This is very important in Brazil, I do not know what the violent crime rate is but I guess that it is astronomical. Wikipedia puts it as 10th in the world for the homicide rate. All the top ten, apart from South Africa, are in Central and South America and the Caribbean. It is encouraging that the rate of crime has been decreasing in recent years.

A couple of weeks ago one of Flavia’s friends mentioned that earlier that day masked gunmen burst into his brother’s house, locked everyone in a room while they stole whatever they could sell. Nobody was hurt. Three months ago the boyfriend of one of her friends was missing for a few days and a ransom paid. The method used was as reported here by the BBC It concentrates the mind wonderfully when the danger is so close.

Flavia’s apartment block has a pedestrian entrance which is guarded 24 hours a day. Nobody gets in or out without the permission of the guard who will remotely unlock the two gates as you reach them. The garage has another electric gate which is also manned. If he recognises you, the guard will open the gate. All the blocks I have seen have at least this level of security and often have video cameras as well.

Houses have high walls, alarms, sensors and are very hard to protect. Some people who could afford to live in a house prefer to live in apartment for the better security. It is very expensive indeed to properly protect a house.

Flavia constantly tells me to be careful, do not carry my iPod, do not look rich, do not look foreign (how can I do that? Or look rich ) to take care, be alert, don’t carry a camera, don’t talk to strangers and so on. To be fair I have never felt threatened and have been perfectly happy to wander around. There are areas where it would be foolish to enter but they are so obvious that it is not a problem. Rio sounds very dangerous indeed. Inland in the countryside it was very carefree and easy going.

I am not sure I would fancy walking home a few blocks in the middle of the night. Especially since when we drive home late at night I noticed that nobody stops at red lights. Flavia was very cautious about crossing green lights checking for traffic coming the ther way. I asked why and she told me that it is too dangerous to stop at night. There are few police on duty and there is a danger of being hijacked if you stop.

On a similar note it is interesting to see the precautions the shops take to protect themselves from their staff, customers and robbers. Often quite small transactions require you to deal with two or three people. An assistant will deal with you and help you choose your goods. She will pass these to a supervisor who will bag them, write out a ticket and pass the goods back to the assistant. You take the ticket to the cashier who collects the money, stamps the ticket and returns it to you to give to the assistant in exchange for the goods.

We went to several high quality kitchen utensil shops and they all had their doors locked. An assistant will let you in if she likes the look of you. This is normal in Spain for jewelers and some banks and uncommon in the UK. In the shopping mall up the road there is a bank. To get in you have to insert your credit card and enter your PIN. Other banks I have noticed have a guard at the door who unlocks it for each customer.

The supermarkets operate in a similar way to Europe but at the Walmart subsidiary a guard checks your till listing against the contents of your trolley before you are allowed to leave the store. There are lots of guards but they are not armed. Your shopping is always put in a bag for you and usually taken to your car.

There are a lot of shopping malls and many people prefer to shop in them because of the better security. They always have secure parking, plenty of guards and the obviously undesirable characters are not admitted.

All this is a complete contrast to Europe. There the most important thing is to employ as few people as possible to reduce costs; they accept relatively high losses as it is cheaper than prevention. The main security is through video surveillance but there are some security guards. Sometimes there are  extra guards behaving like ordinary shoppers and so are hard to spot. I have often left a store in the UK because there was nobody to help me or the staff are so poorly trained that they are unable to give advice.

Since Flavia came to Europe in early April I have been putting on weight -about four kilos.

More large meals!

So has she but I will not tell you how much. We both enjoy eating and drinking and have been taking less exercise than we should.  Just the wedding last week must have added a kilo. Things must change! The start of the Tour de France has inspired me. Put your money on Oscar Freire to win the points competition.

In fact I have already started and have lost a kilo. No alcohol on at least three days per week and a lot less food. In theory we walk around 6 km every evening. In practice we usually do it two or three times a week. I will try to get that up to six times a week. Flavia’s daughter Jana has lent me her bike and my first three rides have been 6, 9 and 12 km. I will increase that  to 20km most days.

The bike is a fetching shade of pink. As Brazilians are so keen on everything being colour co-ordinated I think I will probably have to buy some matching shorts and top like this. Maybe I should go for the hat and sun glasses too. The bike will be very good exercise as half the gears do not work and it is a bit small for me and is very hard work.

The problem is the Brazilian food. It is wonderful, I love it!  It is also high meat content, high fat and high calorie.  It is too much to expect me to show self-restraint when I go to an Aladdin’s Cave of a self-service restaurant. There are so many new things to try and different  ways of preparing them. And, of course, lots of European dishes to show Flavia. It is a shame that fruit and salad take so much time to clean here.

Last weekend there was lots going on as it was St Peter’s day, the patron saint of fishermen and high season for tourism in the mountains. We attended a big Festa Junina in Vitória on Friday evening. There was a covered stage in the park built for the Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul ll in 1991.  We watched a number of bands perform some very good music. I learned about Forró – a rock music style  with  strong African roots.

There must have been a couple of thousand people there with all sorts of kiosks selling food and drink. I was struck by several things. First there was little alcohol being drunk. This may have been partly caused by the new tough drink/driving laws. The second was that  few people were dancing, mostly they listened and chatted. The only applause came from the fans who were close to the front of the stage. Another different thing is that almost all the bands I have seen include some sort of piano accordion or concertina. The sound goes very well with rock music.

On Saturday we drove up into the hills behind Vitória. It is very beautiful and extremely fertile. We saw coffee, bananas, orchids and all sorts of fruits and vegetables being grown.  The area is mainly populated by people of German, Austrian and Italian descent. There are lots of restaurants in those styles.

German traditional dancing

I must admit I was not expecting to see men in leather shorts and girls in European country dresses dancing to accordion music. They are strongly promoting rural tourism – another similarity with Andalucía.

All the hotels except one were fully booked and we took the last room available in our hotel. We were a bit reluctant as there was a big wedding that evening and the bar and restaurant would be closed. The band in the VIP room would be about 10 feet over our heads. “No problem” said the receptionist, “join the party, nobody will notice”  We did not really believe this but brought some nice clothes just in case. We arrived mid-afternoon and saw the preparations. Two sound stages, a truck load of beer, another lorry carrying three enormous barrels of wine, a dozen cooks at a giant barbecue with what must have been a ton of meat, five or six different areas of the hotel were set up with bars, tables and chairs.  It was clearly going to be a big affair.

Around 9pm we joined the party.  I guessed that there were around 600/700 people there. Some women were wearing very beautiful long dresses and their men with nicely tailored suits.

The gatecrashers

At the other extreme some young men were wearing shorts, t-shirts and baseball caps on backwards.  In between these two there was clothing of every level of formality. It made me feel at home as I like the feeling that everyone is wearing exactly what they like to wear.

We found a table and sat down and almost immediately a plate of rice, beans and barbecued meat (churrasco) arrived .  I was hungry and enjoyed this. Half way through another plate arrived, piled high with beef. We turned down several offers of more plates of meat. Not even a hint of bread, salad, chips, fruit or anything healthy. Next came a plate of sausages, chorizo black pudding and other meat delicacies. Finally great trays of cakes and other sweet sticky things arrived, not my sort of food. In between I was befriended by a waiter whose only desire in life was to make me drunk. Every time my beer glass was less than half full he magically appeared and filled it up again.  Flavia was getting the same treatment from the waiter with the whisky bottle.

Towards midnight most of the important guests had left the VIP room so we went in and danced to a lively band.  After 20 minutes the waiters came in carrying great joints of roasted beef, carved them and passed the plates around the room.  I tried to eat some, I really did, but I was defeated. We staggered off to bed when the party finished around 1AM. The resident cock started crowing at 3.30AM and the cleaners started work above us at 6.00AM. I remembered why I prefer towns.

When we went to breakfast at 10.00 there was not much evidence of the party. We have asked the hotel to call us the next time they have a wedding