operu mo lha do.com.br

Maybe you’ve heard of Búzios. Maybe — equally within the range of possibi-lity — you haven’t.

The fixed, year-round population of our town is only barely on the order of 30,000 and there are plenty of world cities with populations way up past the million mark (Tianjin, China and Lu-dhiana, India, to name only two) that no one has ever heard of. But, if you are in Las Vegas this week because you are in the meeting planning and incentives business, you would do well to know about us. We are a town with a great vocation for individual tourism and for small and medium-size conventions and con-gresses and for incentive travel. Búzios is a drive of just over two hours up the coast from the city of Rio de Janeiro and the Rio international airport. (That’s Brazil. South America. But you knew that . . . right?) If nature had gone a slightly diffe-rent way, much of our city would to-day be an island. But nature left us an isthmus, and the isthmus has made us a peninsula, and that means that there is water, spe-cifically of the tropical South Atlantic kind, on all sides of us but one. Biology is destiny, said Freud, ex-plaining why women are like women and men like men. But, when it comes to cities, as often as not it is topogra-phy that is destiny. If you are paying close attention on your entrance into Búzios, you will see two initially implausible signs. One is a DARWIN SLEPT HERE sign. Im-plausible or not, it is the truth. In 1832, Darwin did bed down in these parts in the course of his enlightening half-de-cade-long journey round the world on H.M.S. Beagle. The other initially implausible sign is the one that identifies Búzios as the Brazilian Himalaya. The point, however, is not that Búzios has moun-tains competitive in height with K2 or Everest but rather that Búzios is ho-me to the richest geological vestiges of the great mountains that sprang up half a billion years ago when the now distinct South American and African continents collided violently with ea-ch other before, obviously, separating again a couple of hundred million ye-ars later. But, even if not strictly spe-aking mountainous any longer, Búzios is still full of high elevations, and the high hilliness of the town has made for a coastline not of one or two great long beaches but of a couple of fairly long beaches and many romantic little co-ves and inlets. Again, if nature had gone a sli-ghtly different way, much of Búzios would today be an island and, if one of Búzios’s great men had not interce-ded and shamelessly lied to real-estate developers about the existence of a restrictive building ordinance, even before there was one, who knows but that Búzios would not nowadays have apartment and hotel towers right on top of the beach in the same way that Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian be-

WHAT IS BÚZIOS?

achfront towns do. Develop-ment like that would have been out of scale to the intimacy and charm of our coves and our in-lets, but it could have happened, and it might happen yet if, in the enduring worldwide contest between developers and preser-vationists, the preservationists get distracted and look away for more than a couple of seconds. But Otavinho, the local he-ro previously mentioned, did at a crucial time disseminate his expedient disinformation and then did push an actual ordinan-

ce through, and the result is that nothing in Búzios has so far been constructed above a second floor in height and the architectural model by and large remains the houses the fishermen lived in when Búzios was still nothing more than an isolated and out-of-the-way fishing village. Lodging in Búzios has never been and is not now on the hotel model, still less on the interna-tional name-brand resort hotel model. We do now at long last have a handful of medium-size hotels with capacity for hosting

Bob Zagury and Brigitte Bardot

Photo: Denis Albenese

De 6 a 13 de outubro de 2012 – O Perú Molhado 3

meetings and congresses for a few hundred people, same as some of our residential architecture, though mode-led on fishermen’s cottages, has hyper-trophied to such an extent as to be able to house whole hosts of fishermen. Most of Búzios lodging is still, ne-vertheless, on the pousada model, this being the Portuguese-language word for lodgings more substantial than bed and breakfasts yet not quite rising to the status of full-fledged hotels. Pou-sadas here are thought to number so-mething like 350 or 400, maybe even more. Since Búzios developed as predo-minantly a Brazilian national resort, beachgoing here is on the Brazilian model, not on the American or French or Spanish or Greek or Turkish mo-del — and certainly not on any cha-racterless global model. Brazilians do not go to the beach to burn in the sun. Brazilians make their beaches, inste-ad, an extension of their living rooms and their dining rooms. Conversation is energetic; visiting back and forth, lively. Food and beverage services ran-ge from beer and French fries up the food chain to lobster and champagne. Thanks to the ambulantes, you can even buy yourself a new wardrobe wi-thout getting up from your beach chair or emerging from under your umbrella. (The beach is living room and dining room; it’s also Main Street.) Much evening and night life in Bú-zios continues to originate on or near the pedestrians-only Rua das Pedras, or Stone Street, so-named for its surface of paving stones rather than asphalt, but in recent years the so-called Orla Bardot, extending beyond the Rua das Pedras along open ocean, has threatened to ou-tpace the Rua das Pedras at the upscale end, and out in Manguinhos, a couple of kilometers away, where commerce tra-ditionally addressed the pedestrian nee-ds of year-round residents for building

materials, housepaint and groceries, a couple of new dining and boutique de-velopments, notably the Porto da Bar-ra and Domme, have been coming up strong on the outside. Given the absence here of brand-name international chain hotels, with their aggressive don’t-bother-getting-up-we’ll-come-to-you marketing de-partments, how does a meeting planner or an incentive travel buyer proceed? One option is you put yourselves in the hands of a trustworthy Brazilian tour operator. Another is that you use Tri-pAdvisor and other Internet sources in-telligently. Best of all, you come down and check us out. For more information, visit the Web site of the Búzios Convention & Visi-tors Bureau at www.buzioscvb.com.br and of the Búzios Tourism Office at www.visitebuzios.com.— The Editors


The newspaper you hold in your hand is not always pu-blished in English. It is usu-ally published in Portuguese but occasionally in Spa-

nish — that’s when we’re reaching out to our hermanos in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile and so on — but also from ti-me to time in Portunhol, also known in Spanish as Portuñol, in an attempt to be intelligible simultaneously to Portugue-se and Spanish speakers. The name Perú Molhado is itself something of a randy joke. But no way are we going to gloss it for you. We’re in the U.S. today, aren’t we? We’ve heard there may be laws. If you’re really curious, ask a Brazilian friend. Or see what you can find out on the Internet. If the Perú Molhado, now in its 32nd year, were ever to cease to exist, the world would probably still go on. Even Búzios would probably still go on. But would the world be the same? Would Búzios be the same? The Perú Molhado, free of all prejudices both as to religion and to matters sexual and always imper-vious to schoolmarmish chastisements and well-meaning grandmotherly cau-tions alike, so embodies Búzios’s bohe-mian spirit that it is hard to imagine Bú-zios without it. If you want to see what we’re really like when we’re writing in our own lan-guage, and for internal consumption, visit us online at www.operumolhado.com.br.

WHAT IS THE PERÚ MOLHADO?


From Búzios to the world our Popstar made in Brazil.

There is a new girl heating the musical scene Patricia Alves aka MC Mermaid with an original Deep House & Funk style, she released 3 Tracks for download on SoundCloud – Búzios arriving in Ibi-

za, Brazilian Body Culture and the new “FEEL THE VIBE” a tribute for her “godmother” the International Top Jazz Singer Ithamara Koorax who gave her the nickname of MC Mermaid – The Girl from Geribá. Patricia was born in Rio de Janeiro and has traveled all over Asia, Europe and US. Check it on http://soundcloud.com/patricia-alves-5/feel-the-vibe-6

MC Mermaid “FEEL THE VIBE”

Phot

o: F

red

Roz

ário


By Mark Zussman

My wife Barbara and I, both U.S. na-tives, have lived here in the town of Búzios, State of Rio de Janeiro, Bra-zil — the home of the newspaper you now hold in your hands — for over a

decade now. If we ever move again, it won’t be any far-ther than the next beach down. When you have a good thing going, why risk it? And, when you have a great thing going, why even toy with the idea of risking it? It’s not that there’s anything wrong with New York or any of the other places we’ve lived in, in both the U.S. and Europe, over the years, either. New York is one of the stellar places. Paris, France? Also famously stellar. But when you get to the place that’s most stellar of all, you hold on with all your strength, you resist blandish-ments, you close your ears to the sound of other Sirens, you light a match to any last remnants you may have of wanderlust and you hope that most of it will go up in smoke. But let me quote what was said some years ago by Isac Tillinger, our first and in a sense our always-and-forever secretary of tourism, a person so of the gold standard among tourism secretaries as to make even as super-talented and hard-working a successor as the in-cumbent Cristiano Marques seem slightly counterfeit. What Isac said, and said to the world at large, to people like those of you foregathered this week in Las Vegas, was this: “Don’t come here. We are not yet ready to re-ceive you.” Goodness gracious. A place as fabulous as Bú-zios and Isac says not to come here, we’re not ready for you? You can imagine the flak that old Isac took for that one. From the people who own pousadas, this being the Portuguese-language word for lodgings mo-re substantial than bed and breakfasts yet not quite ri-sing to the status of full-fledged hotels. From the res-taurateurs. From the dive shop operators and from the people who run schooner excursions around our coast to the many beaches. Búzios lives off of tourism. Why would Isac want to tell people not to come here when what he’s being paid for is to promote us? But let us try to parse what Isac meant by that impe-tuous outburst. Búzios is one of the world’s really outstanding breezy and easy-going beach towns and by my lights, though I shall not argue the point here in detail, or at all, far and away the most outstanding beach town anywhere here on the continent of South America. But let us be clear about what Búzios is and at the same ti-me what Búzios is not. Búzios is not Cancún, Búzios is not Montego Bay, Búzios is not Punta Cana. I am spe-aking so far to the Americans and the Canadians among you up at this week’s IMEX event in Las Vegas. For you Europeans, it is not the Costa del Sol, it is not the Algarve, it is not Djerba Island, it is not the Gambia. Búzios is first and foremost a Brazilian national resort. It is a resort by Brazilians and for Brazilians, and in particular for people from Rio de Janeiro, just a little over two hours away by automobile, in pretty much the same way that the Hamptons, on Long Is-land, New York, exist as a resort by New Yorkers and for New Yorkers, everyone else, either play by our ru-les or be damned. Búzios, in other words, is not one of those places where exotic umbrella drinks are served by people with Mediterranean or south-of-the-Equator complexions to visitors with pallid way-up-north com-plexions. Búzios for the Brazilians. Oh, yes, and for the sometimes sun-starved Argentines, Uruguayans, Chile-ans. As for the rest of you, well, to a certain extent Isac did not have it right. To a certain extent, he did have it right. I spoke of the Búzios pousadeiros who gave Isac flak for telling all you Northern Hemisphere folks to stay away, we’re not ready to receive you yet. Many, though by no means all, of our pousadas are actually quite charming. They tend to run to ten rooms, 14 rooms. A pousada with 20 rooms is a giant pousada. The owners of these pousadas usually manage the pou-sadas themselves, and this means that there is very per-sonalized attention and a warmth that outsiders are not accustomed to in the lodgings they find when they go traveling. We may have as many as 350 or 400 of these pousadas here in Búzios. Maybe even more. And let’s

SO DO WE WANT YOU HERE? OR DO WE NOT WANT YOU HERE?


concede that half of these pousadas are by Northern Hemisphere standards, if not by Brazilian standards, dumps. But that means that half are not dumps. When Isac said that we weren’t ready to receive you, please don’t come, what he has to have meant, then, is that, because we don’t have any of the global hotel chains here, neither a Sheraton, a Marriott, a Me-liá, a Sandals, nor any of the others, and because, mo-reover, we are a resort primarily by Brazilians and for Brazilians, we are lacking in universally familiar “stan-dard” rooms, the ones you walk into in Barbados or Aruba and find reassuringly indistinguishable from the ones you already know from Mauritius or the Seychel-les. We don’t have a lot in the way of king size beds, we may not — in fact we probably don’t — have CNN and English-language movie channels on the televisions in the rooms, in some pousadas we may not offer televi-sions at all, and we’re not set up to provide room servi-ce 24 hours a day from an encyclopedic menu. Guests will not be offered nachos and guacamole at every turn — wrong country, they’re not part of our culture. And, even if we did have room service, which, again, we don’t by and large, the room-service operator would very likely not speak English. The rest of the world will meet you three quarters of the way. We may not even meet you half way. We may meet you only a quarter of the way. Could Isac have thought we should ratchet up to meeting our visitors 30 percent of the way? Thirty-five percent? Forty percent? This was never clear. But another thing that Isac has gone around saying over the years, a corollary to the admonition alrea-dy cited: “By Brazilian standards, Búzios is sophisti-cated. By the standards of the Northern Hemisphere, it’s primitive.” OK, this may be true, but primitive is itself sophisticated. And if the universal background

hum of Piers Morgan and Richard Quest is sophistica-ted, couldn’t I just stick with primitive? And wouldn’t others of you care to join us? Búzios is a place you co-me to if you want something sui generis, not something at once reassuringly standard and depressingly stan-dard. I am not going to sing Búzios’s praises at length. The Búzios that Barbara and I know, which is the Bú-zios of permanent residents, doesn’t even overlap a lot with the Búzios of casual visitors. In the morning, for example, Barbara and I will often walk up the beach for breakfast at a place called Golden Bread with baguettes as good as the baguettes in Paris. But it’s rare that we see any tourists there. Tourists have a generous break-fast served to them in all the pousadas. It’s part of the deal. The people at the other tables? They’re our nei-ghbors. Tourists could go to the movies at our eccentric little movie house. I don’t know why they don’t. But they don’t. It’s our neighbors we see there at the movie house as well and our neighbors we see at the superma-rket and in the hardware store and in the pharmacy. We don’t even go out for dinner a lot any more, except for sushi, which we don’t make at home, though the restau-rants here are on a par with the restaurants in Rio and São Paulo. Well, you know what the problem with the restaurants is here nowadays? It’s not that they’re not good. They are good. But they’re expensive. If I were going to give just one reason for meeting planners and incentive travel buyers to think of Búzios, it would be, in a word, the Brazilians themselves. The openness, the charm, the worldliness, the intelligence, the inventiveness and the cordiality of Brazilians is 90 percent of the reason Barbara and I live here. There are, after all, beaches everywhere, and we’re not even bea-chgoers. So I have been struck recently by two polls I

have seen, scientific or not, that suggest that other peo-ple around the world are beginning to pick up on what I have known ever since I first started coming this way in the early 1980s. One is a poll from Skyscanner, supposedly Europe’s leading Internet travel search site, ranking 33 of the world’s peoples, plus “other,” from rudest to least rude. (Least rude, I assume, can also be taken to mean most polite.) At the rudest end of the scale: the French, the Russians, the British, the Germans, “other,” Chinese and Americans in that order. At the least rude end of the scale: Brazilians in top place, followed by Caribbean peoples in general, then Filipinos, then Thais. I knew that. I might not have known about the Filipinos and the Thais, but no way was I unaware that the Brazilians we-re the best-mannered people I’ve ever come in contact with. The other poll, of 30,000 people in 15 countries, conducted by Badoo.com discovered American to be the world’s “coolest nationality,” followed immediate-ly by Brazilian, then Spanish, Italian and French in that order and with Polish three up from the bottom of the scale, Turkish two up, Canadian one up, and German as the unbeatably least cool. Let us all attempt to unders-tand the concept of “coolest nationality” in our own va-rious ways. I myself am often suspicious even of Gallup methodology. No wonder I am suspicious of Badoo’s, particularly since Americans vote disproportionately in these polls and Americans are famously self-admiring. Eliminate the Americans from the results, therefore, and you may get a more impartial and therefore a more credible answer. If you do happen down this way, look us up. We are not hard to find. Try that Golden Bread I mentioned, for example. Say, nine o’clock in the morning?


By Sandro Peixoto

Francis Ford Coppola, the American film diretor and wine grower, came to Búzios in 2008 with a view to buying some land at Forno Beach. An enormous piece of land right next to the beach, per-fect for a luxury condominium. Coppola was struck by the Búzios sunlight. He stayed at the Manguinhos mansion of Maria Soledad

Barreton, a Chilean who happens to own the Bar do Zé, a Búzios restaurant. Before leaving, Coppola extended a surprise invitation to our Maria Soledad. He got her into his private jet and swept her away to dinner at the Bargaço Restaurant, which specializes in Northeastern food, up in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco state. Coppola learned about Búzios through a friend who lived in Buenos Aires. He was looking for a place to build a luxury hotel, one of those modern ones, you know the type, light on rooms and heavy on sophistication. Unfortunate-ly, the deal fell through, and we lost the opportunity to have one more impor-tant gringo in Búzios. Before Francis Ford Coppola, we did have an American, a true Búziano. We´re talking about Bruce Henry, from Spring Valley, New York, not far from Manhattan. Raised in Spain, Bruce for a time owned and operated the most famous bar in Búzios, Estalagem. It was here that he took out his enor-mous acoustic bass and played alongside such internationally-renowned mu-sicians as Cat Stevens, Raul Mascarenhas, Gilson Peranzetta and Raul de Castro, among others. Before changing his religion and his name, Cat Ste-vens, now Yusuf Islam, came to Búzios several times. They say he wrote the song “Father and Son” after watching a fisherman talking with his son. Whenever Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones needed a break he, too, used to look in at Búzios. His preferred stopping-place was the home of his friend, Renata Deschamps, on the famous Rua das Pedras, or Stone Street. We´re talking about the ´70s now, when Mick was just a kid and spent his afterno-ons doing handstands and smoking cigarettes with a funny smell that left the city´s fishermen – most of them Evangelicals – well, doing handstands of a different sort! His afternoon jam sessions on Renata´s varanda brought loads of people. What was really funny was how few people knew they were standing next to one of the most famous rock stars in the world.

The Day Coppola Very Nearly Became a Buziano

Francis Ford Coppola - bon vivant

Joaquim Álvaro Monteiro de Carvalho, bon vivant

Richard Gere look-alike Búzios law officer with Janice

Dr. André, Búzios mayor-elect, with top model Luiza Brunet


João Cândido Portinari, son of one of Brazil`s most distinguished painters

Bruce Henry, cosmopolitan bassist

Rob Schneider, just hangin’

The Mick

The great Ronaldo, trying his hand at golf

Guy Laliberté owner of Cirque du Soleil

Amy Irving with her ex, Bruno Barreto

DJ Carl Cox

Silvinha Martins, ex-wife of Richar Gere, with Adriana Salituro


The wind here will blow you away!Búzios Vela Clube

www.buziosvelaclube.com.br


By Barbara Lowenstein, Perú Mol-hado Reader and Búzios-Ameri-can, Who Blogs About Her Life

My husband, Mark, and I have lived in Búzios, Brazil for over a decade. You think you can get us

out of here? Better bring your team of wild horses with you. Doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate all that America has done for us. We both received solid edu-cations there. We have family ties there. We value our American citizenship, so much so that we drove into Rio last week to deliver our absentee ballots for No-vember’s Presidential election to a consular official. But we are blessed with a quality of life that’s simply no longer available in the U.S. Here in Brazil we have super health care, a simpler, stress free life, and more and better friends than we ever had in a lifetime else-where. Reprinted below are excerpts from some of my blogposts of the past year that speak generally about living abroad and particularly about life in Búzios.

An Expat in Brazil

“Right now I’m gazing at this very view. It’s always the same, yet it’s always different. It’s beautiful when the blues are blue and the greens are green, it’s beauti-ful in a tropical downpour, it’s beautiful in the oppres-sively muggy summer, it’s beautiful in the chilly wind of winter, at night it sparkles with the lights across the bay. There’s something new to look at every minute: fishing boats come and go, wind surfers glide by, kite surfers fly overhead, we watch graceful seagulls and scary, mean looking vultures. Birds I can’t even begin to name fly in and out of our house (and sometimes commit bird harikari against our windows). The tide ebbs and flows, as tides do . . .” (read more at http://tropicaldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2011/10/right now im gazing at this very view.html)

A Smart City“Some people o w n S m a r t Cars, or Smart TVs, or Smart-phones. Some p e o p l e w e a r S m a r t J e a n s . Some subscribe to SmartMoney Magazine. Oth-e r s r e a d t h e S m a r t P l a n e t b l o g . N o w, I don’t want to be a smart aleck, but I am here to gloat. Within t h r e e y e a r s , Mark and I will be enjoying an opportunity that very few people are given in this world. We will be living in a Smart City, a city of new light, a city with a completely transformed electric grid. Residents of Búzios, State of Rio de Ja-neiro, Brazil are giddy from this news. We are told that we are going to be the first Smart City in Latin Amer-ica, and the fourth Smart City in the entire world . . .”

(read more at http://tropicaldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2012/09/a smart city.html)

Aging in Brazil“I unknowingly chose a terrific country in which to grow old. Brazil has nice names for old age, like “melhor idade” (the best age) and “terceira idade” (the third age, which seems to imply a fourth or fifth). Somehow, to my ear they don’t sound as old, as heavy, as the “Golden Years” does. And Brazil has a 70 page Senior Citizen Statute for persons 60

years or older which is vigorously applied. Seniors get immediate and preferential treatment at banks, post of-fices, and all places that offer public services; they (I suppose I should bite the bullet and start saying “we”) have priority for receiving tax refunds; we enjoy a 50% discount on tickets to all leisure and cultural activi-ties: movies, theaters, sporting events, concerts; we are eligible to participate in the Viaje Mais Melhor Idade program (More Travel for Seniors) which offers 50% off at hotels, as well as various other travel discounts. It is against the law to neglect, disrespect, discriminate, abandon, act cruelly towards, or in any other way com-promise the health and security of an elderly person. Period. Penalties range from six months to 12 years in jail, plus heavy fines . . .” (read more at http://tropi-caldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2011/10/i buy my first senior ticket i was.html)

High Season

“High Season starts today. From now until Ash Wednesday next year upwards of 200,000 people are expected to swell our normal Búzios population of 28,000, and that doesn’t take into account the thou-sands of tourists that disembark every day from the cruise ships. The hoteliers are rubbing their hands to-gether with glee. They’ve been waiting for high sea-son on pins and needles. They have already announced nearly 100% occupancy, even with minimum pack-ages of five to seven days. Owners of rental properties are salivating. There are people willing to shell out as much as $8,000 per week for the privilege of luxury private lodgings. Equally energized are the restaurants, the souvenir shops, the tour operators, the taxi drivers and the food markets. Drugstores will turn a steady profit just from sunscreen sales alone. Informal beach peddlers are counting on these two months to make up for the slow sales of low season . . .”(read more at http://tropicaldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2011/12/leaving rio in droves.html)

Driving in Brazil“. . . I’m tempted to hold my tongue on the subject of driving in Brazil. But I won’t. I can’t. Brazilian driving is the bee in my bonnet, the pea under my mattress, my pet topic, my bugbear. It is the only stress in my stress free life. I can’t get through the simplest outing in the car without screaming some choice epithets, flashing the finger, gesticulating, yelling, or holding my breath in mortal fear (and I’m not even driving, I’m just the passenger) . . . so what is it? Aggressive tailgating, reckless passing — on the right, on the left, into the on-coming lane — it just doesn’t gibe with my sense of the Brazilian spirit of paz e amor. I was baffled until one white knuckle ride into Rio, when it came to me in a flash. Futebol. The national sport, the national passion. They’re all playing soccer. The drivers are forever cut-

ting in front of each other to take any field advantage they can, they’re passing with reckless abandon to get to the imaginary goal posts. One car scrapes against another? Just a rebound, the ball (or in this case the car) remains in play. Driving at breakneck speed on the shoulder? No worries, that’s just an offside position, which is not an offense in itself . . .” (read more at http://tropicaldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2011/11/my mother taught me that if you have.html)

If the Shoe Fits . . .

“I’ve undergone a complete wardrobe overhaul since moving to Brazil, and no item of my apparel has changed more than my shoes. The picture you see here? That’s it, that’s my shoe wardrobe as it now stands. Not

a mid or high heel in there, though I used to own dozens of them. No more pumps, platforms, stilettos or wedges. Not a single boot, not for rain, not for snow. In truth, this abundance of flats and sandals owes more to lower back problems, developed over years of wearing seven inch heels, than to my new environment. But the flip flops, or havaianas as they’re called here, I owe to Brazil . . .” (read more at http://tropicaldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2011/10/my entire current shoe wardrobe ive.html)

Dance Dance Dance“. . . what I’m coming to is this: with all my wiggling and waggling and shimmying and shaking, why, oh why, oh why can’t I sam-

ba? This is the signature dance of my adopted country, you’d think I’d have absorbed it naturally by now. But I haven’t. This is extremely frustrating and embarrass-ing. I’ve tried and tried. I’ve tried slow, I’ve tried fast. I even took lessons for heaven’s sake. I watch two year olds samba like veterans, and I’m amazed by my in-ability to come anywhere close . . . the samba is more open, freer, looser, it combines both linear and circu-lar movements with a fast bounce and wide open arms. And even as I focus on the hips, I sense there’s some-thing going on in the knees, too, but I don’t have a clue . . .”(read more at http://tropicaldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2012/02/i used to do little of this dancing in.html)

Three Things We Would Miss If We Left Brazil For The Next Place“I’m not sure why I’m thinking along these lines, re-ally. Neither Mark nor I plan to give up the view from our terrace anytime soon. But you never know . . . and the what we’d miss game is fun to play, even if the re-ality is still distant.1. O jeito de ser brasileiro — The Brazilian way of be-ing. Easy to translate, more complex to describe. And I don’t want to get lost in national stereotypes, either, you know, the French are this, the Germans that, the Argentines the other, the Japanese . . . and so forth. Putting aside the stereotypes, I still have to marvel at the jeito brasileiro. It’s a remarkably seductive warmth and generosity of spirit, an ease and comfort in one’s own skin that’s contagious, an ability to relax and en-joy life, with and without life’s adversities; it’s an abil-ity to break into song to make a point in the middle of the supermarket, it’s a way of laughing and gesturing, of walking and talking . .”(read more at http://tropicaldaydreams.blogspot.com.br/2012/07/three things we would miss if we left.html)

TROPICAL DAYDREAMS


By Ephim Shluger (*)

The proposed renewal of the port area of Rio de Janei-ro, also known as the “Porto Maravilha” project, which covers nearly 5 million squa-

re meters, has attracted a broad spectrum of investors and businesses. The project started with a robust portfolio of propo-sed public works aimed to improve local infrastructure, provision of public services and mobility systems with a total investment package estimated in R$ 3.5 billion (about US$ 1.7 billion), which include: opening of a 4 km long tunel, building of 70 kilometers of roads and sidewalks, upgrading the network 700 km of urban infrastructure, building of 17 km of bike paths, and demolition of the elevated highway (Perimetral). In addition, upgrading of public spaces and the conserva-tion of cultural heritage sites and of iconic architectural monuments, is in full swing. Furthermore, the propo-sal includes a new system of electric street car (VLT) which will link Porto Maravilha to the Santos Dumont Airport, and the building of two new museums, name-ly: the Museum of Tomorrow (Museu do Amanhã), de-signed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, and Rio Art Museum (Museu de Arte do Rio - MAR) that will strengthen the cultural life of the city. The transformative effects of the Porto Maravilha pro-ject on the city as whole, is attributed to three inter-linked factors. First, the auspicious political-institutio-nal alignment found at the Government structure – at the local, the state and the federal levels. Second, the adoption of an effective financial instrument based on the sale of construction certificates (aka CEPACs), whi-ch in turn will allow builders to raise the FAR (floor area ratios) of their projects. The CEPACs sales will form an earmarked fund which will be used to cover the infrastructure works. Portion of these funds will be applied for the conservation and maintenance of the architecture and sites in the historic neighborhoods. Third, and more importantly, the turning-point of Rio’s economic transformations which started with the disco-very of the vast off-shore reserves of oil and gas, hence triggering a new local economic boom. In the years to come, Rio will host global sport and cul-tural events, including the Soccer Confederation Cup in 2013, the FIFA World Cup in 2014, and the Olympic Games in 2016. In this scenario, a formidable challen-ge is presented for attaining excellence in urban design and the architecture of new buildings, for there is a quest for sustainability and a lasting legacy in the im-plementation of Porto Maravilha Project. Last July, Rio was inscribed into the list of World He-ritage Sites, under the category of Cultural Landscape, by UNESCO. As a celebrated tourist destination Rio is becoming an important research and development cen-tre linked to the cutting edge industrial and the service sector activities. In this context, Rio is a good place to invest, to live and work, and to celebrate its vibrant so-cial and cultural diversity.

(*) Architect and Urban Designer Director of OKNO Consultancy, Rio de Janeiro www.transformacoesurbanas.com

Porto Maravilha: opportunities for sustainable and lasting development legacy

BusinessThe Rio Art Museum – a project in the making

The soon-to-be Museum of Tomorrow

New high-speed roadways

New parks

Rio warehouses soon to be transformed into cultural spaces


Blue Tree Park Beach Resort — A 480m2 room accommodates 600 persons in auditorium seating or for cocktails, 400 persons in banquet seating, 260 per-sons in classroom, and 240 fishbone; 4 rooms of 120m2, 2 rooms of 35m2, and a spacious foyer (www.bluetree.com.br/hoteis-e-resorts/buzios.jsp)

Pousada dos Tangarás — Offers a room of 72m2 seating 60 in auditorium configuration, 42 in classroom configu-ration, 38 herringbone (www.tangaras.com.br) Pedra da Laguna Lodge and Spa — Offers an 84m2 meeting room with U-shaped seating for 45, herringbone se-ating for 45, round table for 50 (www.pedradalaguna.com.br) Pontal da Ferradura — Offers 200m2 for 130 persons auditorium-style, 80 clas-sroom, 70 fishbone, 50 round table and 40 U (www.pontaldaferradura.com.br) Villa Rasa Marina Boutique Hotel and Spa — Ac-commodates 80 in auditorium confi-guration, 45 in clas-sroom, herringbone or banquet and 30 in U (www.villarasa-marina.com.br) For incentive groups, To u r S h o p B ú z i o s offers an array of ser-vices from golf at the Búzios Golf Club and Resort (18 holes, de-sign by Pete and Perry Dye, of Dye Designs, Colorado) to schooner tours along our coastline, sport fishing, diving, snorke-ling and much more (www.tourshop.com.br)

BÚZIOS CONGRESS, CONVENTION, AND MEETINGS FACILITIES

Rio-Búzios Beach Hotel — Accommodates 80 in auditorium configuration, 60 classroom style and 24 in U (www.riobuzios.com.br)

Atlântico Búzios Hotel & Resort — Offers four rooms of 200m2 for auditorium seating of 200 persons, banquet seating for 150, classroom seating for 140, U-seating for 50; 3 rooms of 100m2; 2 rooms of 50m2 and another 5 smaller rooms (www.atlanticobuzios.com.br)

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>> Blue Marlin Búzios – Offers a large meeting room, Bra-zilian-Indonesian restaurant, yoga studio and life-style shop

on sporty Geriba Beach (www.bluemarlinbuzios.com)

Blue Marlin Búzios

Insólito Búzios

Ferradura Resort

Pousada El Parador

Come enjoy the most beautiful beaches in the world ---

Those in the know are here already

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