Tag: Brazil

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 14: Rio Friday September 8, 2023

After two nights of sleeping okay – one of which I actually did mostly sleep – I did not sleep much at all. I spent a rather long time trying to structure a bed and half’s worth of pillows to prevent myself from coughing and I have no idea how late I was up doing …

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 13: Rio Thursday September 7, 2023

I slept! I was only up 3-4 times, I think. Things seemed to be looking up with the respiratory problem but the traveler’s diarrhea ramped up so it was a trade off. I took too many Imodium and it didn’t do enough.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 12: Rio Wednesday September 6, 2023

I slept better than I had in a couple nights, but it’s relative. I was still up way too many times. When I woke up I thought it was just a sore throat now but that soon changed to intense coughing.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 10: Interregnum Monday September 4, 2023

Today I turned 42. I didn’t sleep, as I had started coughing an awful lot and I had what I thought was a fever, with accompanying fever dreams and general confusion. Based on the way I had felt the night before, I hadn’t booked a day trip to an island or beach for today, as …

2023, Personal

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 9: Salvador Sunday September 3, 2023

We had another big breakfast buffet this morning, with lots of choice, and the ability to sit outside like at the pousadas in Olinda and Santo Amaro, but with arguably the worst tea options since Santo Amaro.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 4: Maranhão, Tuesday August 29, 2023

We landed in São Luís after midnight to find the airport just full of people. Apparently the internal flights in Brazil don’t stop. There were flights at 2 and 4 AM, for example. Glad we didn’t have to take any of those.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 3: Olinda/Recife Monday August 28, 2023

We woke up and sat down to a slightly different breakfast than the day before. Like most hotels outside of North America, Brazilian guesthouses have great breakfasts, as do their hotels.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 2: Olinda/Recife – Sunday August 27 2023

We slept pretty well despite how warm it was. Breakfast was a fairly elaborate buffet for a guesthouse. The buffet had lots of fresh fruit (standard in Brazil) with a bunch of interesting baked goods and savoury stuff. We tried most of it over the days we were there.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 1: Saturday August 26, 2023

I was a little more anxious for this trip than I had been in our recent “post-pandemic” travel. We had initially planned to go to Africa, which is the story of our travel lives. Why did we decide on Brazil, instead? We couldn’t figure out which country in Africa to go to, Brazil seemed a …

2002, Movies

Ônibus 174 (2002, José Padilha, Felipe Lacerda)

Bus 174 is a low-budget, overlong documentary about a bizarre hostage-taking incident in Brazil that was watched by the country on the news. The story itself is compelling in many ways but the actual film about the incident is kind of a mess. We might call it “completist” as it’s a 2.5 hour movie about …

2016, Movies

In the Shadow of the Hill (2016, Dan Jackson)

This is a thorough, engrossing and, for its subject matter, pretty to look at film about a favela in Rio and the problems that have occurred since the police “pacified” it in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup of Soccer. There is a lot here of interest and the film is quite well …