The route so far and some scattered notes

I am writing these notes in Alter de Chao (yes, without the small apostrophes or whatever) in the middle of Amazonas. I have time to write, since the sun shines all too punishingly here near eqvator. As my friend Frederico said yesterday when we were about to retire to our hammocks for a 3-hour siesta by the mighty river Tapajos: "Now sun is strong. Now sun commands our action". So, the sun commands me to write. Here we go...

The route so far and some scattered notes

This is just to give a summary of my trip so far. Later, I will write about many issues in more extensive manner. You can send your complaints and suggestions by email. Please, do that! Interactivity rules, I assume.

I left Finland on Tuesday the 19th of October via Frankfurt to Boston. The flights were OK, I was reading the "Lean Thinking"-books the whole time and managed to read the first 100-pages. It is a good book, full of practical examples about leaning different industries and services. I will write more about that later, leaning I mean. In Frankfurt, the always-so-humoristic German authorities had placed a large sing reading "The following security check is only due to the requests by American authorities" and some check there was. I am not sure what this security check really prevents except longer shopping session in the local tax-free.

Milton was there to meet me at the airport. Nice guy, a carpenter, MIT-graduate, bicycle enthusiastic, and boyfriend of Mirja, who is a philosopher with whom I studied type theory etc some years ago. Visit to Boston was pleasant: I met most of my coming fellow students (all but 3 of them are male (out of 50)). There was the official open house meeting, the free beer, the bad, fat food, the nice presentations during the alumni conference, some house hunting in Back Bay, nice sushi dinner with Mirja and Milton in some faraway suburb of rich Kerry-voters, some more beer and then some, getting lost in metro system (by reading the "Lean Thinking" book all too intensively) etc. More later.

I left Boston for New York by bus on Saturday the 23rd of October. Buses are cheap in USA. This one cost $15 for the some 300 kilometers there are. There are nothing of special interest along the road down to NYC. We did, however, stop at one feeding place of fat people and I managed to spot some of them. One man was so fat, that his walking was rather difficult. When he started to walk, it took some time for the fat to start moving. Then, at each step, the fat seemed to follow the laws of physics and not the will of the man. So, he was more or less just making great effort but not moving that much. One should not laugh at unfortunate people, but I do wonder how someone can let him/herself get that fat. One does not wake up one morning with 100 kilos extra fat, does one?
The bus arrived via Harlem (no white people) via Central Park (only white people) to Port Authority (all kinds of people). My hotel was, accidentally, next to the bus station. The Carter Hotel is nothing special, cost $100 per night, rooms are small, there is no shampoo, prostitutes and pimps roam the lobby together with travellers from all over the world. In all, a nice place to spend one night. The location is good, one block from Times Square. In addition to the traditional neon signs, large display, shops and tourist, there is now a recruiting center of US Army/Navy etc in the middle of the Square. New cannon fodder, or should one say neo-conservative fodder, is souhgt after. There were no queues, maybe the neighborhood is too rich.There is also an exhibition on how the Department of War on Drugs has been protecting the American citizens from the evil drug trafficers from poor countries or something. I did not check the exhibition so closely. Anyway, I met Riitta and we had nice dinner (squid, fish and chips) next to the Grand Central Station. The station has been renovated and is definitely one of the nicest and most impressive ones in the whole world. Definitely worth visiting.

From New York I flew to the Bogota airport. I did not go out of the airport this time, I will tour Bogota on my way back. I kept on reading the "Lean Thinking"-book and I was also getting leaner by having to skip both lunch and dinner. It was a day of reading, but not really worth remembering.

Adventure resumed after a torturous 5-hour flight from Bogota to Sao Paolo, one of the biggest cities in the world and the biggest in South America. I got some taste what it means to come from a poor country to a richer one: there were nobody waiting for getting her passport checked, but everyone from our plane was herded in one corner. After 10 minutes of perplexed waiting, we found out passangers of Air Italia flight have strict priority over those of Avianca.

I spend 3.5 days in Sao Paolo (from Monday 25th to early Thursday 28th). I took it relatively easy, wandered around a little, had quite some pints (or chopps as they call them here) wiht Diego, a forest engineer about to move to Mozambique to do some work with cashew nuts (did you, by the way, know that cashew has a fruit from which the nut hangs? I did not before seeing them in Mariba much later) and Filippe, a layer turned into journalist in some nice bar in Vila Madalena. Also the football-player-poet spent some time by our table telling some stories about street soccer games in Sweder or something. I could not quite understand his poetic English. The other day, I met Mika and Juan-Carlos and some others with Osvaldo, rubber factory manager from Santarem, a great and funny guy. I will later visit his factory to check how lean it is or just for fun. Osvaldo offered me a nice sushi-dinner in Liberdade-barrio. There are quite some Japanese living in Sao Paolo. I also visited the 26th Sao Paolo biennale, which contained some really interesting video-art. Usually, I consider video-art a makeshift from of art, but now I have to admit that there may be something in it. But many works of art were not that good in the biennale, but there we so many of them. Then I visited Santos, the nearest port city some 70 kilometers from Sao Paolo. The road to Santos is worth the trip by itself: the plateau on which Sao Paolo is drops quite suddenly to the coastal area. Nice, really steep descend. Santos itself was nothing special, but I did have a nice lunch of fried fish and a bottle of wine there in one old restaurant. In Sao Paolo, I stay in Residencia Harmonia in Vila Madalena; I had a nice one bedroom apartment there. Great place, quiet, clean, safe, good breakfast.

The distance between Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro is about 400 km and it takes 5.5 hours by bus. And the busses they have here in Brazil are beyond imagination, so confortable: they have two decks, everyone gets pillows, quilts, juice etc. If one travel really long distance (and there are some 60 hours rides available here), one can book a leito, a fully reclining seat with quite enough space for even my legs. I do wonder why we do not have such busses in Eupope and why the busses in USA are so unconfortable. More about this later, I assume.

Rio de Janeiro itself was bit of a disappointment for me. I stayed in Hotel Astoria 3 in Copacabana, 3 blocks from the beach itself. Of course, after settling in my small room, I went to see the famous beach. Well, it was Thursday, about 4 pm, with strong wind, flying sand, and the beach was more or less empty. There were some gay man doing pushups etc, but that could not keep my attention for long. I did have a beer, walked all the way to the southern end of the beach and back. Nice walk, some nice buildings, some beautiful people, but 4 lanes full of cars and busses is not what one really calls nice beach atmosphere. Anyway, famous places, beaches and others, are worth visiting once. The other day, on Friday, I went to check the beach of Ipanema, which is the place for rich and (artifically) beautiful. It was too hot, I could not stay there for long. It was also too bright for my poor eyes, so I could not see who and how beautiful were present. I decided that I am not a beach person. So, I did something else. I took a ferry to Niteroi and tried to find the famous UFO-shaped art museum, but I got lost in some suburb. Nice walk, but not what I was looking for. I had also skipped lunch and got angry at myself and decided to call it a day and went back to the centre of Rio, which is ugly as any. Or uglier. It was Friday, so I was about to take the risk and check the bars in Lapa, but then I shied away. After all, going to bars alone and having to take taxi from one bar to another just to not get robbed is not what I consider fun. What I consider fun is visiting botanical gardens and on Saturday I did that. The botanical garden in Rio is a good place to see some tropical trees in their original environment. There are even some impressive sumaumas, the biggest trees there are in Amazon, in Rio. Being Saturday, I decided to give the Copacabana beach on last look and found out that the Brazilian do take their beach appearence seriously. I also noticed that being fat or old does not mean that one cannot sport very skimpy bikinis. Quite explicit, I would say. More about dress code later. I also did some long bus rides and saw some favelas from the bus window. More about bus rides later, too.

On Saturday, 30th of October, I flew from Rio to Belem. Belem is an old Portuguese settelement/town 100 km from the Atlantic by rio Tocantins. I arrived late, at 11 pm, and took taxi to Manaca Hotel. Now, there was one taxiride not the forget. Just absolute danger, no respect of speed limits, of traffic lights, of anything. I was lucky to be able to check-in safe and sound. The hotel was nice, a small one of 17 rooms. But it was seriously hot and my air conditioner was useless. So, I was sweating and not sleeping there too much. I managed to do quite much in Belem in 3 days. On Sunday, I walked to the centre, browsed a little in Ver-o-Peso market, took taxi to the botanical garden, which was quite OK. The rest of the day I spent by following the communal elections. In Belem, just like in all other cities in Brazil, there were mayor elections taking place and there were 2 candidates: the left-wing and the right-wing. Both sides had their supporters all around the cities singing, dancing, waving their flags, shouting slogans, setting of fireworks etc. It was a real carneval going on. The left-wing supporters were dressed in red, the right-wing supporters in yellow. I decided to find out how the party was going on in the suburbs and took a ramdom bus. The busdrivers and the conductor belonged to the yellow party and the route went through some really red areas. The red supporters were all the time shouting at the driver that he should support reds, not yellow. The driver just took another banderoll and hang it on the windshield. It was fun. At terminal, I insisted that I want to return back to the centre by the same bus, but I think that they realized that I was on the side of the reds and kicked me out of the bus. I took taxi, whose driver was also on the side of the yellow ones, but did not kick me out. The driver also supported Bush (a few days later, another taxi-driver was really upset about Bush winning again). Later, I was sampling some rather decent beer in the local microbrewery by the dockside when I realized that one boat was about to sail. I jumped aboard and took a 1.5-hour trip up and down the river, which is, by the way, about 4 km wide at that point.

More later. I have to go out and have a drink now.

October

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs November 2004".