When we arrived, Tim and Angelina had just moved to a neighborhood called Flamengo. It's a lively spot with lots of great restaurants, easy metro and beach access, and a nice bike path. Previously, they had been living in an artsy, hillside neighborhood called Santa Teresa. Sunday was an annual Open Studios in Santa Teresa, and Tim and Angelina had some more moving to do, so we headed up into the hills. Tim's Dixieland band was supposed to play in the street, but the performance got rained out. While we were sad not to get to see them, one day of rain in nine wasn't bad.
After helping to finish things up at the old apartment, Eric and I walked around in the rain seeing the Open Studios. We saw lots of cute works of art.
You'll see that the streets have streetcar tracks. This is a sad story. There used to be a streetcar, called the Bonde, that ran up the hill to Santa Teresa from the downtown area, Centro. It also ran over the narrow top of the giant Rio aqueduct, the Arcos da Lapa. Last year, after an accident with multiple fatalities, the Bonde was shut down. This would be something like shutting down the cable car in San Francisco. The closure of the Bonde has devastated Santa Teresa, and we saw memorials to the streetcar everywhere.
At the most recent Carnaval celebration, Angelina designed and built a parade float for Orquestra Voadora in the shape of a Bonde car. You can see a picture of her float in this article (in Portuguese). The article describes Orquestra Voadora attracting an audience of 50,000 people at an annual free outdoor show.
When Eric and I visited Rio in 2002, we took a city tour that brought us to a park in Santa Teresa called the Parque das Ruinas, or Park of Ruins. In the earlier part of the 20th century, a woman named Laurinda Santos Lobo had lived in an elaborate brick house on the hill, and had hosted a salon for artists and intellectuals until she died in 1946. [Source: Lonely Planet] The building was ruined, but parts of it still stand, and it's been turned into a park with great views of the city. It has some outdoor stages where performances are sometimes held, and you can climb the stairs all the way up several stories to the top and enjoy the view. We had loved it in 2002 and wanted to have a quick look again.
We went back to Flamengo for a buffet dinner. Then, at last, it was time to say goodbye to Nina and for Tim and Angelina to take us to the airport. We had had such a fantastic time, it was hard to leave. We thanked them profusely for their amazing hospitality, even in the middle of moving. Although there are many, many places we want to visit, we look forward to the next time we can go to Brazil!