Got this buzzing in my ears, ref...

Take notice, Ashley Young! Not one, not two, but twenty-two players and a referee dived for the turf in this weekend’s Bahia Championship game in Salvador between Fluminense de Feira & Juazeirense. No penalties were awarded, and the dives might have lacked our Ashley’s artistic interpretation, but then when you’re suddenly confronted by a massive swarm of angry bees, instinct takes over and there’s no time for the fancy stuff…

Meanwhile, fans behind the goal had to take shelter behind a huge Fluminense bandeira as the merciless winged attackers buzzed them.

The footage below is especially odd if you watch it without sound, but look out for the Juazeirense No. 10: the only man in the stadium not cowering before the new insect overlords. ¡que colhões! I haven’t been able to find out his name, but we could have done with that kind of attitude at Elland Road this season…

There Jess goes!

This coming Tuesday, the 17^th of April, I will be taking my first trip to Brazil. Living in the north of England I can’t say I’m well-prepared in terms of wardrobe, but I’ll be doing my best this weekend to round up some last minute summer clothing.

While ultimately I’m sure I’ll have everything I need for this trip in my suitcase by the time I go, I must admit that mentally it’s still quite a lot to get my head around. Having done a degree in Portuguese at the University of Leeds, I’m meant to be fluent in the language. And to a certain extent I am – in Portugal. I’m unsure of whether my American/British English-influenced European Portuguese accent will be understood by Brazilians, and whether I’ll be able to understand them as well.

Having studied Portuguese at degree level, a lot of my course focused on Brazil – geography, literature, history, culture, and current events. I expect I probably have a lot more preconceived notions than most first time visitors to the country, and I am fascinated to see if I’ve got anything right at all. I have many Brazilian friends, but as much as they’ve told me over the years from first-hand experience of their native country, I genuinely expect to be surprised.

While I’ve travelled what I think is a substantial amount, I must admit that Brazil is kind of a big deal to me. I’ve wanted to go to South America for as long as I’ve known it existed, and although there are many other South American countries I’m desperate to see, I’m glad I’m starting with Brazil.

I‘m not even sure exactly what it is I want to do there; my usual travel style is to sort of settle in one place and get a feel for what it would be like to live there. I’m sure I’ll get to a lot of the tourist activities, but ultimately I want to relax and chat with people. I’m generally a very social creature so meeting people is always high on my list of priorities while I’m abroad. If I’m lucky I’ll have time to see the friends I already have as well…

Ultimately I am excited, nervous, excited again, ultra-organised and somehow still utterly unprepared for the next couple of weeks. Regardless of how I’m feeling, or if my suitcase is still filled with jumpers and boots, I will be on the plane when it leaves Leeds Bradford Airport, and I will be spending the next two and a half weeks in Brazil. I guess by then I’ll be as ready as I’ll ever be! I can’t wait to read this entry again when I get back to the UK because I’m sure I’ll find it pretty entertaining. Keep an eye on this space in early May for a post-Brazilian adventure entry!

This costume, appropriately called the Space Pirate, can be purchased ready to wear for the price of R$800 (£800 GBP/$465 USD).

Dressing up like this street reveller will set you back R$1000 (£370 GBP/$585 USD). To put that into perspective, in Brazil that’s about the average cost of school clothes.

Hummingbird , the 2011 winner of the Samba Schools of Rio de Janeiro parade, have chosen to pay homage this year to the city of Sao Luis in Maranhão. This costume is inspired by the “Feast of the Divine”, the famous celebration held in the capital of Maranhão in the month of July. This costs R$1,100 (£410 GBP/$490 USD) although with home delivery included it’s almost a bargain!

This eye-catching ensemble is fit for a royalty, or at the very least a president – the 2012 theme of this Sao Paulo samba school is “Lula- Portrait of a Nation”. The costume refers to former president Lula’s Pernambucano origins, and is the most of expensive of all at R$2990 (£1110 GBP/$1740 USD).

Thanks for the costume photos and information to:

http://epocanegocios.globo.com/Revista/Common/0,,GF88535-16290,00-AS+FANTASIAS+MAIS+CARAS+DO+CARNAVAL.html#fotogaleria=1

Oy Romario – Put it away!

It’s getting close now… Only two weeks to go until the Rio Carnival gets into full swing, and preparations are well underway. More or less. This is Brazil, after all. This year the big news is all away from the main Sambadrome parades, with the focus on preparations for the street parties, or blocos, which are really the main carnival experience for most Rio residents.

Close on a million people join in over 150 blocos in the fortnight leading up to the Sambadrome spectacular on the 19th, and obviously that many people drinking that much beer cause one obvious problem… Anyone who has wandered around Rio in the days after carnival will testify to the almighty whiff of ammonia coming from every side street and making you pray for rain!

Of course, many Rio residents just leave town for carnival but just as many don’t, and this year, as in Salvador in previous years, there has been an outcry about 2011′s failure to provide enough toilets. So this year 8,000 chemical loos will be installed in an effort to cater for the massed revellers.

Will it be enough? Well, if you don’t fancy the queues and try to sneak away to attend to nature’s call, you’d better be watching out for an eye in the sky… A few hundred metres above the carnival mayhem, a miniature blimp fitted with a high-res camera will be hovering. It’s mainly to keep an eye on possible large-scale disturbances but Rio officials have made it clear that what you might call smaller-scale problems will also be targetted…

Howling mad?

It’s not often we do a little bit of maths on the Buzz from Brazil, but my post today is going to take you, dear reader, into the murky world of lies, damn lies and statistics. It all started with me reading a feature on how Brazilians owned more of the moon than any other South American country. “More of what?” I hear you say. Yep, that would be the moon.

I don’t know whether or not you’ve come across this before, but the UN treaty covering ownership of space specifically refers to ‘countries’ not being able to lay claim to space or the objects therein. Proving that where there’s moon-muck, there’s brass, a guy called Dennis Hope has laid claim to the entire moon and has begun flogging bits of it to anyone who’ll pay $19.99 plus $1.51 “lunar tax”. (I have to say that last bit properly cracks me up). Anyway, the guys over at HSN have got hold of a breakdown by country and apparently Brazilians have bought more land on the moon than anyone else in South America.

“Typical Crazy Brazilians,” you might say, and on another day I might agree with you. After all, if you’re a Latin Tiger and a new world power, why not grab a bit of (lunar) cheese while you can, right? However… this is where the maths comes in. There are a lot more people in Brazil than in any other South American country – almost 5 times as many as, say Argentina – and yet Brazilians only own twice as many lunar acres as, again, Argentina. Surely we need to go per-capita on this before we use it as evidence of Brazilians being howling mad?

And when you do, the results are quite interesting… Far from being rampant buyers of lunar real estate, Brazilians (1 in 50,000) actually own less of the moon per capita than Argentinians (1 in 20,000), less than Peruvians (1 in 25,000) and much, much less than the self-styled “English of South America”, those dastardly Chileans – a staggering 1 in 15,000 of whom own a slice of our celestial companion.  So who’s crazy now? Although I’d love to see what Neymar could manage in zero-G…

Of course, all this could be due to a simple translation error, with Brazilians keen to cash in on the growing trend for honeymoons in Brazil?

Merry Xmas all

Not surprisingly, many Brazilians have enjoyed the boot being on the other foot, and some of the reaction has been dripping with schadenfreude, not to say outright triumphalism. Politicians are being reasonably circumspect: President Rouseff has expressed some frustration with her German counterpart, Angela Merkel, and Finance Minister Mantegna has refused to work directly with the EU or ECB, instead preferring that Brazil works through the IMF, presumably for the wider influence they feel that will offer. On the streets, however, there is no denying that the average Brazilian has seen the crisis in Europe and the US unfold with a slight sense of glee that the countries they have always seen as patronising them are now coming to them with a begging bowl.

The new-found confidence can be seen in a recent ad for Johnnie Walker in which Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio “wakes up” revealing that it, and by extension Brazil, was a sleeping giant all along. This to a backdrop of high-rise offices, golden beaches and clear blue seas.

However, it’s only fair to question whether this vision of Brazil is maybe just a little too rosy. While I love Brazil, it’s fair to say that Brazilians aren’t the most gracious winners in the world (just ask any Argentinian!) and so just because people are enjoying the new-found respect and position in the world doesn’t mean that Brazilians aren’t experiencing their share of problems…

Firstly, many economists in Brazil and elsewhere are becoming critical of the country’s dependence on exports to China, and in particular on the fact that commodities such as soya, minerals and oil form such a large part of the economy. In fact, some people are even describing Brazil as a “derivative” of China, referring to the traded contracts whose value entirely depends on the value of another asset. This is overly harsh, but even the Brazilian Centre for the Study of Foreign Trade (Funcex) has pointed out that without the so-called “China effect”, Brazil’s current $3-billion trade surplus would turn into a deficit.

What lies behind these figures, and behind the commodities boom is the fact that a large part of Brazilian exports consists of relatively low-tech, low-skilled products. While there are lots of successful, high-tech Brazilian firms like Embraer, these companies (and jobs) are largely concentrated in the south-east of the country. Once you move outside of this area, you find what in many ways is the Real Brazil: much lower per-capita income, much fewer skilled jobs, a much more informal economy with more work taking place outside the tax system, lower education levels, and all the other symbols we associate with a developing country. While you can’t quite talk about “two Brazils”, this split is real and has been recognised by successive governments. To be fair, these successive governments have done their best to try and change things – part of Dilma Rousseff’s problem with Angela Merkel was that the German Chancellor didn’t want to learn from Brazil’s experience of reducing social inequality – but the challenges are a long way from being overcome.

Many people going on holiday to Brazil are surprised at how high prices in places like Rio and Sao Paulo are, whether it’s a hotel room or a cup of coffee, but the chic bars and restaurants of Zona Sul are only part of the story. The giant might be stirring, but it’s not about to swim to Frankfurt just yet…

Fala Portugues? Mais ou menos…

For Brits who’ve spent time in Portugal and picked up European Portuguese, arriving in Brazil and hearing the Brazilian variety of the language can be a difficult adjustment. Whilst British and American English have their differences, these lie largely in accent and vocabulary as opposed to grammar- this unfortunately is not the case with European and Brazilian Portuguese. For those accustomed to saying “nos” in Portugal, hearing “a gente” as the translation for “we”can be confusing, as in Portugal “a gente”generally refers simply to people.

The differences don’t end there, however. Although there are countless regional accents throughout Portugal, Brazil is many times the size of Portugal, and consequently has many more variations of the language. Watching Brazilian films like Cidade de Deus (City of God) for the purpose of language acquisition will very likely prove to be an exercise in futility, as the language in the favelas is often incomprehensible even to middle class Brazilians whose native tongue is Portuguese.

The safest bet is to study Brazilian Portuguese and stick to a generic Rio accent if possible. For those who want to learn the language as an academic pursuit, or simply gain fluency beyond what is useful on holiday, many find it much easier to learn European Portuguese first as it is generally agreed to be the more difficult variety. Put simply, the transition from European to Brazilian is quite a lot easier than doing it the other way round.

Finally, for anyone who has experience with Spain or Portugal, it probably goes without saying that Brazilians don’t want to hear your Spanish. They will probably understand you, and if your Spanish is substantially better than your Portuguese it may be tempting to use it for the sake of getting a point across, but it will generally go unappreciated by native Portuguese speakers in Brazil. If anything, they’re much more likely to want to practise their English with you!

What's the colour of money? Pink!?!

I should start this piece off by saying that I have never personally witnessed any form of corruption in Brazil. Unlike in certain other Latin American countries (cough Paraguay cough) it’s never been suggested that I might like to make a contribution to a police benevolent fund to avoid a lengthy customs check, or perhaps speed up a visa application. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, or maybe it’s just very different if you’re on holiday in Brazil, because I’m seeing more and more media coverage of apparently rampant corruption in Brazil and I’m hearing more and more from Brazilian friends about it as well…

When international media focus on corruption in Brazil, the reaction from Brazilians is often very defensive. They will tell you that corruption isn’t all that severe in Brazil and point to recent British scandals such as the Liam Fox/Adam Werrity affair (no pun intended). Another thing I often hear is that what foreigners call corruption is just a less ‘official’ form of getting the same job done. So, following this example, in Britain when you call up BT to get a new phone line installed you can either wait three weeks or you can pay for ‘express’ installation. In Brazil you can be told it will take a month put if you pay the engineer a little propina then it could be done the next day.

Does this hold water? Well, leaving aside the fact that the last few times I’ve had a phone line installed in the UK I don’t actually remember any kind of “express” option – it’s just taken weeks whatever – the fact is that this is a documented, regularised and (crucially) taxed service. It seems to me that whether or not you think the companies in question should just provide better service as standard, you can’t count it as a corrupt practice.

And besides, this doesn’t really explain the growing grumblings within Brazil at corruption. This isn’t international journalists looking down their nose at Brazil or making up problems where they don’t exist. This is normal Brazilian people looking at some of the things going on in government at all levels and saying that they’ve had enough. No fewer than six cabinet ministers are facing serious allegations of fraud and a combined effort of the Catholic Church and the Brazilian Bar Association have gathered a petition of 1.6 million signatures in support of the “Clean Record” Bill which aims to bar people convicted of corruption from public life permanently.

I’m not naïve enough to suggest that corruption doesn’t exist in the UK and every so often we get a glimpse into a world of deals done in Dubai hotels and fireside chats in the Cotswolds – you have to say it’s amazing how many MPs end up with cushy non-exec directorships once they’ve left parliament, or even while they are still in the house. I even think there is a bit of an element of schadenfreude in some of the international coverage of corruption in Brazil (and all the other BRICs). I also understand Brazilians’ frustration that instead of covering the undoubted huge leaps made in the past twenty years, journalists are digging up (or more likely, re-hashing) stories of corruption instead. However, when a poll on one internet site shows 54% of Brazilians saying they encounter corruption at least once a week, let’s not pretend it’s not happening, folks…

What are your thoughts? As I say my personal experience in this respect is good, but perhaps you have a different take on things?

There’s loads of good stuff going on, from guerilla allotments to giant multimedia projections, but my favourite is ‘Invader’ who’s a French guy who makes giant mosaics of 70s arcade-game characters in unlikely places. Bit of a one-trick pony, ok, but looks pretty cool and just goes to show that while Rio gets all the tourists, São Paulo gets all the artists

There are lots more pics at http://dedentroedefora.com/artistas/space-invader/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/hammerkaos/6091761450/, by the way

Cheers Gran - this one's for you

In the latest twist in the saga that is Brazil’s World Cup 2014 preparations, former international star Romario has jumped into the fray, defending the governments resistance to Fifa’s demands about ticket prices.

I’m struggling to think of the last time a former British international (of any sport) became a politician, but in Brazil it’s not all that ununusual, and following in the footsteps of Pele and others, Romario is now a congressman so what he says carries quite a bit of weight. I’m speaking figuratively, of course – compared to former team-mate Ronaldo, Romario is actually looking pretty slim these days…

What’s got his goat this week is thatin Brazil students and pensioners traditionally get discounted tickets for sporting events. The government wanted to continue this for the duration of the World Cup – they reckon it would have meant about $100m less in ticket revenues, but seeing as Fifa bank literally billions from the World Cup, it seems like small change.

So far so good – until someone told Sepp Blatter… You really don’t get a fatter catter than Blatter, do you? Fifa have said no go on the tickets, and by the way you need to pass some other laws restricting the use of trademarks, protecting TV rights and only allowing certain brands of food and alcohol to be sold in (and, unbelievably, around) stadiums for the duration of the Brazil World Cup. As Romario tweeted “Brazil needs to stop this business of being a slave of Fifa. The sovereignty of the country has to be respected.”

Fifa have responded to the delay in this ‘World Cup Law’ being passed by publicly expressing their concern about delays in construction work on stadiums and other infrastructure and leaking threats about moving the 2014 World Cup if they decide that Brazil isn’t going to be ready.

If you heard Fernando Duarte on the (excellent) Football Weekly podcast from the Guardian the other week, you’ll know that the rumour in Brazil is that these rumours are being fed by the British media so that England can step in at the last minute and ‘steal’ the World Cup. I have to say that anyone who has heard Blatter’s views (and those of most of Fifa’s Executive Committee) on England recently will see this as absolutely nuts, but it does go to show that there is starting to be realy public pressure building up about what is happening to prepare for 2014.

Regular readers will know that my opinion is that Brazil will be ready-ish – this is South America, folks – and it will all be fine. I see Fifa’s complaints as just grandstanding to try and get the Congress to pass the law which practically makes parts of Brazilian cities into Fifa territory for part of 2014. Fifa claim all the money they make from tournaments is re-invested in football but does anyone anywhere really believe that? Or have I just been spending too long with Brazilian conspiracy theorists?