Category Archives: travel

This is my third trip to Rio de Janeiro. It’s Ursula’s fourth.  Whenever we come here we engage in that marvelous Brazilian dining experience known as churrascaria.  And when we go for churrascaria we invariably visit our favorite such establishment, Porcão.  Porcão has several locations, but our particular favorite is the one in the Flamengo district of Rio.  The views of Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain) and Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer statue) are among the best in the entire city, and the restaurant itself is located adjacent to the very exclusive yacht harbor at Guanabara Bay

In a churrascaria, you pay a set price for all you can eat at the salad bar and any meats served in the restaurant.  The interesting thing in churrascaria service is that waiters flow around the tables with huge skewers of meat.  If you see something you like, you get the waiter’s attention and he will bring the skewer over to your table.  There he will carve off a slice as you grab it with a pair of tongs and drop it onto your plate.  That means you definitely want to go easy at the salad bar and, prior to your visit, skip lunch and go very light on breakfast.

Upon being seated all guests are issued a diagram of a cow with the different cuts marked on it.  Additionally, you will be given a round tag, red on one side and green on the other.  You display the green side, which says, “SIM Por Favor (Yes, Please),” until you simply can’t take it anymore and scream for mercy.  The emergency mercy indicator is the red side, and it says, “NÃO Obregado (No, Thanks).”  Flipping over to red signals the wait staff to collect your plates and entice you with the optional, non-inclusive desert menu.

To give you the flavor of the experience (pun intended), we decided this trip to photograph the event from the views outside the restaurant to the offerings contained within this magical establishment.  So, sit back, relax, enjoy the views, and prepare to have your appetite whetted to where you can’t stand it:

Well, we made it. Please excuse any typos, spelling errors, grammar mistakes, or poor sentence structure, as I’m typing this up on about three hours of sleep.  Carnival was nothing as I imagined.  For one thing, it’s highly organized.  The twelve districts of Rio de Janeiro compete to see which can mobilize and choreograph the better parade, including floats, dancers, singers, and myriad marchers.  There must have been thousands in each parade, which are spread out over two consecutive nights.  We managed to stay for the first four full parades of the second night, leaving the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí only well into parade five and after a soaking rain that began halfway through parade three and which lasted through all of parade four.  But by 5:00 A.M., we’d had it.  We got back to the hotel just before 6:00 A.M. and slept the sleep of the dead until 9:45 A.M.

Because of the rains, I was only able to photograph the first two parades extensively, and only part of parade three.  The following photographs should whet your appetite until I can get some more ready for a later blog entry:

Well, here we are in beautiful Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. We arrived Sunday morning a little after 9:30 A.M. local time after a rather lengthy flight out of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport that began with our Boeing 767 pushing back from the gate at around 7:45 P.M. the night before.  Our hotel is in the famed Copacabana district, which is where all today’s photographs were snapped.  Copacabana also appears to be Party Central for this thing, as you can tell by the crowds.  Unfortunately, still photographs fail to give you the full flavor of what’s going on here, and the overall sobriety of many of the participants.

Internet access is from a nearby internet café, as the hotel wanted to charge well over $20 for twenty-four hours of access.  There’s nothing cheap in this town!  Even pizza for two and a couple of sodas will run you close to $30.

Tonight we have tickets for the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí, which is where the various samba schools have their competitive parade for Carnival.  If all goes well and the lighting is good, I’ll try to get photographs posted tomorrow.  Until then, enjoy these: