This has been a rather intense past 2 months, where our
usual relaxed, beachy Rio lifestyle was
pleasantly shaken up by a series of parties, receptions, dinners, weekends away
and friends visiting. I have also been on an inexplicable kick to cook Asian
food, which has understandably deeply excited the Diplomat. I also managed to
fly back to the Motherland for a weekend to furnish our newly-acquired house
and rent it out. In the midst of all that, the Diplomat played more golf than a
retired military colonel and Son began to ask all sorts of grown-up questions
about babies and their origin.
I do not even remember when it all started. In the beginning
of April, deciding to delight the Diplomat with a befitting present for his
birthday, I took him out of town to a bed and breakfast in the former mountain
retreat for the long-extinct Brazilian royal family nearby Rio, in pretty Petropolis . Now, you
should know that Petropolis
boasts a gorgeous golf course and for weeks on end before that I had to endure
hints, random mentions, loud thinking and not so-subtle suggestions that a
weekend in the immediate vicinity of that golf course would be a rather
acceptable gift for the Diplomat’s birthday. I rallied a bunch of our good
friends and we spent a beautiful weekend there, during which the Diplomat and
his golf buddy J spent 75% of their time at said golf course. To be fair, the
75% included them being badly lost on the way to and back from the golf course
until it became clear that there were not one, but TWO courses around. Such are
the perils of that game.
The weekend was followed by a series of parties and late
nights out dancing in downtown Rio as some of our closest friends and
colleagues here were getting ready to leave Rio
while others came to visit us. We also attended a swanky party honoring a
famous journalist in a gorgeous mansion belonging to one of the oldest families
in Brazil ,
where the champagne was pouring freely while all kinds of intellectuals were
deciding the fate of the country in theory.
I do not know if you have heard, but Rio is about to host
the summer Olympics and much of our professional lives have been deeply steeped
into preparations for the hordes of Americans coming to Rio
to support the teams and to get in trouble in general. To that effect, we have
been attending receptions and events with various representatives of the local
security authorities and Olympics-related folks (it’s staggering how many
people are involved in planning these Games), making sure we are all set for
the eager Olympics tourists. We talk with diplomats from the other foreign
missions to compare plans and exchange brilliant ideas. We take Brazilian
officials to the U.S.
to have them observe how we prepare for big sporting events like the Boston
Marathon or even Superbowl. We plan for emergencies, prepare contingency plans,
write secondary contingency plans and overthink outreach to our fellow
compatriots. We listen to grim predictions about the state of the
infrastructure and impending Zika apocalypse on CNN. And so I think you will
understand me when I tell you that, as far as I am concerned, these Games
cannot come any faster. Or could move to Newfoundland
for all I care.
While the Diplomat and I have been thusly busy, suddenly,
Son began to ask many a profound questions on the subject of girls and babies.
I would like to remind the kind reading audience that the child is at the
ginger and impressionable age of 7.5 years. He is a lanky, tireless kid
obsessed with all gross things little boys are obsessed with. He laughs to
tears when he farts in front of my disapproving gaze and can make paper planes
till he is lost under the pile. In other words – Son is a little kid. I think. That
is why I get startled when in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon, I am suddenly
being asked pointed questions about how to make girls like you. Wait, what?? Didn’t
you just spend an entire afternoon trying to eat ants? What girls?
We have also ventured into the land of babymaking. While we
still have not had the conversation with the technical details, at this point
Son is fairly clear that both mommy and daddy are somehow part of the exercise.
Rest assured, it was all presented very nice and romantic to him, with long
discussions about love and inner beauty. Which is why I was a tad taken aback
when last week Son came to me pensively, looked me dead in the eye, and asked
me, “So, how do you NOT make a baby when you love someone?”
Last weekend I finally managed to motivate myself and the
family to go climb the iconic Two Brothers (Dois Irmãos) mountain adjacent to
where we live. Dois Irmãos are those two peaks that you typically see behind
the beach with a serious sunset lighting every time someone talks about Rio on TV. Told that the peaks are not really challenging
to climb (in fact, an elderly couple’s blog said that they had done the hike
many times in flip-flops under an hour!), I rushed the excited Son and
underwhelmed Diplomat out of the house on a pleasantly overcast Saturday
morning. After a 7 min taxi ride we got dropped off into the lower parts of
Rio’s safest favela Vidigal, from where we had to take some form of transport
up the steep streets of the favela to the beginning of the hiking trail. One
could choose a motorbike taxi or to ride in an old, rickety minivan. In a fit
of misguided adventurism, I decided to get on a bike and wait for Son and
Diplomat who took the van. I have never been on a motorbike before in my life.
Ever. So perhaps my first ride should not have been through the narrow, broken,
crawling with cars and people, steep and winding streets of a favela. One way
or the other, we made it up and in a few moments, Son and the Diplomat showed
up as well and off we went on our hike. I think you have gathered by now, if
you are a regular reader, that we are not hikers. This was only our second ever
hike in our lives after Patagonia and I have
to tell you – it was challenging. At one point, as we were crawling
precariously up a large rock, I wanted to meet that old lady who seems to climb
it for breakfast in her peignoir and fluffy house mules while drinking coffee
from a porcelain cup and give her a piece of my own mind. We made it in about
an hour after all, and the views from above were fabulous. What was even more
striking was the amount of Brazilians taking selfies in various state of
undress, perched perilously on the slippery rocks. That is a lot of dedication
for a duck-face, hair-side-swipe picture.
We are preparing to send Son over to Grandma’s in Bulgaria for the summer, from where he will go
directly to the U.S.
