Cidade Maravilhosa

Last month I spent a couple of days in Rio de Janeiro. It was the first time I had been back there since the summer of 2003, when I lived there for three months.

One night I went back to my favorite place in Rio, a big rock called Arpoador (Harpooner) that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, dividing the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. I used to go there as often as I could to watch the sunset, and I managed to get there just in time to see it again.

There were probably 200 people scattered around the big rock. Some were fishing, but most were there, like me, to watch the sun set over the Dois Irmaos, or Two Brothers, the massive rocks that loom over the southern end of Rio.
As I sat there waiting, the sound of voices and laughter floated down and mixed with the noise of the waves crashing against the rocks below us, before drifting into the evening sky. But as the sun got closer to the horizon, the voices grew hushed and the crowd was quiet and we all stared in silence as the fiery globe disappeared into the sea.

Then, just as the top of the sun dropped below the horizon line, the whole crowd erupted in approval, and the evening air was filled with applause and cheers in appreciation of the show.

I love Brazil.

(The top photo is taken from my hotel window. The hotel was under renovation, so the whole building was wrapped in a semi-transparent gauze-like material. The photo that came out of it reminded me of a painting my brother might do.)

Thanksgivings Past

Last week we spent Thanksgiving at the beach in Ventura and it was fantastic. As we were sitting down for dinner looking out over the ocean, I thought of Khartoum, Sudan, where I spent the first Thanksgiving of our marriage. I was working for USAID and left two weeks after our Honeymoon for six weeks in Sudan, where we were working on the Darfur crisis.

While in Sudan, we all lived in a house a few miles from the U.S. Embassy, which I called "Real World Khartoum." One man, Jim, had been there for months, and cooking was his outlet. He decided to prepare a big Thanksgiving dinner for all of us, and and he even ordered a Turkey for $300 that was flown in all the way from Amsterdam on the biweekly KLM flight.

Although the Turkey made the flight, it never made it beyond the airport in Khartoum, where overzealous Sudanese customs agents suspected our prize cargo of carrying bird flu and incinerated our turkey (along with Jim's last hope at sanity). Somehow a frozen Turkey from Amsterdam was a bigger threat and a higher priority for them than genocide in Darfur...

Since the embassy was closed on Thanksgiving, we took a rare day off (we were working seven days a week) and organized a trip to some pyramids along the Nile at a place called Meroe up near the Egyptian border. So I spent Thanksgiving morning on camelback riding through the Sudanese desert.

And when we got home, Jim had managed to find some chicken in a little market in Khartoum and we had a fine Thanksgiving after all. I don't think I would recommend Thanksgiving (or Spring Break, for that matter) in Khartoum, but it made for a memorable holiday.