While in Rio, we managed to get tickets to one of the year’s biggest soccer matches here in Brazil, the Taça Guanabara. Two neighboring bitter rivals, Flamengo and Botafogo, played for the title of city champion. The crowd was rowdy, the soccer was great, and the excitement was through the roof. Head to the Maracanã Stadium for today’s photos.
On Saturday afternoon we visited Brazilian hip-hop artist, filmmaker and author MV Bill in the neighborhood where he was raised and still lives today, Cidade de Deus (City of God). To read more about our visit and see what this activist is about, click on today’s photo gallery.
I am standing on a street corner in Recreio, Zona Oeste, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Its just past three in the afternoon, and the streets, except for a light sea breeze, are devoid of life. It feels like a Florida retirement community—quiet, hot, stagnant. Mike rings the doorbell. We wait. Mike rings the doorbell again.
Finally, the crackle of a voice from the speaker phone, a pleasant female voice, but not the voice we came here to meet. Mike introduces himself, and moments later, out steps a very average-looking Brazilian man. Average height, average weight, mid-fifties, wearing shorts, a Brazilian national team soccer jersey, and Havaianas, a Brazilian brand of flip-flop that is the preferred footwear of the entire nation. He isn’t the archetypal heartthrob, but then again, he never was, it was his nice-guy persona, his every-man way of being, that made him so popular.