Cidade De Deus

So as the days multiply, so do the experiences and its kind of hard to keep up. There’s no natural place to store these happenings, nor is there anyway to make real sense of them. They just kind of happen and you find yourself three days later thinking…’What the fuck’, ‘How am I alive’ and ‘Who am I again?’

One of those very instances happened last week when I paid a trip to Cidade de Deus. Yes, the film, but oh, so so much more. Flown there on the back of a motorbike, and having no biking etiquette at all, well, naturally, I burnt all the skin from my ankles as soon as I got on. Holding back the pain through clenched teeth, I endured my skin melting for at least an hour. Whilst Criss crossing between every nutter known to man, my helmeted little head flapped like a wotsit in a windstorm. How I arrived in one piece is still quite simply a miracle. 

Note to self. NEVER ride on the back of a motorbike in Rio. Either you will die or you will lose all control of your bladder and neither is a good look in my eyes. 

Once safely located within the walls of reason, Lealmir’s front yard, I  proceeded to consume more beer than humanly possible. Now, I don’t really drink beer. Put it down to a fashionable diet disease called Candida, (no not thrush) and IBS, it seems the yeasty little bastards don’t agree with me. But that night they did and as I have learnt on this unpredictable treasure hunt, when your offered a beer, you take it.

You see the thing is, the week before I had been at a Baile Funk party in Cidade De Deus and it was a big affair.. The first of its kind in 10 years since the favela had been pacified. And naturally, as the Brazilians love their beer, a lot of it was ordered in. But not all of it had been consumed. The remaining bottles were waiting in Lealmir’s garage and as the night proceeded more and more shopping trolleys were dragged into the humble quarters and bottles cracked open. 

We drank and we drank. Meat was presented to my watering mouth and friendship was put forward at the not so for seeable table and we drank some more. A white Bob Marley appeared, then left, we drank even more. People came, people went. We drank more. The bottle collector went by on his bike, once, twice, now in vision, now not in vision. We drank some more. When I finally felt I had had my fair share and my gut looked like father Christmas on a bad day, I turned to Lealmir, and muttered ‘Get me home’. 

Within seconds I was in a cab heading to the mounds of middle classiness’ and deposited at a bus stop, where somehow the taxi driver knew the bus driver who knew the taxi driver. He had been given strict instructions  to keep an eye on the gringo and get her home in one piece. Which he did as I work up in daylight with the bus pulling into Centro and only 2 hours to get to work and spend a day under an air con unit pretending to edit. But that didn’t really matter. I was happy. Happy with my new family and happy with the fact I was still alive after drinking so much beer.  Only problem now, was the fact the toilet at work didnt flush and there was some definite porcelain prince action about to take place.