Getting to know Centro

Rio is famed for its beaches, but after a day and half here I haven't seen a beach. I've seen the sea - it's hard not to - but I chose to spend the couple of days I had free before starting work exploring my immediate neighbourhood.

I've been initially accommodated in Centro, Rio's downtown, which is full of a mixture of office buildings and old cobbled streets with old buildings. It's a real contrast which I rather like. In fact Rio is definitely a city of contrasts: a fancy clothes shop might have a man outside selling popcorn from a cart, and there's very definitely a class/wealth divide which is easily visible. It's also a very busy place but so far I haven't felt unsafe at all; there's a heavy police presence and I'm being more careful than I would normally be with regard to valuables, but Centro at least seems pretty safe in a big city sort of way.

I got my bearings first by walking up to Praca Maua, a square by the waterfront which has been recently redeveloped. There are two museums there - the Museu de Arte do Rio, and the Museu de Amanha - and a big sign reading #CidadeOlimpica, which is attracting lots of people to sit and pose on it. The Museu de Arte is in an interesting building, again recently-built, which links a new edifice with an old one and has a rooftop terrace. As art museums go it's not bad, although a couple of the exhibitions were entirely in Portuguese with not even a brief explanation in English which meant I was able to get the gist but not much more of the curators' thinking.

#CidadeOlimpica

Across the square I was utterly entranced by the Museu do Amanha (literally, the Museum of Tomorrow) which was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. It's about science and sustainability, apparently, and there was a big queue of people outside it waiting to go in so I just walked around and took lots and lots of pictures!

Museu do Amanha

On day two I sketched myself a walking itinerary based on Lonely Planet recommendations and Google Maps and, in typical Harris family fashion, set out on foot to explore in more depth. I visited an awful lot of churches, something Rio has in abundance, beginning with the astonishing gilded Monastery of Sao Bento. Up on a hill above Praca Maua, the monastery is very simple from the outside but inside is a riot of gold. It's stunning. It also had a couple of men carefully cleaning and sweeping, which was something I encountered in every church I visited all day. There was always someone cleaning.

Monastery of Sao Bento

I popped into any number of churches during the day but the monastery was one of my favourites. The other church which stands out is a complete contrast. Rio's cathedral is, from the outside, an absolute montrosity - a giant concrete cone, opened only 40 years ago - but inside it has four enormous stained glass windows which are entrancing. I loved it. It was kind of bonkers but it worked.
 

Cathedral interior

The other church which I suspect is on most agendas is the Igreja de Nossa Senora de Candelaria, stuck on a traffic island at the end of the busy four-lane Avenida Presidente Vargas. Inside, it has beautiful paintings on the ceilings and the light coming through the windows high in the dome made for stunning effects.

Apart from churches, the other two main sights of the day were the Museu Historico Nacional and the Escadaria Selaron.

For a mere R$8 (less than £2) the museum takes you through Brazil's history, from prehistory to independence. I hadn't realised that the Portuguese royal family were so enamoured with Brazil that in the 19th century Don Pedro I declared he was splitting the country off from Portugal (which it had previously been united with under the Portuguese crown) to become an empire. The empire lasted less than a century and saw just two emperors, Pedro I and Pedro II, before independence in 1889. The museum had all sorts of interesting artefacts, like coins, paintings, weapons, furniture and so on, from all eras of the country's history, and was a really useful primer for two months here!

The Escadaria Selaron was a bit of a surprise because I hadn't been planning to cross the line between the Centro district and the Santa Teresa district quite yet. Rio has a walking trail and there were useful signs all over pointing towards sights, and as I was working out which way to go next there was a sign for the Escadaria.

Escadaria Selaron

Basically this is a stairway up a hill in Santa Teresa, which artist Jorge Selaron has decorated with hundreds of brightly-coloured tiles. At the bottom a description explained that he's now collecting tiles from all over the world, and when he gets a new one, swaps it with an old one. So the stairway has tiles with pictures of British telephone boxes, Alcatraz, Dutch windmills - all sorts of things. It's quite bonkers and is quite lovely. It's also the only thing I saw on my whole day where it was teeming with tourists and I had to be patient to get pictures which didn't feature someone else's selfie. At the top, most people turned around and went back down the stairs; I turned left and went down the street instead which was much nicer. The houses were a little shabby but there was painting and graffiti everywhere, music playing inside and a real sense of atmosphere and the real Rio.

Santa Teresa street

 So, so far, I like Rio. I'm very much looking forward to starting work today, meeting my ONS colleagues, getting my Rio 2016 uniform, and getting stuck into whatever the next few weeks have to offer.