Choque de Ordem

Rio's trying to get a little more organized. No, really. As mentioned before, the city of Rio has several rather intractable problems that pose certain issues for the upcoming 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, not to mention for the daily life of the citizens here. The nastiest two problems are probably the drug-gang violence, and the pervasive filth/pollution throughout the city and its waterways. However, rest assured Rio is doing its best to tackle two much more serious problems: excessive coconut husks on the beaches, and too much pee in the streets during Carnaval.

No, seriously! The Rio city government really is trying to clean up the coconut husks and the pee. More generally, the chaos and trash that have been associated both with the public beaches and with the street blocos.

Beaches first. Basically, there's been too much trash on the beaches. This is partly due to what the newspapers keep calling a "falta de educação", which translates literally to "a lack of education," figuratively to "poor manners" and even more figuratively to "a ridiculously high cultural acceptance of tossing trash all over the place." People litter like there's no tomorrow. Got a piece of trash in your hand? Why not just DROP IT, right there, right where you're standing? Who cares if your beach, or your neighborhood street, ends up completely covered in refuse? Why bother looking for a trash can?

Bit by bit, this attitude's changing. I see a slight change already - there are more trash cans on the beaches, for one thing, and, it might be my imagination, but it seems like the streets are a little cleaner.

And, the mayor of Rio has started a formal campaign to clean up the beaches. It's called the "Choque de Ordem" campaign (literally, "Shock of Order"). Originally the idea was to eliminate the selling of any food that resulted in large amounts of trash, meaning: coconuts, shrimp-on-skewers, and cheese-on-skewers. (My BELOVED SQUEAKY CHEESE is about to disappear off the beaches! OH NO!!!!!) There was a massive public outcry about the coconuts, people basically saying that it's not Rio without coconuts. The mayor was forced to give ground on that one; the coconuts can stay, though they are trying to restrict them to the little bars along the sidewalk and keep them off the sandy part of the beaches. But sure enough, the squeaky cheese and the shrimp have disappeared off the Ipanema beach. I was briefly inconsolable about the loss of the squeaky cheese, until I flagged down one of the new watermelon-wedge sellers that had cropped up instead....mmmmmm, fresh watermelon! I'm not all that convinced that watermelon rinds are better trash than squeaky-cheese-skewers, but I guess it at least you can't puncture your foot on a watermelon rind.

Second, the blocos. The Rio bloco parades have just been growing and growing and growing over the last ten years, and it's changed from an informal street celebration to a powerful force that can shut down traffic literally throughout the whole city for almost three solid weeks. As much as we gringoes love the idea of three solid weeks of partying, believe it or not there are actually people living here in this city who have to go to work every day, and it's been a real problem for them to have to navigate through a sudden crowd of (say) 100,000 partiers, producing mountains of trash, and literally rivers of pee (literally! rivers! flowing down the street! I've seen it! I've had to cross it! 100,000 people x minimum of 4 beers apiece x no Port-a-Potties = rivers of pee). And some rather scary moments when street vendors with blazing hot barbecues try to push through the crowd.

Last year, the mayor tried to force the Rio blocos to switch to the Salvador bloco method, which involves many of the paraders parading inside a protective cord held by a bunch of security guards. The idea is that the bloco sells t-shirts to partiers who want to be able to parade inside the cord. You can only get inside if you buy a t-shirt. This has long been the accepted routine in Salvador, but it was massively unpopular here in Rio. It smacked too much of separating the rich from the poor. And the whole idea of the blocos here in Rio is that they have brought Carnaval back to the poor people on the street - the people who can't afford the tickets to go see the fancy escola parades in Rio's Sambodromo.

So, this year they've mostly given up on the cord/t-shirt idea. Instead the city government has focused on the traffic and the filth issues. They've taken much more aggressive control of the bloco schedule, putting a limit on how many blocos can parade in certain neighborhoods, and rearranging the places and times of many parades. In maybe their brightest move, the city has decided to take several bloco parades out of congested areas like Santa Teresa and Ipanema, and instead move them to the massive Rio Branco avenue, which will be shut down to street traffic on weekends and made available just just for bloco parades. (There are big "Carnaval da Rua!" signs hanging all over the Rio Branco already.) This is pretty cool idea because, once upon a time, long ago in the past, the Rio Branco was the original site of most of Rio's Carnaval. So there's a lot of Carnaval history associated with that street and it's neat that there will once again be street parades on the Rio Branco. Monobloco's parade will be on the Rio Branco this year instead of the beaches, for example. Banga had to also move their parade (though I forget where to). Carmelitas moved some of their parades out of traffic-congested Santa Teresa. And some of the newer, smaller blocos were prevented from parading at all.

Blocos must now also pony up the money to treat their security guards decently. Each security guard, particularly the ones holding the rope around the band, must be provided with gloves, shoes, several liters of water, and a lunch.

Another very important development, in my view, is that city's quadrupled the number of Port-a-Potties at each bloco parade. They're also trying to discourage the time-honored tradition of peeing in the streets by lining the most tempting walls and trees with hundreds of signs that say things like "Please don't pee here" and "This isn't the right spot to pee".

(Last weekend at the parades in the Sambodromo, I spotted one parader who had taped a "Please don't pee here" sign to his back. Cute.)

There are also more police, more traffic guards at each bloco, and vendors with large carts and hot barbecues are (in theory) prevented from moving through the bloco crowds.

So, last weekend was the first real test of all these changes. And so far, so good! Newspapers this week have reported that the bloco parades went astonishingly smoothly and were blessedly free of pee, trash, accidental burns and traffic congestion. But this weekend will be a bigger challenge. There are 116 blocos scheduled to parade this coming weekend. Yes, I said ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN BLOCOS. Including four of the biggest parades of all:
(1) Cordão da Bola Preta (Rope of the Black Ball) starts about one hour from now, as I write this on Friday evening;
(2) Simpatia E Quase Amor (Kindness Is Almost Love) goes tomorrow afternoon on Ipanema beach;
(3) Suvaco de Cristo (Armpit Of Christ), Sunday morning at the Botanical Garden;
(4) and Escravos de Maua (Slaves Of Maua) Sunday afternoon downtown in the Centro.

(yeah, the bloco names are hilarious. But that's a subject for another day.)

Each of those blocos routinely draws over 100,000 people. So everyone is curious to see what will happen. Will it all go smoothly? Will the Rio Branco become a cesspool? Will there be enough Port-a-Potties?

So, it looks like it's about time for me to head out and check out Cordão da Bola Preta and see how those Port-a-Potties are holding up. From there I'll head to Afro-Reggae and then to the Monobloco show. Off we go - the second weekend of Extended Carnaval is about to start!!