My daughter Elissa, my wife Terry, and me before the match enjoying some Brahma Chopp beers, which I would describe as Brazilian Bud Lite.
Last month, four of us (my wife, our kids Elissa and Jack, and me) took a one-week vacation to Rio de Janiero, Brazil. It was the first time any of us had been to South America, and the trip lived up to our every expectation.
Rio is a wonderful place with a rhythm and vibe all its own. I highly recommend it to anyone anxious to experience Brazilian culture and the friendly Brazilian people, though it does present some minor obstacles for the American traveler.
For one thing, while there are English words on signs all over the city, relatively few people there speak our language well. I wouldn't expect them to (it's THEIR country, after all), but we tend to get spoiled traveling to many popular destinations in Europe and Asia where you can find English speakers on almost every corner.
We learned the words you need to be polite in Brazilian Portuguese, including "hello," "goodbye," "please," "thank you," and "I request that you not steal my iPhone." Beyond that, we relied on hand gestures and the godsend of an app known as Google Translate.
Fluminense supporters waving flags
and screaming at the top of their lungs.
There's also quite a bit of traffic in Rio, so don't expect to get anywhere quickly. The locals accept this as a fact of life and make up for it by driving like suicidal maniacs.
That's an exaggeration, of course, but not by much. We got around via Uber, and we found the Uber drivers to be somewhat aggressive in their driving. By "somewhat aggressive" I mean changing lanes on a whim without really looking, not bothering to even tap the brakes at stop signs, and seemingly targeting pedestrians for no other reason than the sheer sport of it.
While the Uber rides provided enough thrills to last us a long while, so did my favorite part of the trip, which was the chance to attend a soccer match between Rio-based teams Fluminense and Vasco de Gama.
We did this through a tour company that specializes in bringing foreigners to Brazilian soccer games. Buying tickets directly as a non-Brazilian is a difficult experience – perhaps intentionally so – so you have to do it through an accredited agent.
Our tour guide Leo was outstanding. He was effortlessly trilingual (Portuguese, Spanish and English) and did a good job preparing us all for the experience.
Because Brazilian soccer is an experience. From the pregame festivities outside historic Maracanã Stadium to the match itself, rare is the time you can even hear yourself think. Everything about it is loud. All the time.
A small portion of the pregame crowd near Maracanã Stadium.
The streets around Maracanã were filled with people sporting Fluminense and Vasco de Gama colors. While it was technically a home match for Fluminense, the Vasco supporters seemed to be out in greater numbers.
We were told that Vasco fans generally draw from the region's working classes, while Fluminense fans are somewhat more affluent.
Regardless, we didn't overtly root for either team. We just tried to soak in the atmosphere. Outside the stadium there were fireworks aplenty (M-80s and bottle rockets mostly) and people yelling specific chants/cheers for their team. Europeans and North Americans mingled freely and happily with Brazilians and other South Americans, giving the whole thing an air of intense but friendly rivalry more than dark menace.
Once inside, we were struck by a few things that differed greatly from American sporting events:
- The only reason we knew the Brazilian national anthem was playing was because the players stood at attention and the words appeared on the video boards. The fans continued cheering loudly as if nothing important was going on. We couldn't hear the song at all.
- Once the match began, everybody stood. Everybody. The whole time. There was virtually no sitting.
- On a related note, people clogged the aisles of our section rather than just staying close to their seats. If you wanted to go get a beer or visit the restroom during the match, you had to wade through a dense sea of screaming fans standing in your way.
- I say "their seats," but there is no assigned seating in Maracanã Stadium. You just claim a seat and sit in it. If you leave, the seat is fair game for anyone else.
That's me and my son Jack before the start of the match.
Each side's supporters seemed to have an arsenal of chants and songs they would shout together in large groups. These were obviously in Portuguese (as were all game announcements and video board messages), and Leo tried to teach me one for Fluminense.
When the Fluminense fans launched into this particular chant, Leo turned around and looked at me like a teacher quizzing a pupil, but I immediately forgot almost everything I had learned. Instead I just sort of yelled along using nonsense words that somewhat approximated what I heard from the fans around me.
No matter, though. It was still a lot of fun.
In fact, the whole thing was a lot of fun...loud, crazy, and carried out in a beautiful language I will never be able to learn no matter how hard I try. But in the end, Fluminense's 2-1 victory (even including the shower of beer that hit us when Vasco scored the first goal of the match) was undeniably enjoyable.
I will not, however, be trying out anything I learned in Brazil at, say, the next Cleveland Guardians game. Between standing in someone's line of sight the whole game and claiming seats for which I don't own a ticket, something tells me I would be in a lot more danger at Progressive Field than I ever was at Maracanã.
