Map, what map?

The faux carioca has returned to the too-tight embrace of Blow-me-ton where she languishes under the scourge of a nasty Brazilian cold and grows impatient with her wounded ankle. The good news is that an x-ray revealed no bones were broken or cracked during her assault on the other guy’s head. The bad news is that the ankle’s most important ligaments were sprained during the impact and it will be another 2-5 months before a full recovery. Strengthening the muscles in the foot is a good thing until it starts to hurt. When the hurting begins, so too shall the final installments of Waxing Brazilian.

So what does a gal have to do to get around Rio de Janeiro if she wants to add a little toxicity to the environment--and we’re not talking about a post beans and beer stroll by the beach. Well, she might drive a car or take a taxi but there is also the bus, the various illegal vans, or the Metro.

What is interesting about the bus and the vans is the lack of posted schedules or maps. Anywhere. While this makes sense for the contravans, it defies logic for the bus system. Buses are numbered and have destinations posted in the windows, e.g. Praça General Osorio via Barato Ribeiro. If the picky traveler wants to know whether a bus is heading near her destination, she must ask. She asks other riders, the bus driver, the money-taker that sits by the bus’ turnstile, but ask she must. Sometimes she receives correct, incomplete, over-detailed, or just plain wrong information. Yet Brazilian culture is very much shaped by oral tradition and there is a logic in the system of navigating buses by talking to other people. One Brazilian perspective might consider the individual mapping out her travel plans in solitude as lonely and weirdly antisocial. There is no reason to be so self-sufficient when there are other people on the streets who know how to get to point B from point A. The independent American spirit resists this reliance upon others, but is eventually served its humble pie (the only kind in Brazil) when in Rio--dropped incidentally, on the filthy bakery floor.

For a few centavos more, the city trekker can ride the clean and bourgeois Metro. Why bourgeois? Because the Metro includes so many useless ‘perks’. The thrifty carioca will regard the Metro as a needlessly expensive alternative to the vans and buses. Vans and buses range in price from R$2-2.40. The Metro, on the other hand, is R$2.60. For what does one pay up to an extra 60 centavos? Sure, there’s a map of the system in the subway cars (not very useful for someone trying to decide which train to board while wavering on the platform—better to ask someone). What’s more, the Metro plus its connecting buses are all air-conditioned. Air-conditioning, in case the gentle readers did not already know this, is a sign of civility. Over air-conditioning is the height of luxury that no self-respecting Third World elitist would dare complain about. But perhaps the greatest useless perk of using the Metro that serves to remind its riders of their bourgeois status is the music. Each air-conditioned bus and Metro station plays uninterrupted classical and jazz music. The rubes could never appreciate such refinement. Appropriately enough, crime is very low on the Metro. No one jumps the turnstiles or moves between subway cars. There is no one trying to sell socks or candy on the Metro. The homeless and the mentally ill steer clear. Truly the Rio Metro is a bourgeois paradise that is begging to be discovered by a savvy hustler.