Sleeping Around (9 page)

Weighed down with omelette and cake, I wandered past the whitewashed army barracks then ducked into a small park that ran along the rocky shoreline before stopping dead in my tracks and exclaiming ‘Wow!' But it probably should have been ‘Ahhh!' Directly in front of me was a sea of tall and tanned and young and lovely girls from Ipanema spread out on the beach or strolling along wiggling their bare bottoms. Most were wearing the bikini that shows everything without quite showing everything: a sliver of a thong downstairs and a spaghetti strap upstairs—vermicelli, really—anchored by a pair of nipple badges. I'm no expert, but I didn't think there was too much need to improve the mammary health of Brazil's population.

The only downside to my arrival at Ipanema beach was that I couldn't get
that
bloody song out of my head. I did manage to eventually stop singing it, but then I began whistling it between my teeth as I climbed a narrow dirt path that wound its way up to a bluff and a stunning vista over Ipanema beach. I was sitting on a bench soaking in the view—while still dementedly whistling away—when a young lady in a long white cotton dress sat next to me and began stripping off. When she'd got down to her tiny white bikini, I noticed a small tattoo on her lower back just above her bottom (well, where else was I supposed to look?). It looked like a rubber stamp and written inside was: ‘Made in Brazil'.

I spent most of my time strolling along the beach dodging balls. It seemed that the straight guys, who favoured board shorts, were kicking soccer balls to each other, while the gay guys, who preferred their shorts tight and tiny, were playing dainty games of paddleball. The busiest part of the beach was the area surrounding the lifesaving tower Posto 9. There were lithe, fit, bronzed bodies everywhere playing volleyball, kicking footballs or languidly reposed on the beach, while the smell of old socks (marijuana) and music filled the air. Compared to the locals I felt (and looked a bit like) Mr Bean on holiday, so after tramping along almost the entire stretch of beach I headed to the busy back streets of Ipanema.

I spent the next few hours sauntering back to Pedro's house, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or a lovely square or lively cafes full of groovy young people. Most of my return journey, however, was spent circumnavigating
Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas
as I strolled lazily along the narrow park on the water's edge past joggers and lovers. I stopped for a beer in a waterside cafe and, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, I decided that after only 24 hours I had fallen in love with this marvellous and stunning city. And no, it wasn't just the bare bottoms and healthy mammaries that swayed me.

Pedro had told me that he would be home at eight o'clock, but by 9.30 he hadn't shown and I was getting very hungry. Although I was very tempted, the ‘How to be a good guest' section on the couch-surfing website recommends that you ‘Do not raid your host's fridge'. Other ways to be a good guest include: Do not ignore your hosts; Do not whisper; Don't be derogatory, impatient or dismissive about your host's children; Do not insult your host's cooking; and Do not party without your host except if he tells you to party.

I was eyeing off the tasty-looking biscuits in the cat bowl when Pedro finally turned up at 10.30. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Cobal market, which was only a short walk from Pedro's house. In the evening the entire market is turned into a huge restaurant precinct and the passageways are filled with tables and noisy diners.

While we were eating our fajitas, I asked Pedro what it meant to be Brazilian. ‘Brazil is . . . surrealistic,' he said. ‘It has the most amazing mix of natural resources, biodiversity and a history like no other country, because races have mixed together from the very beginning. This cauldron of cultures gave birth to a new sort of place with very few preconceptions and many crossed influences that make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts, and that shows. I am really, really proud of being Brazilian, and not just because of our natural resources, but because we have real freedom—and not the American-way-of-life twisted concept of freedom by money—and a cultural kaleidoscope that truly exists only here.'

I was very impressed. Not only with Pedro's obvious love for his country, but that after a couple of beers his English was better than mine when I'm sober.

‘Would you like to go to a nightclub?' Pedro asked after we'd finished dinner.

‘Um, yeah,' I said rather unconvincingly. It was already after midnight and way past my bedtime.

‘You did say that you want to experience Brazilian life,' Pedro said. ‘And that's what we Brazilians do. We go clubbing.'

‘I won't get in,' I said, looking down at my cargo shorts and thongs.

‘No, you're okay. That's what everyone wears.'

What a wonderful country. Brazil is very proud to be the home of Havaianas, the world's largest and best-known brand of thongs (the ones also known as flip-flops, rather that the ones also known as bum floss), so they consider their humble thongs suitable footwear for any occasion.

We queued for 40 minutes to get into Casa da Matriz nightclub, which was down one of those dark alleys that Pedro told me to keep away from, and when we finally got to the doorman he grunted at me. ‘He wants to see your ID,' Pedro translated.

I scoffed, ‘He's kidding, right? Tell him that although I often think and act like I'm a teenager, I'm actually close to retirement age.'

Mr Neanderthal refused to budge, though, so we had to drive back to Pedro's to get my passport. When we returned to the nightclub, there was no queue and Mr Neanderthal didn't even bother looking at my ID. The nightclub, which was chock-full of heaving bodies, was in a large old house and the former lounge room was a dance floor while the former kitchen was a bar and the former master bedroom upstairs was another dance floor. I liked it, but I did have to wait ten minutes for a piss; they still only had the three former toilets. Being the old bugger that I am, I preferred the music downstairs where they were playing, as a radio DJ would say, ‘the best music from the 60s, 70s, 80, 90s and today'.

We were handed a ‘Drink Card' as we stepped inside. All drinks purchased at the bar were marked on the card and you paid at the end of the night. I imagine that after a big night you could be in for quite a surprise. ‘What happens if you go crazy at the bar and don't have enough money to pay?' I asked Pedro—or actually screamed over the music.

‘They won't let you leave, so you have to get money from a friend,' he shouted back. ‘I had to ring up my mum once at four in the morning to bring me some money. What's worse, though,' he continued, ‘is if you lose your card and then find it later on the bar after people have bought drinks for everyone on it.'

Around two in the morning I was sitting quietly enjoying my fifth or possibly eighth beer when a gorgeous Brazilian girl asked me for a dance. Well, when I say dance it ended up being more of a stumble. She was blind drunk. ‘Would you like to fuck a Brazilian girl?' she bellowed in my ear.

‘Pardon?'

‘Not me!' she slurred. ‘I don't really like you, but I can find someone for you if you like.'

When we left at three o'clock, she had found someone she did really like and was busy trying to get her tongue down into his lungs.

Pedro lit up a joint when we got back to his house. ‘My first step-father liked cocaine,' Pedro said in between puffs. ‘That was the main reason why they split up.' Pedro was an only child, but his mum had remarried twice and he now had four half-siblings and two step-siblings. ‘My real dad is an art teacher at university, but he is also a very famous illustrator of children's books,' Pedro said proudly. ‘The only problem with illustrating, though, is that he'd spend months on a job putting his heart and soul into it and get paid hardly anything. One book he illustrated has been a bestseller for thirty years and he only got a one-off payment.' He showed me the book, which—with its fantastically psychedelic illustrations—looked as if he was the one who had sniffed some cocaine, not the first step-father. Or was it the second? It was getting very late.

Sometime after 4 a.m. I staggered off to bed, leaving Pedro playing with his chords again. My couch-surfing trip was slowly turning into a flaking-out-on-a-couch-in-a-drunken-stupor trip.

Ah ha, so that was why Pedro had stayed up! He was waiting for someone. I might not have ‘fucked a Brazilian girl', but Pedro obviously had. When I stumbled upstairs at midday, I found a young, and somewhat large, woman in the kitchen cooking something on the stove with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. Pedro's ‘friend' spoke no English, so we smiled at each uncomfortably for a minute. Then she started washing the dishes. Gee, that's all right, I thought. Most pick-ups just leave in the morning.

Pedro eventually tottered down the stairs looking, not surprisingly, rather sheepish. ‘I didn't get to sleep till six,' he said warily.

‘I bet,' I said with a sly wink.

Pedro said something to his lady friend and she stopped washing the dishes and went upstairs.

‘The kitty litter needs changing,' Pedro said matter-of-factly.

Boy, maybe I should have picked up as well. I needed my laundry done and there was also that tear in my shorts that needed sewing.

‘Um, she seems nice,' I observed cheerfully.

‘Yeah, she's great,' Pedro said. ‘Rosângela has been my maid since I moved in here. She comes once a week and cleans the entire house and makes me meals as well.' Oops. They should add ‘Don't make assumptions about your host' to the ‘How to be a good guest' list.

Pedro paid his maid US$30 for ten hours' work and she also worked for Pedro's mum and two of his aunties. ‘Maids are always found through someone you know,' Pedro told me. ‘Often people will try to “steal” someone's maid, because a good one—an honest, skilled and hard-working one—is hard to find.'

‘Do many people have a maid?' I asked.

‘A lot of middle-class people have one and it's usually a black lady that lives with a white family. Many apartments have a small room off the laundry or kitchen, which is the maid's room. It goes back to the
casa grande e senzala
, or the landlord's house and slave's house tradition. Back in the old days the husbands or teenagers would have sex with the maids. Now you can see why most Brazilians have mixed blood.'

Rosângela was making my ‘couch' when we left to go to the market for brinner (we were eating so late that breakfast had almost become dinner). We ate at Restaurante do Mercado, a small traditional Brazilian buffet restaurant where you paid according to the weight of the food on your plate. There was an array of delectable-looking salads and meats, but apart from choosing a tiny salad and a small piece of grilled chicken, I got a bit carried away with the chips—I could thank my hangover for that. Pedro scoffed down his food because he had to get to work. It was also time for me to say goodbye to Pedro who had become, after just two days, a good friend. I only hoped I had got drunk enough to qualify as one of the people that Pedro enjoyed.

I devoted most of the afternoon to walking, or more like plodding, to
Pão de Açúcar,
Rio's famous Sugarloaf Mountain. Pedro said that it would take me an hour to walk there. It took me two. I was tired (yes, okay, and a little hungover) but I also did stop twice to buy a pair of Havaianas. They were on sale just about everywhere. I saw racks of Havaianas in a chemist, a video hire shop, a juice shop, a newsagent and even a florist (‘It's my wife's birthday, so I'll have a bunch of pink and white Havaianas please').

I can now tick off another location on my James-Bond-filming-sites-of-the-world tour. It was the cable supporting the Sugarloaf Mountain cable car that Jaws tried to bite through in the film
Moonraker
. Bond might have been fighting the forces of evil, but I bet he didn't have to fight his way through a gaggle of tour bus groups just so he could take a photo of yet another [insert superlative here] view of the city.

It was 7.30 by the time I got back to Pedro's house, which didn't leave any time for my planned, and much-needed, nap. Mariana had said to ‘get ready to party hard because we hardly ever sleep' but, to be honest, I was more ready to sleep hard and hardly ever party.

7

‘I'm the coolest Carioca in Rio and the happiest girl you'll ever meet.'

Mariana Violante, 26, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

CouchSurfing.com

‘I've invited my friend to stay as well just in case you are a rapist or a mass murderer,' Mariana said casually as she greeted me at the door.

‘Well, I'm not!' I said quickly and in the process sounded, even to myself, like I very much was.

Mariana's friend, who had been hiding behind the door, popped her head out and gave me a nervous smile. ‘This is Paula,' Mariana said brightly. ‘She is my best friend and the
second
coolest girl in all of Rio.' Mariana did live in one of the coolest parts of town, in a swanky apartment block which even had a swanky doorman in full uniform in the foyer. The apartment was only one building back from Copacabana beach, which you could see from the lounge-room window. Well, you could glimpse a sliver of it. There was a thin strip of water and sand just visible in a gap between buildings. On my tour of the small apartment we bypassed the couch and I was shown to my very own tiny bedroom with a tiny bed and an even tinier ensuite (so tiny in fact that you could wee in the toilet while standing in the shower—not that I tried to, I hasten to add).