It was the biggest party of the year – and will probably retain that distinction until the end. Everybody was there, including foreign officials far too cool to be named. Dancers, singers and synchronized swimmers performed … all in honor of the Dear Leader’s sixty-eighth birthday. According to Pyongyang’s state-run media, Kim was “praised by mankind as the most outstanding political elder and the peerlessly brilliant commander of the present era.”
Across the border, however, the partying was supplanted with speculation, particularly given rumors of Kim’s 2008 stroke. According to the LA Times, his psychological state is said to be in question. A South Korean journal article puts the end of his life no more than five years into the future. In fact, the report says, “Kim Jong Il is known to have shed some tears when bodyguards were with him, unlike in the past.”
This didn’t stop the dear leader from getting down, though, at a party held on a day to considered to be one of North Korea’s top holidays. The synchronized swimmers “depicted beautiful frost flowers carrying boundless reverence” for Kim, inspired by such music as “Let’s Meet Each Other on the Front” and “Let the Soldiers Be Heroes.”
This year, there were some changes: gifts for the kids were in short supply. You could blame the country’s dismal financial situation, or take it right from the horse’s mouth: “abnormal climatic conditions” and “blocked sea routes” prevented the tradition from being continued. A handful made out, though “Presents were transported by helicopter for a small number of children,” the release reported, “a measure taken by Kim Jong Il.”
Cigar manufacturers are eager to host consumers. If you happen to be in Honduras or Nicaragua, your request for a tour of the facilities would probably be met with excitement and a warm welcome. But, you can get more than that. As the manufacturers and retailers struggle to overcome the effects of the global recession, many are arranging cigar-centric trips designed to host you from seed to ash.
Many cigar companies are partnering with tobacconists to arrange cigar tours for their customers. Camacho brings smokers down to Honduras to spend a few days at “Camp Camacho,” where they can tour the fields, see how cigars are rolled and smoke as much as you like. Rocky Patel and Drew Estate (which makes Acids and Javas) host groups as well, in Honduras and Nicaragua, respectively. My recent trip to Pepin Garcia’s factory was a first for the company, but I strongly suspect that many will follow. WhileDrew Estate is open to individual bookings, most of the cigar trips offered by manufacturers need to be arranged by cigar shops.
Your local retailer has the connections to make a cigar trip possible, so that’s where you need to start. Bring the idea up, and make sure there are enough people in the shop who share your interest. You’ll probably need about a dozen to make the trip happen (on my trip, De La Concha and Uptown Cigar, contributing roughly the same number of travelers each).
Since the cigar companies are eager to bring you to their facilities, you’ll generally be responsible for your airfare … and nothing else. Accommodations, meals and transportation are usually included, and you’ll be provided enough cigars to keep you busy – I had one lit pretty much all day every day. The details will vary with the cigar company. Those that have rooms on the premises will put you up inside the walls, and companies that don’t will arrange for you to stay in a local hotel.
%Gallery-84839%
On your tour, you’ll become intimately familiar with the process of making cigars. From the tobacco fields, where the plants are bursting from the ground, to the factories, where legions of rollers showcase their dexterity, you’ll gain a new appreciation for the process by which your favorite stick reaches store shelves (and ultimately your humidor). At Pepin Garcia’s My Father operation, we saw everything, including the wood shop where the cigar boxes are built and printed. An estimated 70 pairs of hands are necessary to create a cigar, and w saw most of them.
At night, you’ll eat, smoke and hang out with the cigar company hosts and, more important, your fellow travelers. After all, what makes your favorite cigar shop special? It’s the people who smoke with you. This is what will turn your cigar trip into a memorable event.
Carnival hasn’t officially started here in Rio, but the revelry has already been underway for days. Beginning last week, the first big street parties kicked off, filling many neighborhoods with revelers singing and dancing down the avenues. These are Rio’s street parades — known locally as bandas and blocos — and are open to all who want to join the party. All you have to do is show up.
Despite their earliest appearance in the 19th century, until recently, there were only a handful of these street parades still going on around town, and most visitors described Salvador in Bahia as the home of true street carnival. (Their disappearance from Rio coincided with the opening of the Sambadrome in 1984, where the colorful samba school parades became the raison d’etre for Carnival.) All that has changed dramatically in the last ten years, as Carnival has returned to the streets with some 465 — nearly double the number from 2009 — free music and dance celebrations happening throughout the city this year. (Copacabana alone will host some 55 street parades.) All in all, the city predicts a turnout of 2.5 million people attending the celebrations.
One of the first to kick off the street fests is the Banda de Ipanema, which takes place two Saturdays before Carnival, and again on Carnival Saturday. Held in Ipanema, it attracts a wildly diverse crowd, many of whom come from well beyond the neighborhood’s boundaries. Long before Vinicius de Moraes and Tom Jobim penned their famous song, ‘Garota de Ipanema’ (Girl from Ipanema), the neighborhood was a desirable one. It’s only become more so in Brazil’s recent boom years, with a clean, lovely beachfront and side streets lined with towering mangueiras (mango trees) and sprinkled with outdoor cafes and restaurants, eye-catching boutiques and lively bars, all favored stomping grounds of Ipanema’s stereotypically young, good-looking — possibly gay and probably wealthy — crowd.
Around 4pm, a few hundred revelers gather in and around Ipanema’s Praca General Osorio, a plaza sprinkled with palms and grassy bits, paved walkways and a concrete fountain that hasn’t seen water for years. Some arrive wearing the Banda’s official t-shirt for the event, which this year pays homage to Brazil’s best-known architect, the still active 102-year-old Oscar Niemeyer. Others are attired in the typical weekend costume of the zona sul (southern neighborhoods): shorts and t-shirts, flip flops (invariably Havaianas) or, less formally, swim trunks and bare chests for the men, bikinis and sarongs for the women. There are a few costumes among the crowd — rainbow-hued mohawks, fairy wings, leather-vested bikies and a few drag queens teetering on six-inch heels — though the more outlandish outfits won’t appear until Carnival Saturday.
The focal point of the gathering is a thirty-piece brass band (the ‘banda’ part of the street parade). They’ll lead everyone in marchinhas, colorful, sometimes racy sing-alongs played during Carnival. There are several hundred well-known marchinhas, some of which date back to Rio’s early street carnivals in the 1890s, and every Carioca knows the lyrics to at least a dozen of these songs. Another point of interest for the crowd is the ubiquitous presence of beer vendors wheeling over-sized coolers around the plaza.
By six pm the crowd has swelled to several thousand, and the band starts moving–the street parade is off. Participants encompass a wide swath of Carioca society — as democratic as the beaches around town, with rich and poor, young and old, all joining together in a singing and dancing mass snaking its way through Ipanema. As the parade reaches Av Vieira Souto, the road running parallel to the ocean, thousands more from the beach clamber up onto the road and join in the revelry. Soon the road is a sea of people, singing and shimmying their way along the waterfront. By day’s end, more than 10,000 will join in.
After a few blocks (and a dozen marchinhas), the banda turns inland and stops beside the Igreja Nossa Senhora da Paz (Our Lady of Peace church). There, the crowd takes on a solemn aspect as the band plays “Carinhoso,” paying homage to the famous composer Pixinguinha who died inside the church while attending a baptism during Carnival. As the band plays the song, some in the crowd are visibly moved, holding hands and crying.
The parade continues as darkness arrives, and in the apartments above the street, solitary figures dance on the balconies. A few revelers call up to those in the windows in a sing-song chant to “come down, come down and join the band.” Meanwhile, the beer vendors are still following alongside the parade, competing against a few enterprising caipirinha vendors, who, holding packed trays of iced drinks aloft, glide seamlessly through the dense crowd. A few inspired revelers climb light posts (some for the view, some to dance rather provocatively with a fixed object). Others carve a space for themselves in the swirling crowd — like the very portly bare-chested man in tiny swim trunks who bounces joyfully and heedlessly about, singing out of key, as his neighboring revelers scurry out of the way. ‘Brazilians are among the least inhibited of people,’ a Carioca friend once explained to me.
It all comes to an end around nine o’clock back in Praca General Osorio, after which fest-goers peel off, filling the bars and restaurants around Ipanema, or heading back to the beach, which despite the late hour remains surprisingly crowded. Like most other nights during this summer in Rio, the humidity is overpowering, and a dip in the ocean provides fast relief from the sweltering heat.
Over the next week, hundreds more street parades will hit the Rio stage. More famous gatherings, like the Cordao de Bola Preta in the center of town, will bring out several hundred thousand. Some blocos have whimsical names, like ‘Simpatia e quase amor’ (Sympathy is almost love) or the well-known Suvaco do Cristo, which roughly translated means ‘the armpit smell of Christ’, a reference to the parade’s location in Jardim Botanica, beneath the outstretched arms of Rio’s well-known Savior. Other fests revolve around neighborhood icons — like the Bloco das Carmelitas, which references the Carmelite monastery in Santa Teresa. Some celebrants even parade through the streets in full habits.
The combined effect of these events, taking place in every corner of the city, is simply transformative. On a typical outing in Rio, it is impossible not to stumble upon one or another street fest. And if time permits, you might as well join in. Spontaneity, after all, is but one of many ingredients in Rio’s Carnival.
Pop economics books, which purport to offer the surprising explanations behind seemingly ordinary events, are more popular than ever. You’ve probably heard of or read Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics, their new sequel SuperFreakonomics, or Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, but allow me to throw in a plug for a similar book you may not have come across.
Tyler Cowen‘s book Discover Your Inner Economistwill be of special interest to those of us who like to travel, and in particular, those who like to sample local fare while on the road.
If you have to choose to have dinner in either Stockholm or Belize City, Cowen says, you’ll get much better food for the money in Belize. To Cowen, if a restaurant is located in a bad neighborhood, or is successful even in a poor country, the food must be really good. “Iron bars on the windows,” he writes, “and barbed wire on the fences, however bad for the residents or your own safety, are both good signs for the food.”
Experience tells us that he’s right, too. On the road, the food is often best, and cheapest, at out-of-the-way establishments. More than that, it is a worthwhile experience to share a meal with locals, and the proprietors of restaurants are often extra welcoming to those who choose their hard-to-reach establishment over all the others. Talking to a local is almost always the best way to find these hidden gems.
Cowen has gleaned another bit of wisdom from his expertise in economics, expanding on the old “money isn’t everything” cliché. “The critical economic problem is scarcity,” he says. “Money is scarce, but in most things the scarcity of time, attention, and caring is more important.”
Hopefully when we visit other places, we can take a bit of the culture home with us. Knowledge is the best souvenir. So take a class with the locals. Learn:
To do a local dance
To sing a song in their language
To play an unusual instrument
To cook a special recipe
No time to take a class? If food is your favorite, buy a local cookbook or ask the chef for a recipe. Purchase a songbook or a video of local dances. You can learn it when you return home or continue practicing the lessons you did take.