Dhani Jones in Brazil!

 If you love Dhani Jones as much as I do, gimme a YAY! \o/

I love Dhani's attitude on this show.  No pretense, just pure friendliness, determination towards the sport, and affability.

So while waiting for my ticket line to be called at Corcovado Cristo o Redentor (or White Jesus, as my friends call it), this Travel Channel host passed right by me to grab a drink.  

OMG.

I walked over to his companions who had a ton of huge black bags.  Camera equipment.  

OMG.  Is that Dhani Jones?

The dude in shades nods, very chill.

OMG.  I love him!

No one else seemed to notice, and the room was fairly crowded.  That's why Dhani walked right by me, with an inch to spare.

I ran to him.  Hey I love your show!  You know, my good friend was at your house just recently in San Diego.

(It's true.  My friend went to his house and noticed the Sports Illustrated covers and realized the house he was visiting was owned by the Mr DJ.  Private story.)

That got Dhani's attention and he told his crew that.  The mean ticket line lady wouldn't let my girlfriend & I onto the same train as Dhani, so he threw his arms up in the air at me to say, Why aren't you on this train?!

But then the heavens opened up and we did get onto his same train car!  Dhani gets the front row to himself to be filmed, while a producer asks us to be quiet during filming.  It was an unbelievable feeling to be in the background of one of my fave travel shows, while going to this monument in Rio!

His video crew sat next to me and said the man is a nice guy behind cameras too.  Of course he is, you can tell.  

He promised me a photo at the Cristo monument and came to me before shooting to quickly take a photo before work got busy.  What was kool was Dhani carries around his own nice camera to shoot personal travel photos when the video camera isn't rolling.  I think that was the best part for me.

Coffee in Brazil

  
Eu gostaria de um café gelado, por favor.

Confused, weirded-out looks in response.

Não, não tenho isso aqui.

Então posso eu ter um copo de gelo para o meu café?

I landed in Rio during a heatwave in February.  It's a tropical, equatorial country and February is summer.  Add a heatwave to that and I would drip sweat just putting on my clothes on each morning.  (I have a hard time perspiring in general, running indoors doesn't get a sweat going for me.)

Since Brazilians do not drink it and consider iced coffee to be unacceptable and flat out "weird" as I've been told by a brazuca who lived in the US for 10 years, the best this New Yorker coffee addict could do was order a glass of ice with each coffee.  Asking for a coffee results in an espresso called a cafezinho (literally, small coffee), as you see in my photo above taken one block from Ipanema beach.  That gorgeous marigold background is actually a trash bin!  You use the top of the trash bin as a high bar table, then dispose of your paper & plastic into it.


Since this particular vendor owning the marigold trash bin was too irritated to give me a cup of ice, I drank this cafezinho in 104degrees F.

Heck, an iced coffee is momentary sanctuary on a hot day!  Ask any New Yorker, it's our favorite go-to drink to cool off, an absolute necessity.  Hence, the per-block Starbucks existence surrounding Union Square.  In European-influenced Latin America, coffee in paper cups and I suppose even iced coffee are considered crass.  If I recall reading correctly an article years ago, Starbucks had difficulty penetrating Brazil due to the locals dislike of paper cups.  (But walk into Leblon shopping mall, and there is a sofa lounge of chic-looking brasileiros at the Starbucks station smack in the middle of the mall.  I considered buying a Rio Starbucks portable canister before checking the insane price typical of the brand.)

There are lots of rules to enjoy coffee properly.  No cappuccino in Italy past noon, only tourists order that.  In Korea, they love their coffee with lots of milk and sugar.  Last I checked, espresso was an inconceivable order.  In Peru, even the most humble mom-and-pop shack in Huanchaco served delicious coffee on a tray with cream and sugar in metal servers with a delicate spoon.  In Brasil, no iced coffee. 

So improvise with the totally offhand request for ice!

Kids & ice cream in Spain

It’s a scorching day in Madrid and before entering this ice cream shop for myself, here is this little girl trying to decide amongst the many choices.  Kids eating ice cream are the funniest, cutest thing.  I would like to avoid the word “cute” but sometimes it just fits. This adorably-dressed girl churning her brain to pick an ice cream flavor was so funny to me.  Notice her left foot wavering as she gazes at the selection before her.  I took this while traveling Spain with my Dad in July 2010.

Pelourinho, Salvador Brasil!

Walking into the summer yellow sunshine of Salvador, Bahia, Brasil last February felt like I was reborn.  Our squished cab ride had us emerge from a gray shady street and we walked on cobblestones uphill into a sunbathed street of pink, blue, yellow houses in Pelourinho.  It’s UNESCO- designated world heritage city.  One of the bestmeals of my life, the happiest, the tastiest, was here.  I saw Gourmet magazine’s Diary of a Foodie segment on Salvador, Brasil and as tasty as that moqueca looked on tv, eating that spicy seafood stew with farofa for real was one of the happiest meals of my life.  It was one of those moments you can’t believe you are alive and are so grateful to feel the sun and bright orange colors while marching bands during Carnaval parade a few feet away, its sounds and cheers and dances visible and audible through the open terra cotta windows.  

An hour or two later, the sun started to set and here vrooms down the cobblestone street a bearded man on motorcycle with his two well-trained dogs on board!

After years of contorting my body into haphazard and precarious positions to take the perfect travel photo and sharing those journeys on my Facebook and with my laptop and paper journal, it’s high time I transposed those times onto my blog.  I used to write frequently on older blogs but had then switched to a more private mode.  Meanwhile, my reputation among family & friends & in the office is “the traveler.”  My buddy Paul at work recently said to me that my receiving the cobalt blue rolling suitcase was the perfect birthday present because “If I had to describe you in one word, it would be ‘traveler.’” 

It would be selfish of me to accredit this wanderlust to innate personality.  My parents came from an international mindset with friends from various countries.  Music from Portuguese fadista Amália to American clarinetist Benny Goodman, compositions of Nino Rota, Korean pop folk such as Patti Kim, Latin rhumbas in a collection too thick to name streamed through our house.  Roadtrips with the family meant cassette tapes stocked with Elvis, Buddy Holly, Nat King Cole, Burl Ives, and Doris Day.  I was regularly quizzed to recognize which Classical composer was playing.  My dad recently gave me my new favorite book, 20 Chickens for a Saddle, signed by the author and now my eyes are filled with a Botswanan childhood.  So my wanderlusting, or as I like to say, wanderbusting given my risk-taking attitude while traveling, was nurtured from early on.