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Rio de Janeiro, candidate for the 2016 Olympic Games.

With Rio the Janeiro, the Portuguese got it all wrong. It wasn’t a river, and it wasn’t this pretty in January. Rio is amazing year round or, better yet, was amazing. If you have some imagination, climb up Pão de Açúcar, half close your eyes and delete all the apartment buildings from view. There’s no other city in the world located in a paradise such as this.

Maybe that’s why it is so different, people so faithful and yet so pagan at the same time. In the morning the surfers cross themselves before entering the waters and in the afternoons the sambadrome almost burst from the heated atmosphere. This kind of thing only happens in Rio. It’s modern cathedral, round with 20,000 seats, tries to compete with the football stadiums, though Maracana always wins. In Pele’s time it had 200,000 followers, also ardent, but for another religion. There God is round and to worship it you need to kiss it, pamper it and caress it. No kicks are allowed, no rough playing. In Brazil, what they play is jogo bonito, and if you don’t understand that, you’d better stay home with the catenaccio on.

Brazilians are like this with everything. Life is a game for them, always smiling, always thumbs up. Everything is okay, “ta bò”. That’s why they’ve been able to make their flag and colors fashionable. Wearing a yellow t-shirt is a way to tell the world that you’re like them, able to inject rhythm into anything that moves, a ball or a tin can, with your feet or with two sticks. Brazilians set almost anything to music, be it football or life itself, so you don’t know if they’re dancing when they’re playing or if they’re playing when they’re dancing. Like capoeira, a dance invented by black slaves to train for martial arts without the owners even noticing.

They like parties so much they don’t care much about food, as if it were a nuisance. In plenty of restaurants they sell food by weight; they don’t care if the container is full of salad or meat. They don’t waste time eating or getting paid. They only have one famous dish, the feijoada, though it is more a memory of times better forgotten than a recipe to be cherished. It is a mix of rice, beans and all kinds of meat. A stew the slaves prepared on Sundays with the leftovers of their owners’ banquets. It’s no surprise that it’s leaves something to be desired. The main ingredient in the caipirinha, cachaça, also comes from the leftovers the Portuguese gave the blacks, in this case the sugar cane they themselves had cultivated.

While in those days they were taken from their villages by force, none of them would want to return to Africa now. They earned the right to live in Paradise the hard way, toiling their lives away and eating a lot of shit, even if mixed with meat on Sundays.