This weekend and last weekend was “Rock in Rio,” which is billed as Latin America’s biggest music concert and featured Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Justin Timberlake, Metallica, and many other US bands that I could have seen if I stayed in New York.
Better music was closer to my Flamengo apartment at Praça São Salvador, a shady square surrounded by a cramped grocery, quiet fire house, and several small restaurants and juice stands. I spent a few hours here Saturday and Sunday nights enjoying the live samba and choro from the neighborhood musicians. An older woman danced the dance of her life in hot pink spandex.
All ages mingled, teenagers and elderly and everyone in-between. Be it in a park or at a street cafe, here in Rio there isn’t the same sense of age division like in the United States, where kids play with kids and women talk in the kitchen and men sit in front of the TV.
Here’s a longish recording of the scene at Praça São Salvador:
