The featured image was taken inside the Museum of Tomorrow, an extraordinary experience. Very difficult to photograph. What you are looking at is a rotunda that contains six floor to ceiling screens showing rotating films about the impact of population growth on the planet. This is only one of fifty or so permanent exhibits.…

The featured image is of an exhibit currently in the downtown Rio Bank of Brazil. The artist is Austrian. Using shoeshine boxes, he shows in this massive sculpture his impression of the Favela: impenetrable, forbidding, and imprisioning. Well portrayed in the film, City of God, the first Favelas in Rio were a scramble to…

If only Rio looked as pretty as it does from the top of Sugarloaf mountain as shown in the featured image. When I arrived on Sunday afternoon and stepped out of a taxi in front of my hotel, all I could think of was the line made famous by Bette Davis: What a dump.…

In the film, The Sheltering Sky, actress Debra Winger has a conversation with someone in a rail station and says, “we are not tourists, we are travelers.”  There is a difference. When I went on formal tours to Machu Picchu and Patagonia, I was a tourist. All energy was devoted in getting from one attraction…

Until I arrived in Salvador de Bahia, I had never heard of the Candomble religion, which has 5000 year old roots in Africa. As best I have learned, it is an anamistic  faith and respectful of the forces of nature.  Then Portuguese  sent Jesuits to Brazil to convert the locals.  When the Africans were imported…

The featured image is a photo I took last Sunday night when I went out for my first dinner in Salvador. It captures the essence of this happening tourist destination wherein modern street vendors sell their wares in front of buildings and statuary from the 1500s. I had read about  Bahian food with its  African…

American music rules here in São Paulo- until it doesn’t.  Early this afternoon I went to a flea market close by my hotel and a loud speaker was blasting away the Kim Carnes classic, Bette Davis Eyes, followed by The Doors  hit, Love Me Two Times.  Everyone was happy and dancing around, helped somewhat  by…

Okay, so I have not seen this putty  skin tone paired with gray eyes yet but it could happen! How happy I am to have taken a college history course on the Colonial History of Latin America last fall.  I notice things here in Brazil I might not have otherwise.  One is the lingering legacy…

The featured image shows a pay telephone. These appear on nearly every corner in São Paulo, Brazil. Cell phone service is by no means  in the hands of the majority in this city of 12 million. Perhaps this is why having your cell phone swiped by a drive by bicyclist is always a threat. Knowing the…