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The beach undertow in Ipanema gave me the biggest stir of my life. In the Santa Marta favela, Michael Jackson shot They do not care about us when drug trafficker Marcinho VP assured Spike Lee, director of the video clip, of the security of the “king of pop.” There, more than twenty years later, a child "gave away to me." for only two reales, a drawing made by him. At Escadaria de Santa Tereza, or Escalera de Selarón, decorated with mosaics brought from all over the world by Chilean plastic artist Jorge Selarón, who in 2013 would be found charred in the same place, I devoured a feijoada and lost my cell phone. I drank caipirinha and caipiroska, beer and a colored alcohol of dubious source and sold in small plastic bags in Copacabana. They squeezed me from all sides in the crowd of momo's hussars, and I deafened with joy at the bloco of the moment: unforgettable little moments.
The madness and debauchery in Rio de Janeiro during the carnival is just indescribable; an overflow of everything: joy, colors, incredible bodies, naked people, heat, shouting, dancing, alcohol, excesses, music, violence, water, urine everywhere, flavors, sex, hysteria, waste, poverty, contrasts, sweat, disorder, euphoria, women, men, children, drugs, all the imaginable absurdity, all sublimity that can be felt from eclecticism, iconicity, syncretism, racial issues, the spirituality, soccer and batucada, streets flooded with so much to give and receive.
The Rio Sambadrome is a palette of colors in the hands of Bacchus, his canvas a concrete carpet of about five blocks long. To visit it means to be proactive: to buy a tourist package or something like it with a few months in advance, and that had not occurred to us. But one magical night, as the sambadrome was filling with people, a boy just came out of the blue, he was giving away tickets! And so, without expecting it or imagining it, we were at the epicenter of the Rio carnival, living in the flesh that "everything can happen in Rio," and for free.