Rio Tour: Considering Chickens

A few quick notes from a tour I took the other day.

The tour started in a national park (the largest national park inside a city on earth). The park is an Atlantic rainforest, which means the soil quality is higher than in a tropical rainforest. The trees are shorter in the Atlantic rainforest but there is still a high level of biodiversity. We then drove to Christ the Redeemer for views over rio. Unsurprisingly , the area around the statue was very touristy but the views were more the worth the crowds. 

We drove back down into the city into a neighborhood called Santa Teresa. We had lunch and then saw the Escalera de Selarón. A quick note on lunch - all the beef I have had so far in Rio is insanely good. Even hole-in-the-wall burger joints have fantastic beef. I ordered steak for lunch and was not disappointed.

After taking a few photos of the steps, we drove to sugarloaf mountain in time for sunset.

I spent most the day with a Scottish woman, British woman, and a French woman who know lives in Cape Town and speaks English with a cool hybrid French / South African language. She told me that Cape Town has a respectable film making industry. Apparently the American film industry uses the South African production capabilities from time to time, for a much lower price than they might pay in Los Angeles for the same service. (Mad Max was filmed in Namibia and some of the production work was done in Cape Town.)

Throughout the day I discussed socioeconomic concerns with the tour guide. He was born in a favela. He taught himself Spanish and English and is now quite highly educated from what I can tell (the tour covered a broad range of topics, from ocean and rainforest biology to history, art and current events in Brazil). He said that there is basically no way out of the favelas. There is no primary education for the children of the favelas. There IS public education in Brazil but the entrance exams are prohibitively difficult for those born into poverty. The private schools have easier entrance exams but are expensive. He said some folks in the favelas have been given iPhones (?? Not sure from whom) and get a small amount of money from the government each month and are thus content with their situation and don't try to get educated.

He drew a parallel between chickens in the marketplace and people in the favelas. He said that the chickens are not locked in cages, but they don't leave their owners because they are provided with easy access to food. The chickens are unaware that they will be slaughtered and sold. The tour guide said the people in the favelas are like these chickens, except that people are theoretically capable of logical reasoning while chickens are not.

I'm not going to say whether I agree with his viewpoints or not but I think it's valuable to write down his thoughts. My tour guide is certainly one in a bajillion - one of the very few born into a favela who end up with a lower middle class life.

This is a subject for another post but I haven't seen much evidence of a middle class here.