Michelle Jana Chan writes… It is said that the Incas did not focus on the stars at night. Instead of pointing out twinkling celestial bodies and joining up the dots to make constellations, they found meaning in the dark patches of the night sky. For them, a pool of blackness immediately below the Southern Cross…
Author Archives: travel
Laiza Bastos Vieira, dancer and choreographer for the Mocidade Samba School’s comissão de frente (the school’s lead float in the Sambódromo parade), shares with us a little of what life is like as a professional samba dancer in Rio de Janeiro. How did you get into samba? Samba often runs in families. It did in…
“Back erect! Chest up! Hips firm!” Carla Campos bawls over the wild tumult of samba drumming convulsing the speakers in her smart Ipanema dance studio. “Stop bobbing up and down! Stop wriggling! You’re not a chicken. You’re not a worm. You’re a man! You’re a malandro!” Ah, the malandro — the archetypal bad boy, the con artist, the…
A sublime symphony of rainforest, rocks and sweeping Atlantic beaches, Rio de Janeiro’s is the face with which Brazil dazzles the world. But the carnival city was eclipsed in the modern power stakes by Sao Paulo, Latin America’s industrial dynamo – and their culinary trajectories long followed suit. Waves of immigration from as far afield…