More Blog Updates

Time to satisfy the curiosity of those readers who are wondering what's been happening with some of the ongoing dramas — or even just the day-to-day changes — that make up our life in Búzios. So here are a few blog updates:


The Vacant Lot's Not Vacant Anymore
(First posted on 9/16/13, updated on 6/23/14)

Two years ago the beautiful forest next door to our house was uprooted, sections of the steep, sloping hillside were removed, and construction began on the foundation of a house. But just a few months after it started, the work stopped. Whether it was stopped by the authorities or the owner simply abandoned it because he ran out of money has never been quite clear. All we know is that people carted off the tools and the porta-potty, and Mark and I have since been watching nature return in all its exuberance. Here's how the lot was left when it was abandoned:

And here's what it looks like now:

Hah! Now it's for sale!

For us it's just a matter of waiting for the next shoe to drop.


Bakery 1 and Bakery 2
(First posted on 5/6/13)

The bakery at the corner of our street, the one I referred to as Bakery 1 in the May 2013 post, is now being run by the owner's son, and is being slowly dragged into the 21st century. The old TV with bad reception has been replaced by a snazzy flat screen model, products are being upgraded, but the place still thankfully retains its seedy, neighborhood-y feel. Bakery 2, otherwise known as Golden Bread, is no longer the only place to meet and greet, and not because the quality has gone downhill, but rather because the formula has changed. They've gone the way of self-service. As someone who hails from the land of self-service, all I can say is that the place has lost some of its original luster.

Bakery 3

But more to the point here, Búzios has now been blessed with yet another bakery, Bakery 3, and what a place this is! Run by the elegant, French-born Valérie and her equally elegant, German-born baker-husband, this newest hot spot of European-quality breads and rolls and pastries and other baked goodies has some of our friends touting it as the only bakery in town. But Mark and I frequent them all, of course, 'cause you never know which side your croissant is buttered on.




Dining Areas
(First posted on 8/18/14)

A year ago I was thrilling to the plethora of dining areas we have at home — five, count them, five, quite separate and distinct, each one of them used depending on the meal, the weather, and the number of people we need to seat. Well, could it be that five wasn't enough? We have added a sixth dining area to the mix. Outside the living room, and at the top of the stairs which lead to the beach, our new favorite dining area is intimate, cozy, protected from the glare of the setting sun, and it reminds us of Provence:



Girl's Night Out  
(First posted on 11/10/11, updated on 5/13/13)



The institution of Girls' Night Out that my friend Cristina and I began some 12 years ago is still going strong. We still meet once a week (barring illness, travel, etc.), we still alternate languages, and — believe me — neither one of us has aged one iota. Really.





Watchin' Movies
(First posted on 5/7/12, updated on 5/13/13)

In the two years since our update on how many movies Mark and I have watched since moving to Brazil, the number has risen to 2,088. Hey, it's our main source of entertainment . . .


Man in Water
(First posted 11/19/14, updated on 8/10/15)



This man fascinates me. He is still there, almost every day, standing in the water in front of our house, quiet, contemplative, pensive. Yesterday Mark and I passed him on the beach (he was on his way into the water), and we all nodded a hello. The man will never know what a world-renowned celebrity he's become.

Watchin' Movies

Part of our movie life in early 2010

I don't remember exactly why Mark and I felt we needed to take a little notebook and write down the title of every single movie we saw after moving to Brazil. Perhaps because we were seeing more movies than ever before? Perhaps because our memories had jointly begun to fail? Perhaps we thought this would be an Important List That Would Mean Something to Somebody Someday? To be honest, I admit that I do have this kind of obsessive behavior in my blood. I own, for example, a collection of playbills of every single play or show I ever saw from 1968 (Gilbert Bécaud at Carnegie Hall) to our attendance two weeks ago at Bibi Ferreira's one-woman tour-de-force in honor of her 90 years on stage, with each show's ticket stubs neatly slipped between the pages of the playbills. (Hmm, I wonder what this collection would fetch on Ebay? But I digress.) Once we were happily ensconced in our little town of Búzios, with its one movie theater (introduced in my blogpost of January 30th) we realized that movies would be a big chunk of our cultural life. And so, between that movie theater and several video rental stores, our movie list was spawned.

I have been as faithful as possible in keeping the list up-to-date, give or take occasional human lapses. I don't usually include films that we turn on and turn off within five minutes, either. As of this writing, we have seen 1,460 films in ten years, or 146 films a year, about 12.2 films a month. Put that way, it doesn't seem like much. But juxtaposed with a fairly normal life full of other things to do, I feel we're holding our own. And I don't just write down the titles, either. I've taken to adding a one-sentence "blurb," something to remember the film by, à la Howard Thompson, the former New York Times film critic famous for inventing and writing those pithy capsule reviews for the Times television listings. I don't come close to his wit, but I have fun trying.

To be seen . . . one day

I joked above about our faulty memories, but it really is hard to keep all these movie titles in your head, especially when they're in different languages. Say we read a review in English about a French movie and decide we want to see that film. That's two titles we have to remember (i.e., La Graine et le Mulet in the original French, and Couscous in English). Then that movie is released here in Brazil under a Portuguese name (O Segredo do Grão). That's three titles now swimming around in the deep end of our heads, and the titles are not always direct translations, either, which complicates things. Now we keep yet another list in another notebook, this one of films to-be-seen, along with all their titles, so that at any given moment in a video rental store we know where we are. Sort of.

I'm in charge of keeping a third list, too, but this one is just for the fun of it. "Film Nationality Count" is its name. The United States tops the list at 737 films, with France in second place (139) and Brazil in third (133). Could this list possibly be of any interest to anyone? Does it say anything about anything? I think it does, actually. I'm convinced that our living abroad has opened up our film-watching options. We may not see all the films that are released in the States, and we may never see all the films on my to-be-seen list, but we see plenty of high-quality cinema that never makes it to the U.S., and that's unfortunate for the American public. And I'm not so sure that even in New York we would have seen as many Argentine films as we have, or Israeli, or Afghani, or Uruguayan, or Turkish, or Mongolian, particularly now that Kim's Video is closed. Our movie lists are a good, solid history of a decade's-worth of cultural life. They track our tastes, they track what's available to us and they track our travels. They even show when we went from watching VHS to watching DVD (in 2005, we were slow). See you at the movies!

Gran Ciné Bardot

Our Gran Ciné Bardot

For those of us who love stage and screen, the cultural life of Búzios revolves around our little 111-seat movie theater, the Gran Ciné Bardot. Without it we might all have had to move. The theater was built about 18 years ago by a passionate cinephile, Mario José Paz, one of the hundreds of Argentines who fell in love with Búzios and have made it their home. To this day the Ciné Bardot is the only game in town, but we wouldn't want it any other way. The theater is both glamorous and relaxed, accessible to all yet intimate, a place to meet like-minded movie buffs and stay late into the night talking celluloid at the theater's café/bar.

The very first movie Mark and I saw at the Ciné Bardot was Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. I don't remember which we liked best, the movie, the comfy, red leather chairs or the old movie posters all over the place. Since that first screening we have kept an eager eye on the weekly programming. There are the occasional blockbuster new releases, especially during high season, and we understand that that's good for business. But Mario José hasn't forgotten his core audience, and there's always some Iranian or Chinese or Romanian movie as counterbalance. Occasionally there's a surprise. Some years ago I think Mario José just had a hankering to rewatch Casablanca, so he opened the theater on an off night and showed the film to a very appreciative audience. I don't think I had ever seen the film on the big screen. What a treat!

Mario José Paz

Mario José and his Ciné Bardot are the dapper host and elegant setting of the annual Búzios International Film Festival, but even so it remains a small-town operation. Years ago, as Mark and I waited to go in to see the hip-hop rapper film 8 Mile — give me a break, there was nothing else playing that weekend and it wasn't a bad movie — we saw Mario José's wife, Ana, casually hanging around the lobby, near the ticket window. When a group of young kids tried to buy tickets to this R-rated film, she sweetly, but firmly, intervened. "Does your Mom know you're here?" she asked the oldest kid. "Oh, yeah, sure..." he answered. "Give me your cell phone," and Ana hit fast dial number one, knowing there'd be a parent at the other end. The two oldest kids? They got to go in. But the two youngest, eight and ten, stayed outside with Ana until their parents came to pick them up. I have to say, we were impressed.

Shanah, in charge of it all, far right; Woody Allen, far left

Mario José has a personal collection of nearly 4,000 DVDs, and two years ago he decided to share them and expand into a video rental operation. To our abiding gratitude he opened the Ciné Bardot Videoteca. For a monthly fee of 50 reais ($28), members of the video club have unlimited access to this extraordinary collection. Who'd have thought we'd get the chance to rewatch Double Indemnity, The Man Who Would be King, Hannah and Her Sisters, The 400 Blows, not to mention all of Fellini, Chabrol, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Cassavetes, Capra, Kieslowski — the list is endless, and the depth of this collection is remarkable. In recent months we've watched all three seasons (106 episodes) of HBO's In Treatment, all 15½ hours of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz and all 9½ hours of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. Whew! A few months ago Netflix expanded into Brazil and showered us with "one free month" membership offers. So we took a look at the movies they were offering. We found nothing — nothing at all — to rival the treasure trove we already have.