- Architect -

What excited me the most about this trip to Brazil was definitely the positive human energy and the diversity.  Although visiting only three brazilian cities, it was like meeting many different societies and lifestyles, all of them consisting different faces of the same nation. Luxury and bare poverty, well-organized neighborhoods and anarchic favela communities, modern architecture wonders and ugly buildings or stadiums of massive design, all these at a distance of one block or less one from another, all these always surrounded by a wild, lush nature.

The city of Brazilia remains in memory as the failure of the modern dream, the weakness to predict that a perfect technical and aesthetic creation would end up to be a ghost, consisted by empty expensive residencies, abandoned glorious streets and a great past haunting the common people who have to come every day to work there and, when the night comes, take the train back to their modest city and home.

A traveler can tell, at the end, that this nation, although cultivating or swallowing these contradictions based on financial, political and social disorders, has really strong common characteristics, such as loving to listening to bossa nova, dancing with excitement, meeting new people, smiling spontaneously and flirting… things that make life bearable and easy. It doesn’t matter if he/ she is in a trendy all-day bar in the heart of Sao Paolo, wearing an expensive suit and relaxing from a hard day at work, or on a moist, filthy street of a favela in Rio de Janeiro, hanging around with the gang: Brazilians are always looking at the bright side of life!