Athena - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - Going to Church & Getting Lost in the Hood

The inside of the Rio Cathedral

Before the festivities of of New Years Eve started, we ventured out into the city to see a few famous cites, the Rio Cathedral and the Escadaria Selarón, stairs.  We first headed to the Escadaria Selarón, but got lost and ended up going to the Cathedral first instead. The Cathedral is well known, but has a very unusual shape - it's like a big upside down cone. Inside, it's almost like a theater in the round, with pews in a 300 degree shape. I'd never seen a such a set up in a church. The coolest thing about the church was the stain glass windows. The cone shaped building actually has four sides that come together at the top in a point. Each side has a large set of stain glass windows. Though the rest of the building is very simple, the stain glass adds a little bit of sophistication. And it did feel good to go to church on NYE. Even though we were tourist and not actually attending a traditional watch night service, it felt good to have a little Jesus on NYE.



Tiffany, Lula and Megan inside the Cathedral

After the Cathedral we took a cab to the Escadaria Selarón, famous steps that were decorated by a Brazilian artist. Jorge Selarón, a Chilean artist living in Brazil, began decorating the steps outside of his house with tiles and paintings. He continued on with this work despite the protest of his neighbors. Seriously though, can you imagine what your reaction would be if your neighbor started painting & tiling the steps in your neighborhood?  I think it's cool that he kept working in the face of criticism. The finished product is very original and cool. He turned a normal staircase that crossed several blocks from an everyday walk way to a Rio icon.


All 4 Traveling Tarheels on the
side of the Escadaria Selaron
 (l to r: Tiffany, Me, Lula, Megan)

Lula and I at the Escadaria Selaron

The stairs are very bright and colorful. The walls on the sides of stairs were predominately red. Houses sit on each side of the staircase. Each stair has a collection of tiles with different designs. Some were made by the artist, some were donated by other people. The walls also had tiles and one of my travelmates, Lula, who is from Eritrea, found a tile of her country's flag. She very proudly took a picture with the tile. We also saw tiles of various versions of a pregnant woman (evidently the artists had relationship issues once with a pregnant woman), Tom from Tom & Jerry, random designs and other famous sites in Brazil. There were a good number of people there; taking pictures without someone else in the background became a challenge. I liked walking up the stairs and looking at the different tiles. We met some people from Raleigh, NC and a couple from California who asked us to take a picture of them doing a dance they do on vacation they take.


The stairs are very bright and colorful. The walls on the sides of stairs were predominately red. Houses sit on each side of the staircase. Each stair has a collection of tiles with different designs. Some were made by the artist, some were donated by other people. The walls also had tiles and one of my travelmates, Lula, who is from Eritrea, found a tile of her country's flag. She very proudly took a picture with the tile. We also saw tiles of various versions of a pregnant woman (evidently the artists had relationship issues once with a pregnant woman), Tom from Tom & Jerry, random designs and other famous sites in Brazil. There were a good number of people there; taking pictures without someone else in the background became a challenge. I liked walking up the stairs and looking at the different tiles. We met some people from Raleigh, NC and a couple from California who asked us to take a picture of them doing a dance they do on vacation they take.





Of course we had some drama getting to the Escadaria Selarón. Google maps showed the wrong place on the map so we started off heading to the wrong location. And of course this wrong location happened to be in the 'hood. We took the Metro to what we thought was the right area and started walking around. The more we walked the worse and worse the neighborhood got. I don't thing any of us felt very scared, but we were definitely aware that we weren't in the best place. The locals gave us curious looks as if to say "What are these girls doing here?". After struggling for a while we asked some cops for directions. We literally flagged down their car and proceeded to ask for directions in our very poor Portuguese. Somehow with hand signals and a photo of the actual Escadaria Selarón we got a general idea of where to go. Since the Cathedral was on the way we decided to stop there first and then took a 5 minute cab ride to the  Escadaria Selarón. The cab driver gave us a funny look when we told him where we wanted to go. From his expression it was obvious that we were very close to our destination any local would probably walk there. But we weren't exactly sure and didn't want a repeat of our earlier adventure.

We finished this part of the day with a late lunch at a nearby traditional Brazilian restaurant. Upon sitting down at our table we immediately fell into wifi and food comas. It was a good way to finish our tourists activities before we started our NYE celebrations.