bus vs bike

I was supposed to meet Junior Teixeira last Wednesday to line up a tamborim lesson, but he didn't show. No big deal; I just figured something had come up. I saw him the next Monday at Monobloco rehearsal, and he immediately came over to apologize for not meeting me. He said (in English) "A bus ran me." I thought maybe he meant he'd had to run to catch a bus and had missed it. Then he lifted his arm to show me an enormous scrape running down his forearm - it turned out, he meant "a bus ran over me". It turned out, he meant "a bus slammed into the back of my bike, destroyed the bike, spun me 360 degrees through the air, and I landed flat on my back in the middle of the street and ended up halfway under the bus with the huge tire one foot away and it just barely managed to stop in time, and I couldn't believe I was still alive, and I have scrapes and bruises all over, and the bike was destroyed, and I was so shaken I could barely crawl to the side of the street, and then I forgot to get the license plate number and the bus just drove away."

Jeez. I am so glad he wasn't killed. He is glad too. And now he has to buy a new bike, somehow.

At least, as bad as that was, it was just accidental. The really creepy stories in Rio are the ones of deliberate violence, and there are so many of those stories all the time... the first draft of this post had a few paragraphs summarizing some of those stories just from today's paper, but then I was too depressed to post it. Never mind. I'll spare you the story of the Sao Paulo couple, and the reasons why cars in Brazil are allowed to run red lights at night. Suffice to say... poor Brasil. I think of Seattle's bike community, which when I left was up in arms and having protest marches because cars in Seattle sometimes accidentally hit bicycles. Lucky Seattle. If only bike accidents were the worst thing that happened here in Rio.