My last week included a zouk congress, a trip to the fabled Curitiba, a meeting with one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2010 and tearful farewells with new friends. Where to start?
I won’t bore you with dance but I would like to say that being in a room full extraordinary dancers is both an inspiration (in the sense of giving me something to aspire to) and frightfully intimidating. The very pleasant and surprising difference about dancers here is that there is significantly less ego (even amongst the professionals) than I have witnessed in Australia. There is also significantly more variety in body shapes here and it has been a pleasant surprise to discover that not all fabulous dancers have lithe, chiseled bodies. There is hope for us mere mortals.
Now on to Curitiba. It is a city I have dreamed of for years. I first discovered its existence when I was doing some research about sustainable cities. I stumbled upon it quite by accident and soon discovered it was widely considered to be an urban planners version of Mecca. The state of Oregon, where Adelaide has been sourcing so many of its ideas from for the last few years, took most of its ideas from the city of Curitiba. Only, in my opinion, Oregon’s ideas haven’t worked as well because one fundamental thing is missing that made Curitiba’s success possible - fearless leadership.
Curitiba was lucky enough to have such leadership in the form of Dr Jaime Lerner - an architect by trade but a visionary thinker and leader by profession. Dr Lerner is an ex politician (having been both Mayor of the City and Governor of the State) so he knows the practical realities of leadership and implementing a vision. The extraordinary thing is how many successes he has had and how many of his ideas are a lasting legacy for the city. I am so enthralled by this man that I could go on for hours about his achievements and his ideas. But you can research most of that yourself so I won’t....for now. I do, however, reserve the right to revisit the topic. What it did make me think about most was Adelaide as a city. Perhaps because I know it better than any other place and perhaps because it is still my home, no matter how wide I roam, I began to compare Curitiba and Adelaide and indeed Rio and the other places I have visited.
I have yet to conclude my thinking on the matter but my interim thought is that while Adelaide is a nice city, that is exactly part of the problem. Somewhere along the way, we have accepted nice as being the benchmark we wish to aspire to. What happened to striving for great? Curitiba’s tourist line has 24 points of interest on it and doesn’t actually cover the whole city. How many points of interest could we include on a tour of metro Adelaide if we were to have a tourist line? Having mentioned it, why don’t we have a tourism line? Curitiba is indeed a lovely city with many things to recommend it, but many of those things are actually man-made and could just as easily exist in Adelaide if we had the vision to create them.
And therein lies the rub. Vision. For years now we have been reducing vision statements to pithy one-liners. How is that supposed to mean anything to anyone? Especially given most of our vision statements completely lack adjectives. There are two things Dr Lerner says are fundamental to positive change - clear vision and action. On reflection, these are the two things most missing from the South Australian Government and the City of Adelaide. But I digress.
Back in Rio, I spent my last 4 days enjoying all the best that this extraordinary city has to offer. I danced, walked around the beaches, partied with friends and even took pleasure in every steep step in Santa Teresa. I also compiled a list of further quirks and oddities which I didn’t mention last time and bring them to you now for your amusement.
For the first time ever, I saw truck racing. The question must be asked, why would anyone want to race trucks? They are slow and ponderous and do not corner like they’re on rails.
The world’s worst busker performed at Cafe Cito. He only spoke Spanish so I’m not sure exactly what he was saying but I think he was suggesting that the instrument he had was something traditional from Bolivia. It looked like a children’s toy guitar from a $2 shop and had roughly the same sound quality (which was marginally better than the sound quality of his voice). I gave him a tenner to stop. Speaking of strange instruments, the one used to put music to Capoeira is an interesting one. It looks like a couple of coconuts at the base with a long vertical stick protruding from them. The stick bows at the top and is connected back to the coconuts by a string, which is the bit that is played. You can be sure that the sound it emits is as strange as the instrument.
I mentioned the bodies beautiful in an earlier posting but did I also mention the street gyms? I think these are an excellent invention both for those who want to use them and those who like to admire those using them. The ‘gyms’ are actually just steel frames/bars/moving wheels etc which anyone can come along and use. An excellent way to encourage your citizens to move more and, thankfully, build muscle. Also improves the urban scenery for those of us who like spectator sports.
Road travel around Santa Teresa is fraught with peril. The streets are steep, they are cobble-stoned and become very slippery when wet. The corners were also designed for...well, I’m not sure. It’s hard to imagine a horse and carriage getting around those hairpins. Most corners are blind, so the way the locals manage that is by beeping to signal their presence. One wonders if they might eliminate the need for all that beeping if they just stuck to their lanes in the first place, but that’s another story... Perhaps it can be told along with the story of why obeying traffic light signals becomes optional after midnight.
While we are talking roads, moto-taxies deserve a mention. These are the motorbikes that congregate every so often and serve as taxis. There were a few pockets of them around the bottom of Santa Teresa which was handy on days when I was carrying groceries from the market or after hours of dancing. The fact that I didn’t die on them was a miracle (refer earlier description of Santa Teresa streets and add to that being on the back of a motorbike, juggling groceries in my hands, holding on with my thighs and no, there is no helmet involved). On the bright side, at least the moto-taxies around Santa Teresa weren’t doubling as “watchers” for the drug lords like they were in the favelas.
Perhaps because of the roads, Brazil is still a very religious country. Despite the growing proliferation of “new” religions like Assemblies of God, the deep thread of catholicism still runs through the City. And not just because Jesus stands constantly keeping watch (it really is hard to be super-sinful when you look up and see him staring at you - omnipresence takes on a whole new perspective). Each subway station has a shrine to Mary somewhere in it. It was like a version of a “where’s Wally?” game to find it.
And so it is with tears that I farewell Rio. And now the only thing left to do is plot a return......
No comments:
Post a Comment