At 8am on Saturday, two hours after the sun had risen over Copacabana, the Rosa Bar on the Rua Ronald da Carvalho was doing good business.
It’s four outside tables were occupied, each with a quart or two of beer sitting in the middle. The call beers in bottles “long necks” in Rio, and they serve the big ones, usually Antartica or Braham, inserted into a plastic cooler sleeve.
At one table, three old men sat and shouted at each other about life. On another, a mother and her two mid-twenties sons or lovers or merely just regulars at the Rosa, sat back and nodded at each other, eyeing their shared bottle with a satisfied thirst. On the last, two fellas had apparently stopped in on their way to the beach for a quick drink.
They wore speedos that had seen many summers, perhaps a few decades of summers. The weather was not made for the beach, there was the threat of rain in the air. This was a day for sitting at the Rosa.
Each day, on my way to the Paralympic Park, which is still called the Olympic Park because, well, it costs money to change names and the Olympics did some first, I try to walk a different route to the Cardeal Arcoverde Metro. The Paralympics seems very far away from the Copacabana, a place that has seen better days and has become a little seedy in places. I like seedy, but not too seedy. Seedy with a nice place to go home to at night. Seedy places sell cheap beer. Hotels and the Paralympic Park do not. Colleagues who were here during the Olympics said they quickly found dive bars to drink in close to their media accommodation, directly opposite the Olympic Park. They asked for beers on the first night and were given 330ml “long neck” beers. They saw the big long neck beers and asked for those instead.
The owner came across with one bottle and two glasses. With hand motions and the word dos, they indicated they would like one each, thank you.
Every night after that, when the two gringos from South Africa would arrive for a drink, two big long necks would be placed in plastic cooler sleeves and sent over to them. You need a place of your own when you are away from home for a spell, a coffee shop or a bar to be your hidey hole after a day of watching and thinking and writing, and thinking of new ways to do it all again the next day.
Myself and those two colleagues found such a place in the shopping mall next to the London Olympic Park, a “craft beer” bar, for wont of a better description, that sold a goodly selection of ales. Once the work was done, we’d head over there. It was called the Tap East, as I recall. It wasn’t the cheapest, but it was central enough for all of us to meet before we caught trains heading east or west.
At the Beijing Paralympics, myself and the late photographer Duif du Toit skipped the R60 a bottle beer prices in our five-star hotel and walked 200m down the road to a hole in the wall. There we sat on stools with the locals and drank R5 quart bottles of the same beer whilst the locals stared unashamedly at Duif’s long beard and longer hair. In Athens, we discovered a little place across the road from our hotel to wash down the day. The owner came to love us. We think.
I have not found my home from home in Rio. There has been little chance to do so, the time difference is a killer for South African media. I walked past Rosa’s late on Saturday on the way back to my hotel. It was open. The old men had gone. They were back the next day.
Independent Media