Porto Alegre, Brazil

BRASILIA is a "planned city" - with a vengeance. That means all hotels are bunched together, all government offices, all commercial office buildings, all shopping areas. The city has a wonderful climate and, at 1,100 feet about sea level, a perpetual cooling breeze. There is a certain, tidy beauty to Brasilia, but the "planned" aspects also make the environment sterile and hostile to walkers. You need a car to get from one sector to another. There is no poverty in Brasilia. It is not allowed. The poor live outside the city in settlements they have appropriated for themselves.

 

 

They call these "invasions." One day you have empty land and then people come from the countryside and put up shacks and begin to build houses and before you know it, a sub-city has sprouted. Eventually, the government sanctions these and provides some facilities - power and sometimes water. This is where the poor people live around Brasilia. Some of these centers grow to populations in the hundreds of thousands.

 

 

The stained glass window behind the altar in the Cathedral Church of the Resurrection in Brasilia has a neat circular bullet hole in it. The bullet passed through the glass and ricocheted twice off a wall, tearing a painting in two neat places. It was fired from a police helicopter, doing battle with a gang of bank robbers. Fortunately, says Almir dos Santos, Bishop of Brasilia, with a smile, there was no one in the church at the time.

 

 

Brazil is heaven for coffee drinkers and hell for vegetarians. The coffee is strong and usually served black and sweet. It is exquisite. I knew I was back in Canada when, at 4:30 a.m., an airline stewardess woke me with a cup of the pale imitation that passes for coffee in Canada.

 

 

The churrascaria is a national institution in Brazil. Picture a restaurant with a token salad buffet, which most people ignore. What you do is sit at a table and wait for a contingent of waiters to come by your table, each carrying a colossal spit of barbecued meats - beef, lamb, pork, sausages, chicken, organs - every part of every animal is deemed consumable. This goes on forever as long as you can bear it, each army of meat-toting waiters replaced by another. One such restaurant we visited boasted 48 cuts of meat.

 

 

Brasilia may be the only city in the southern hemisphere where a pedestrian using a crosswalk stands a really decent chance of making it to the other side without having to do a quarterback shuffle. The cars will stop for you. Even if they don't have to!

 

 

Brazil must have the highest proportion of beautiful people of any country in the world. It's not just the beautiful features and bodies that are noticeable, but everyone, from hotel staff to strangers on the street, has a lively twinkle in their eyes, a friendliness and joie de vivre that melts the heart. A photographer can go crazy here. It's also a very tactile society. Strangers greeting each other for the first time hug and kiss. I'm told married people get two kisses, single people three. I'm not quite sure how the differentiation is made. But they know!

 

 

Porto Alegre is an utterly charming city. With a population comparable to metro Toronto, it is much crazier than super-planned Brasilia, but not nearly as crazy as Rio de Janeiro nor as monstrous and intimidating as Sao Paulo. Downtown streets are closed to traffic and crowded with pedestrians. One feels safe walking there, lost in a swell of smiling people. The streets are clean, the store clerks patient and not too pushy. Everyone seems to have the time to help a stranger. And yet, sadly, I was warned against strolling downtown after dark with an expensive camera.

 

 

From the air, at night, Sao Paulo makes Toronto seem like a country village. For a Canadian, it is almost impossible to imagine a city with almost as many people in it as live in all of Canada. The population of the metropolitan area is more than 26 million.The plane accelerates and rises and the city goes on and on and on.

 

 

In so much of the world, fluency in French and English will get you by. Not in Brazil where most people speak Portuguese and nothing else. I found a restaurant in downtown Brasilia where I could get an early morning coffee. There were about 30 different kinds of coffee on the menu and ordering a specific brew was excruciating for my patient waitress and me. But every day afterwards she remembered me and brought me the same again with a tolerant, knowing smile. She seemed a wonderful person.

 

 

One evening, at a dinner party on an estate in the countryside, I found myself in a group of about 30 people, the only one linguistically unable to communicate with anyone else. I sat alone for hours trying to remain interested in I don't know what, until a young woman took me by the arm and showed me all around the estate, through groves of tropical fruit, mangos, bananas, oranges, lemon, around two swimming pools - the walk culminating on a hillside with a breathtaking view of the southern hemisphere's stars, the glow of Brasilia faintly visible in the distance. The tour was wholly in Portuguese and I understood not a word of what the woman said. But hospitality, grace and friendliness are also universal languages.