88. Brazilia, Brazil

88.

Brasilia, Brazil:

This city is like a cemetery park filled with immense concrete tombstones--a bit sterile and scary.

There are rows of identical apartment buildings perhaps suitable for bureaucrats but not for passionate Brazilians like those I have met.

I like domes and pyramids but I don’t care for these monotonous rectangles very much.

I arrive on a weekend and the city seems deserted. I have heard that everyone who can leave on the weekend does and now I see it is true.

Still, this pre-planned and rather artificial city is unique and a whole lot of creative energy has been used in building it. Maybe in two or three hundred years when the place has had a chance to mellow it will be more habitable.

In the high-rise shopping center of town I notice that the products for sale are similar to those for sale in Honolulu and Ventura. Even the paperbacks in the bookstores are the same—Portuguese translations of Lobsang Rampa and Carlos Castaneda for example.

A pretty young woman walks by wearing a t-shirt with a printed picture of a chick looking out of a cracked egg and the words (in English, of course): “I just got laid!”

Not me.

I board the bus for Rio de Janeiro.

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