1.3.2001
Happy New Year!I may be tardy, but for good reason. Can't post at home these days, also can't send mail. IG the freeenet server in Brazil has decided that all users must register with a valid SIN number before they can use the HTTP server. They say it's to stop spam and increase security. I say it's to track who's looking at what. Anywho...
Mom returned to Canada on New Year's Eve - we had a fabulous visit, and I'm sending her back with a tan. Woo! We managed one last jaunt to Guarujá before she left - both of us were pretty happy about that even if it did end in rain. I dropped her off at the Airport New Year's Eve. About ten I hailed a cab and went down to Paulista and Bela Cintra which isn't too far from home. There had been a ginormous stage in construction all week and posters and tourist information advertised a big street fiesta and live music. Thought it might be fun and busy and better than sitting on my lonely butt for New Year's Eve. Wow oh wow. 1,150,000 brazilieros showed up to ring in the new year to a handful of assorted bands, huge lighted stage, people lining the streets (did I say lining? I mean flooding) for blocks and blocks, huge screens set up all along Paulista so people at the back could see the stage and performers. Apparently there were similar setups in Rio, Salvador and such...the screens cut to live feeds of the other beach/street parties through the night.
A chaos of street vendors proffering food and pop and vast quantities of alcohol - especially the bubbly kind - wove in and out of the mass throng of samba-ing people. Shouring and laughing and fireworks I was afeared would blow up in somebody's (namely mine) face. I got a feel of what Carnival must be like... fun and wild and a little scary. Now I don't feel so bad that I will be missing it by a matter of a month or so. It was very fun, but the thing I will likely never forget about the evening was counting down to midnight - in Portuguese of course - Dez! Nove! Oito! Sete! Meia! Cinco! Quatro! Três! Dois! Um! and then wild eruption, firecrackers exploding everywhere everybody hugging and kissing and dancing and jumping up and down and much shaking of said alcoholic bubbly beverages and the mass soaking of all said 1,150,000 people. Of course it was something like 24 degrees celsius out, so that was okay. Somebody even wished me "toda joia!" and kissed my hand - *swoon*.
For the whole first part of the night I stayed well back from the stage - about four blocks - as to my natural aversion of wild crowds, but I slowly made my way up about three blocks into the bad bustle of bodies. I was just hoping to take a picture close up and dance a song or two, but when I got there there was just too many, and I started understanding how it is that people get trampled to death in football stadiums and rock concerts and the like. That close-packed density of bodies drives everyone a little insane like those pods of whales that beach themselves in the narrow straights of the Arctic. Inevitably, someone or someones, usually a group of drunken young (late teen early twenties from what I saw) men would start to push and shove, and a retaliative wave would pass through the crowd. At one point I found myself not quite able to breath while wedged up against a car trying not to crush the person next to me. I got out of the densest area to find myself being groped by a drunken smiling leering man. I extricated myself only to land in the middle of the pushing crowd again. At this point, I decided I'd had a good New Year's and the Spidey Sense was tingling, so I decided to head out. I walked home in a warm drizzle, leaving the party around 1:30.
This, as it turns out, was a Very Good Thing® as about twenty minutes later, a riot broke out in the place that I was standing. Bottles and cans and such were hurled prompting the action of 500 Military Police accompanied by 150 or so Rent-a-cops. Tear gas was launched and over 100 people were injured. One set of local news reported it as inter-gang warfare, another as an anti-police demonstration, another as a protest to the new mayor just coming in. I don't know about all that - all I know is that things were busy and pushy, but mostly friendly before I left. Whew, I say. Whew. Scary stuff. You can read the whole story at CNN.com.
And I thought New Year's was going to be *boring*. Heh.
posted by The Mo of Space and Death 10:21 (her time) @
Mo is in:
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Weather in:
São Paulo
Campinas
Rio de Janiero
Macaé
Manaus
Guarujá
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