From here I watch the world go by
Saturday, February 26, 2005 • Posted by jcb
Two months down and what have we accomplished you might wonder. Taking a look around the site one might think it’s sandy beaches, coconuts and lovely ladies lyin in the sun, but I can assure you, the sand always finds its way into the vaseline. So lest our State side worldwide fans think our lives have melted into puddles of bacchanalian swill, let’s focus. What the hell are we doing down here? Aside from the obvious … living in a foreign country, learning a new language, adjusting to a completely alien culture, building a business from scratch in an brutally competitive industry with little experience… deep breath, deep breath. [reaches for brown paper bag] Seriously people, its happening. After two months our limitada is FINALLY up and running. Bring on the next set of hurdles. We had an amazing experience this week in Buzios. What started out as an informal meeting with the Senior VP of hotel development for an international hotel chain,
turned into our first pitch session. Inside of five minutes Raphael was down on our idea. Why Praia Brava? What’s over there? Stay closer to town. (Praia Brava is 2 KM away from the Centro) He took us to a few plots he thought were suitable. “See guys this is a location, this what you want.” Then Witzy and I tag teamed him. Off the top turnbuckle I laid the idea out for him. Without getting too specific here, we want to build more than just a hotel. We want to build a sense of time and place, a place that when you walk in, you feel the electricity in the air. If you have ever walked into the Delano you know what I mean. The wheels began turning and then we took him to our location at Praia Brava. After dragging our reluctant quarry to the top of the hill huffing and puffing, Witzy belts out in classic Witzy candor “See Raphael… Now THIS is a location.”
It was amazing, right there with that comment we flipped him. His face lit up like the Fourth of July. By the end he could see our vision and he was more excited than we were. Still we’re a long way off, but its progress.
In other news I think I have grey hair in my beard.. and its not even fully grown in yet. Grill.
Just a little pin prick
Monday, February 21, 2005 • Posted by jcb
We went to Ilha Grande this weekend. What an amazing place. An island with no roads, no cars and very few humans. Our only mode of transport were the myriad of local boat captains cat calling various local destinations.
Some, things, sure, can, sweep, me, off, my, feet
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 • Posted by jcb
(l to r) Bruno, Sandra, Witzy, Iran, James
Struggling up off the canvas, knees weak and quivering, peevish indecision the hallmark of each fitful step. You can only imagine what ten days of Carnivale can do to the average 32 year old body. Not that there is anything average about team further.com. Yeah I said it … go on … back up and read it again if you need to. Satiated, inebriated, waist explicated, maybe even a bit perforated we rolled up the welcome mat at 1415 Rua Prudente de M. closed the blinds, shut off the bar-b-que and started grilling all week long. But we’re back and better for it. Our Brazilian brother Gustavo invited us over for his mother’s birthday bash this past Saturday in Barra, a nearby suburb of Rio. We signed up for a quiet family affair, what we got was a lesson in the Brazilian carnivale recovery method. After a scrumptious meal of camarao de bobo (shrimp bahian style), arroz, feijao, and the ever present Brazilian farofa (manioc flour), the gills needed cleaning. I ask you, what better gill cleaner is there than the caipirinha, and so ensued the evening. After two sightings of the white moon of Witzy, a Brazilian celebrity appearance, and one cut off grandmother, the evening was in full swing. Witz eventually settled into a corner with the local brazilian celebrity (Iran) to plot the evening’s strategy. Not only did these two strange bedfellows get on, they proved hysterical just to watch. Tenuous might be an overly generous description for the grasp each had on the other’s language. But the love was there. All kidding aside, I think it should be noted that Witz is making strides in his portuguese. Won’t be long now. Business is picking up for us. We’re off to Ilha Grande to scout. Someone’s gotta do it.
**** COLORADO KREWE #15 In case of over the top K I double grilling, break glass and repeat after me. “remember your first panic show when you dragged JCB out early ‘cause you thought they sucked.” USE WITH EXTREME CAUTION.
Caipirinha
1 lime
2 ounces of cachaça (sugar cane liquor)
Sugar to taste
Ice cubes
Wash the lime and roll it on the board to loosen the juices. Cut the lime into pieces and place them in a glass. Sprinkle with the sugar and crush the pieces (pulp side up) with a pestle. (We have a long, wooden one from Brazil, made specifically for this purpose.) Just enough to release the juice, otherwise it’ll get bitter. Add the cachaça and stir to mix. Add the ice and stir again. It is delicious and potent!
You can also make a pitcher of caipirinha. Figure out how many people and multiply amounts. If you can’t find cachaça where you live, use a good vodka. The drink will then be called caipiroshka. No vodka? Use white rum and you will have a caipiríssima. Caipirinhas made with sake are all the rage in Rio now! Try one.
The city of Paraty gave its name to the drink: parati is a synonym for cachaça. Other words for it include: pinga, caninha, branquinha, malvada. There are tours of distillers in the state of Minas Gerais, much in the same way as you’d tour vineyards in Sonoma Valley or in France, with the added bonus of their famous regional cuisine. Cachaça is also notorious for brands with pornographic labels…they’re hilarious!
You can use cachaça to flambé bananas and other food; add it to hot chocolate and even to coffee; marinate pork loin and pork chops, etc.
Senac has published a book about cachaça that’s extremely informative; I finally found out why it’s different from rum, for example…It’s made from cane juice outright. You can also get the Caipirinha book above on your next trip to Brazil.
A great place to visit in Leblon in Rio de Janeiro is Academia da Cachaça, Rua Conde Bernadotte, 26, (021)2529-2680. Great selection of drinks and traditional foods to eat with them. A new place to taste very special cachaças has just opened in the Lapa district of Rio: Cachaçaria Mangue Seco, Rua do Lavradio, 23 (021)3852-1947. It’s open from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Tuesday through Saturday.
A river without water
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 • Posted by jcb
Ripple of Hope
“Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation … It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
RFK
Day of Affirmation Address, University of Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb. 13 - An American nun and environmental activist was shot to death in the Amazon jungle on Saturday, heightening tensions between land speculators and peasant settlers in the region and bringing a government pledge to crack down on lawlessness.
The nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, 74, was shot four times in the chest and head by a pair of gunmen while visiting a remote rural encampment near the Trans-Amazon Highway in Pará State. She was renowned throughout the Amazon region for her work with the poor and landless and for her efforts to preserve the rain forest.
Officials view the attack as a challenge to the authority of the government, which has faced resistance from loggers and land speculators in the region over new land-use and ownership regulations.
Immediately after the killing, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered two members of his cabinet and a special police investigative unit to the area.
“Solving this crime and apprehending those who ordered and committed it is a question of honor for us,” Nilmário Miranda, the government’s secretary for human rights, told reporters late on Saturday before heading for the region. “This is intolerable. We cannot permit impunity in a case like this.”
A spokesman for the American Embassy in Brasília said officials there were following the case and were awaiting additional information once the new workweek begins and weather improves in the region. “We trust there will be a full investigation by the police,” he said.
Sister Dorothy was a native of Dayton, Ohio, and belonged to the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She had lived and worked in the Amazon region since the early 1970’s, focusing on organizing and educating peasant groups about issues that included land tenure and the economic and environmental benefits of avoiding deforestation.
“This is a terrible, tremendous loss,” Paulo Moutinho, coordinator of the Institute for Environmental Research in the Amazon and a longtime associate of Sister Dorothy, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “She was an extremely important person, a spokesman for the sustainable development movement with a capacity for leadership as big as that of Chico Mendes,” the internationally known rubber tapper leader killed in 1988.
In an interview late in 2001, Sister Dorothy complained that she was constantly receiving death threats, which she attributed to loggers and land speculators. But she had tense relations with the local police, who viewed her as a social agitator and once detained her on suspicion of inciting violence and supplying guns to peasant groups, and so could not look to them for protection.
Just last week, Sister Dorothy met with Mr. Miranda to discuss a new round of death threats against religious, peasant and environmental groups in the region along the Trans-Amazon Highway, which Mr. Moutinho called “perhaps the most violent in the Amazon.” Her Brazilian associates said Sunday that they feared new attacks aimed at intimidating them and crippling their efforts.
“We’re all incensed, but at the same time we’re also very afraid,” Ana Paula Santos Souza, a leader of the Movement for the Development of the Trans-Amazon and the Xingu, a peasant group with which Sister Dorothy worked closely, said Sunday in an interview. “Sister Dorothy was an American citizen and a nun, and even with all that prominence, she was still killed publicly. What does that mean for the rest of us?”
Two male associates traveling with Sister Dorothy were spared by the gunmen and are reported to have identified one of the killers. The suspect’s name and background have not been disclosed, but the Pastoral Land Commission of the Roman Catholic Church issued a statement saying the killing could have been ordered only by the powerful economic and political interests Sister Dorothy had always fought.
“The hatred of ranchers and loggers respects nothing,” the statement said. “The reprehensible murder of our sister brings back to us memories of a past that we had thought was closed.”
Sister Dorothy’s killing comes at a time of mounting tension in Pará State. Last month, responding to new government regulation of land use and ownership, loggers blocked highways and rivers, burned buses, threatened to pollute rivers with chemicals and warned that “blood will flow” if Mr. da Silva’s government did not suspend decrees they found objectionable.
Early this month, the government acceded to those pressures and rescheduled the timetable for enforcing the regulations. Environmental groups strongly criticized the action, saying it would only encourage more acts of lawlessness in a part of the country where the government’s control has always been incomplete and tenuous.
At the moment Sister Dorothy was attacked and killed, the environment minister, Marina Silva, was scheduled to be attending a ceremony to mark the creation of new “extractive reserves” in Pará in which the government put large areas of jungle off limits to ranchers, loggers and land speculators. To some of Sister Dorothy’s associates, that suggests that her murder had an even broader political motive.
“The timing wasn’t a coincidence, because they could have killed Sister Dorothy anytime they chose,” Ms. Souza said. “But they saw they were losing areas, and they wanted to provoke the state and send a warning. Now it is up to the government to defend the principles Sister Dorothy represented.”
vorsprung durch technik
Saturday, February 12, 2005 • Posted by jcb
Carnivale Photo pages are up in the photo section. Now back in my hole.
Lovely, dark and deep, But what of those promises
Tuesday, February 8, 2005 • Posted by jcb
60,000 spectators, 6 samba schools, 5,000 participants per school and one fevered Sambadrome. As you can imagine we’re a bit slow today. More pics and reporting to come.
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Tuesday, February 8, 2005 • Posted by jcb
Now I heave seen the warnings, screaming from all sides
It’s easy to ignore them and God knows I’ve tried
All of this temptation, it turned my faith to lies
Until I couldn’t see the danger or hear the rising tide
Eu nunca direi a verdade.
Dear Prudence, let me see you smile
Thursday, February 3, 2005 • Posted by jcb
I know. I know. Slacking. But in my defense, this is candyland Rio de Janeiro. Plus the back-end servers have been a pain in the ass lately, making posting a haze. A hosting move is in the works. Stay tuned.
School’s out for summer. Our Carnivale break begins today. Not that we felt the need to attend final exams this week. Lately, Witz and I have been feeling a strange kinship with Jeff Spicoli. Next week we start early morning surf lessons.
Rachel at Jardim Botanico
guest photog josh kaminski
In other news we had our first guests roll through this past week. First on deck was a fine lass going by the name Amanda. Never having met the dynamic duo in person, Amanda threw caution to the wind and opted for a hair raising few days of non stop.. shall we say.. Carnivale tune up. Right on Amanda. No sleep, samba, beach, surfing, excessive Caipirinha consumption, and a nasty sunburn, we put Amanda on a 17 30 hour bus ride to catch up with her friends in Bahia. I hope we weren’t too hard on you. Come back and see us. Next up, Josh and Rachel. Witzy’s long lost redneck cousin and his better half. The family reunion was sweet but soon turned ugly as we had Josh wretching out the window of our favorite local pub within two hours. At a boy Witz, keep it in the family. By the way, Witzy and I are gaining mythic status at the afore mentioned pub Emporio. We might start wearing capes. More detail to follow.
I have no logical explanation for my post title. Except that Witzy and I can’t stop playing the JGB version of the classic Lennon-McCartney tune. Go have a listen. I love how Jerry drags out the word play into four or five syllables. Supposedly Lennon wrote the song for Mia Farrow’s younger sister. Apparently she was a meditation addict, so much so that she needed constant medical supervision to roust her. Whoa!! See Mom was right.. too much of anything is bad for you. Except for….
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I was a fighter, I could turn on a thread. Now I stand accused of the things I've said.