Rio de Janeiro: a few initial tips and observations

With five days to go until the Olympics begins (woo) I know a few friends are heading out here to watch things. So I thought I'd do a slightly premature blog with a few observations about life in Rio, although I've only been here two and a half weeks ...

1) Transport

Is, to be frank, pretty hideous and I think will be the main issue once the Games get going, although the Olympic lanes are supposed to be swinging into action. There's a metro, but at the moment it has just two lines. Line 4 (don't ask me what happened to line 3, really) opens for accredited Olympic personnel tomorrow and to people with 'RioCards' (like London's Oysters) on Friday. Just in time. The Metro itself is great, the trains are frequent, air conditioned to the extent I'm often cold in shorts and t-shirt and reasonably cheap at R$4.10 for a single (about 95p). I'm not entirely sure the Olympic card they're selling, at R$160 for seven days, represent good value unless you're planning a lot of travel, but on the other hand it's convenient not to have to get tickets every time and this will give you access to line 4, which gets you much closer to many venues.

Women have women's-only carriages for rush hour, which is lovely. They're much calmer than the mixed ones, although still crammed with people.

There are about a million buses and picking the right one is confusing. There's an app called Moovit which helps a little bit but nevertheless I find it hard to know what bus to get on. Our boss said don't use buses, but I have done a handful of times in affluent Ipanema and it's been fine. I'm not sure I'd get a bus at night. Bus tickets are R$3.80 for a single, and you can pay by cash. You have to go through a turnstile to get to the seats so the driver is separated from his passengers.

There are a number of 'BRT' (Bus Rapid Transport) buses which have dedicated fast lanes, and in the centre they've recently opened a tram line, although it's not very long yet. Seems popular though.

Taxis are pretty cheap and Ubers cheaper and plentiful. Ubers are also good for avoiding language issues, although we had one the other day who took a very roundabout route to get us back to Centro from Copacabana.

If you need to go between Centro and Barra di Tijuca (the Olympic park and village area), ask to go on the Linha Amarela. This is a toll road and adds about R$6 to your journey but it's usually tons quicker than the other route through town.

To get to town from the airport, I'd recommend one of the blue 'onibuses'. They go from outside the terminal (turn right as you leave the building, don't cross the road) and mine from GIG to Centro was R$14. Taxis can cost you over R$100. Although again, maybe not if you arrive late. The bus people can tell you which bus to get and they're pretty frequent. 

2) Safety

The streets are bristling with soldiers with rifles, police, and what look like state security guards - in Centro they're in red and white uniforms labelled 'Centro Presente'. All are armed.

There have been a handful of high-profile incidents involving athletes or journalists but to date I haven't felt unsafe anywhere. I've been pretty careful, although I have had my camera out a lot. I've walked a lot and I think the key is to make it look like you know where you're going. My main advice would be remember Rio's a big city, don't wave valuables around in quiet, unlit areas and don't go out late alone. I won't say don't go out in the dark alone as it's dark by 6pm at the moment, being winter. I've walked back from Uruguaiana metro station to the hotel a few blocks away at 8pm alone and it's been fine, although hanging around Uruguaiana isn't recommended as it's not the most salubrious district.

Basically, use your common sense, stay alert, and if in doubt, hail a cab.

3) Food

Brazilian do lunch properly. This means in the business district, everyone decamps from work for an hour or so and has a restaurant lunch - usually a buffet. Sandwiches or lighter fare is tough to find. There are 'juice bars' everywhere, some of which also sell various forms of pasty-type things (empadas) filled with meat or cheese. If you're lucky you might get a cheese or cheese and ham sandwich.

Round the touristy areas there's a lot of restaurants which stay open in the evening too, selling various forms of meat and fish, usually with rice and a sort of garnish called farofa - toasted cassava flour, sometimes with additional ingredients, which Brazilians have with EVERYTHING. It's actually quite good. Steak is omnipresent and the most common fish is tilapia. Sides tend to focus on rice: rice and beans is a staple here. Vegetarians are not well catered for but the fruit's great, I'm having melon, pineapple and mango every morning for breakfast at the moment.

Street food is pretty good although the choice is limited.The main savoury options are kebabs (steak or chicken, often served dipped in a sauce and coated in farofa) or tapiocas, which are a kind of pancake filled with your filling of choice. I had a cheese and tomato one the other day which was really rather nice. These things cost between R$5 and R$10 a portion. Then there are carts selling popcorn everywhere, and many of the tapioca stalls also sell churros and sweet tapiocas as well as the savoury versions.

Decent coffee is not that common. There are a few proper cafes but my roommate's had a couole of really dodgy cappucinos in normal cafes. At the venues, all the Brazilians have their coffee in little espresso-sized cups with loads of sugar; they have incredibly sweet tooths here.

Drink is generally beer. This often comes in giant 600ml bottles in their own little cooling bucket which you share between your party in tiny glasses. Or you can ask for a 'chopp', which is a glass of draught beer of about 300ml. By the beaches, it's capirinhas but I haven't managed to have one yet. Fail.

4) Environment and lifestyle

Rio is a big city and it's not the cleanest city. It can smell pretty rank in places with the stench of urine as people pee on the streets. There are a lot of homeless and the poverty is evident - as is the wealth if you go to places like Ipanema.

Despite the traffic when you get to the beaches or the Lagoa there are a lot of people running and cycling and the average weight is definitely less than in the UK. Brazilians care about their appearances!

The plumbing system is also not great and while it's fine in our hotel everywhere else I've been has signs saying don't put loo paper in the loo. For those of us used to doing this it's a weirdly tough one to remember, even if you're looking at a sign ...

Long Lagoa days

I've now been working from the Lagoa stadium most days for just over a week. It really is a stunning venue, with the statue of Christ the Redeemer looking down over the lake and hills all around.

For the most part, the water has been pretty good. On several days including today it's like a mirror in the mornings with the wind picking up slightly in the afternoons. Yesterday it was much worse with white caps in parts of the lake, and they postponed the start of training, before opening the course only from the 1000m mark.

View across to the stands

Of course the mainstream media have been mostly focusing not on how flat the water is but on how clean it is. There was a bit of a fuss last year when a number of the US junior team got sick at the Junior World Championships, although given that very few other athletes got ill it does seem as likely that the Americans picked something up on their flight to Brazil or through eating something dodgy as through the water. US rower Megan Kalmoe wrote an excellent, passionate response to the negative press last week (which, reproduced on The Guardian, picked up a whole bunch of people saying she was over-privileged and moany and missing the point that she thought the press should focus on some of the more serious problems in Brazil).

A friend introduced me to Manoela, a Brazilian journalist and rower who trains out of Botafogo rowing club, and she kindly took me out in a double last week before the lake was closed to non-Olympic rowers. Manoela says she's been rowing on the Lagoa for 20 years and has never got sick. You wouldn't drink the water (it's partially salty anyway), but equally a few splashes are unlikely to be harmful. They're monitoring quality every day and the word is that at the moment, the water in the Lagoa is the best quality it's been for years.

Botafogo is one of several clubs around the lake. Flamengo is the one most-affected by the Games as they row basically from the finish line and their whole area is taken up with Games stuff. There's a permanent rowing stadium on site and a cinema and restaurant complex - we're in there, along with the workforce and athlete dining areas, and they're using a cinema as the press conference room! Then they've added an extra grandstand and all sorts of tents for everything needed to run an Olympic regatta - it's quite an operation.

I'm working from the venue media centre alongside a great group of mostly Brazilians in the press operations team, led by our venue media manager Cora who I worked with in London. Although my job is less operational than theirs I'm trying to help a bit as they prepare the media centre for journalists, who arrive next week when we open for business properly.

At the moment we're arriving fairly early (although it'll be earlier during competition). There's a quick team meeting and then everyone gets on with what they need to do. I check social media and news websites for any updates about rowers or canoeists I ought to be aware of, and then about 9.30am I've taken to heading over to the boat park to see who's around. ONS writers get privileged access which we have to be careful not to abuse, so I'm mostly looking for coaches who are hanging around waiting for their rowers to get off the water to ask if I can speak to the athletes.

Ergos. Ugh.

So far I've been aiming for some of the less well-represented nations. Obviously I want to speak to the handful of defending Olympic champions who are back for another shot at gold, but chances are we'll interview them several times during the competition. My challenge is to hunt out the stories behind some of the other rowers - the Angolan lightweight men's double scull, the first Angolans to row at an Olympic Games; the very sweet and slightly shy scullers from India and Vanuatu, absorbing everything with hopes of achieving their best possible results; the incredibly young Chilean lightweight women's double, who are both just 19; the lovely Polish Wierzbowska sisters who despite being complete opposites are having in a ball in their pair; and former Oxford Blue Michelle Pearson who's made it to the Olympics to row for her native Bermuda and had brilliant things to say about Title IX.

It's great fun, although there's been a fair bit of hanging around, but I've finally got the technology working to take my laptop to the boat park and get online while I wait.

OBS interviewing Phil Rowley, coach of the Angolan LM2x

Once I've got enough quotes, whether through an interview I've done or through listening to an interview done by the Olympic Broadcast Service (who do basically what we do, except for television), I head back to the media centre and file the quotes and maybe a story from them. There's usually some research or admin to do too. Lunch is much like the food we had at the MPC - salad, rice and beans or pasta, a cooked veg, and a choice of a veggie option, chicken/fish, or beef, then something like a chocolate mousse or a bit of fruit.

Later on I tend to head back to the boat park to catch the afternoon training rush, although it's a little quieter then. Currently we have perhaps a third of the nations present and New Zealand is the only big team - they had a few boats training from Sunday and everyone else arrived today (cue a few starstruck people eyeing the nailed-on-for-gold Kiwi pair). France arrived today too and Australia started getting their boats on to racks; we're expecting the USA and GB in the next couple of days and then it'll be really busy.

Next week our press ops volunteers arrive, in time for the media rush, and also my two American 'flash quote reporters' who'll be helping collect reactions from the rowers after they race. It'll be good to be a bigger team ahead of the Games beginning on 6 August - only eight days to go!

Santa Teresa

Friday was 'lockdown' day at the MPC - the day they do a security sweep to ensure that everything on site is legitimate. So we had the day off.

Sadly it dawned rather drizzly, and plans to walk to the statue of Christ the Redeemer were canned. It brightened up enough to warrant an outing and my roommate Lisa and I set out around noon to walk to Santa Teresa.

Santa Teresa is a village-y sort of neighbourhood, very arty and cool (although not really massively prosperous). It sits on one of Rio's many hills above Lapa and Centro, with wonderful views out over the bay. You can catch a free tram up there over the Aqueduto do Carioca, but we thought on our feet was the best way forwards.

We walked up the Escadaria Selarón (why do a touristy photogenic thing once if you can do it twice, right?) and then into Santa Teresa proper, stopping regularly for photos as we climbed a pretty steep hill. We'd hoped to meet some of our colleagues, who said they were at the last tram stop, so we gaily kept on following the tram lines until we realised we weren't finding them. On the way a man in a car stopped, wound his window down and warned us to put cameras away between shots as people drive past on motorbikes and snatch them. I'm pretty confident my shoulder strap would make that tough, but followed his suggestion, although frankly it was a pain to keep stopping, digging the camera out of the bag, taking a picture and putting it away again ...

Eventually we did find our colleagues for a bite to eat, then as we were starting to head downwards again past the arty shops another two groups of ONS-ers arrived too so we teamed up to find a viewpoint - well worth the walk.

Back down the Escadaria and on the hunt for a place for a beer - they're known as boteco or botequim here - we passed what looked like two guys asleep on the pavement opposite. Homelessness is rife in Rio and you see people, almost always men, bedding down everywhere. I even saw one guy bang in the middle of the pavement on my first full day. But as we walked on it was impossible not to notice that their upper bodies were shrouded in black plastic. In discussion over our beers a short while later everyone agreed that the two were not asleep, but dead: lying on the pavement awaiting someone to take them away. It was Friday night, with everyone leaving work and a busy food market in the park just metres away; a sobering reminder that Rio, amid its chaotic beauty and vibrancy, is a harsh place to live for very many people.

Games countdown has begun

There hasn't been an awful lot to blog about the last few days as we've spent most of it in training. Normal days of the week (Monday to Friday working, weekends off) simply don't apply in the weeks running up to an Olympic Games - you work when you're asked to!

We started off by picking up our uniforms from the Uniform and Accreditation Centre, which is in a vast complex called the Cidade do Samba where I think they hold samba festivals and store the floats for Carnival. Luckily we didn't need to pick up our accreditation as there was a very long queue which got longer in the two hours or so we were there, mainly for local staff and volunteers to get the all-important document you need to get into anything at the Olympics.

As 'operational' staff we get to wear a fetching yellow t-shirt which is actually nicer than it looks. Everyone is a big fan of the green shoes, which are apparently really comfy (I haven't worn mine much yet). Everything is branded with the Olympic logo and we'll have to go and get new t-shirts and jackets for the Paralympics in September.

Once everyone in our ONS team had picked up their uniform we bundled into taxis for the journey back to Barra, where the Olympic Park and the Main Press Centre (MPC) are based. Barra is not close to the downtown part of Rio and Fridays are the worst days for travel - apparently everyone drives to work on Fridays rather than taking public transport. It took us 90 minutes to get there but eventually we made it in time for lunch and a series of admin tasks, including getting Brazilian phones and getting set up on the Rio 2016 email systems. Lunch and dinner, when we're there, at the MPC is pretty good: there's always salad, then two sorts of rice and the very traditional Brazilian 'feijao' or beans, then a choice of meat (usually beef or chicken) or fish or a veggie option. Plus fruit and cake or yoghurt. It's easy to eat far too much!

Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent at the MPC too, learning about the CMS for inputting news stories and how to navigate the vast repository of information and data provided for journalists. When it goes live properly, this system has biographies of every athlete, and keeps journalists up to date with results, start lists, facts, rules and of course our news stories and quotes from athletes throughout the Games. It's an incredible resource and we need to know how to use it properly as of course time is always of the essence in getting quotes and news out there.

Road to work with Christ the Redeemer ahead

The three of us staying downtown have had to commute out to Barra each day. There's two routes - via the toll road, or 'Linha Amarela' (literally, 'yellow line') which is a bit quicker and takes us past one of the biggest favelas in Rio, the Complexo de Maré. The favela is divided from the road by big plastic screens and pedestrian footbridges allow people to cross from one side to the other. The other route is more scenic, taking us under the Corcovado (the hill with Christ the Redeemer on top) and past the rowing venue and Rio's racecourse, before coming through the more upscale bits of Barra. It's a bit of a trek but at least we've seen more of Rio than our colleagues staying closer to the Olympic Park. The other night on the Linha Amarela we passed two lads riding horses bareback down the road, which even made our taxi driver exclaim.

Being in town also meant that on Saturday night, as we left the MPC before dinner, we went to grab a bite near the hotel and found a couple of bars in the backstreets with music playing and a real party atmosphere. That felt a bit more like Brazil and it was nice to sit out with a cold beer and good company and soak it all up.

Main press centre at sunset

Our team is fantastic - a fairly small, but incredibly experienced group of journalists from around the world. Quite a lot of us have worked at least one Olympics before and I know several of the group from London. Others have worked at other major sporting events or are serious sports specialists. It's quite a privilege to be included in the group and I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not just a rowing geek and that business journalism skills transfer over quite nicely to sports. I shouldn't be any more intimidated interviewing the Kiwi pair than I am interviewing the managing partner of a law firm with turnover of over £1bn!

We've been given today or tomorrow off, which gives me the opportunity to visit my venue at the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas this afternoon as well as doing a spot of sightseeing and postcard-buying. Athletes start arriving at the weekend and most of the venues open for training on Sunday or Monday, and that's when the work will really start as we seek out news stories ahead of competition.

In the meantime everyone's keeping an eye on the IOC's decision on the Russian team, following the report yesterday linking the Russian government to state-sponsored doping practices. If Russia is excluded from Rio it will have an impact on many sports, including 'my' sports of rowing and canoe sprints. It's been interesting reading some of the initial reaction from the rowing community; Olympic champion Mahé Drysdale posted a strongly-worded comment on the affair on his Facebook page yesterday and Matthew Pinsent (@matthewcpinsent) has also been outspoken on Twitter, for example. That story will keep on developing in the fortnight before the Games begin.

Getting to know Centro

Rio is famed for its beaches, but after a day and half here I haven't seen a beach. I've seen the sea - it's hard not to - but I chose to spend the couple of days I had free before starting work exploring my immediate neighbourhood.

I've been initially accommodated in Centro, Rio's downtown, which is full of a mixture of office buildings and old cobbled streets with old buildings. It's a real contrast which I rather like. In fact Rio is definitely a city of contrasts: a fancy clothes shop might have a man outside selling popcorn from a cart, and there's very definitely a class/wealth divide which is easily visible. It's also a very busy place but so far I haven't felt unsafe at all; there's a heavy police presence and I'm being more careful than I would normally be with regard to valuables, but Centro at least seems pretty safe in a big city sort of way.

I got my bearings first by walking up to Praca Maua, a square by the waterfront which has been recently redeveloped. There are two museums there - the Museu de Arte do Rio, and the Museu de Amanha - and a big sign reading #CidadeOlimpica, which is attracting lots of people to sit and pose on it. The Museu de Arte is in an interesting building, again recently-built, which links a new edifice with an old one and has a rooftop terrace. As art museums go it's not bad, although a couple of the exhibitions were entirely in Portuguese with not even a brief explanation in English which meant I was able to get the gist but not much more of the curators' thinking.

#CidadeOlimpica

Across the square I was utterly entranced by the Museu do Amanha (literally, the Museum of Tomorrow) which was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. It's about science and sustainability, apparently, and there was a big queue of people outside it waiting to go in so I just walked around and took lots and lots of pictures!

Museu do Amanha

On day two I sketched myself a walking itinerary based on Lonely Planet recommendations and Google Maps and, in typical Harris family fashion, set out on foot to explore in more depth. I visited an awful lot of churches, something Rio has in abundance, beginning with the astonishing gilded Monastery of Sao Bento. Up on a hill above Praca Maua, the monastery is very simple from the outside but inside is a riot of gold. It's stunning. It also had a couple of men carefully cleaning and sweeping, which was something I encountered in every church I visited all day. There was always someone cleaning.

Monastery of Sao Bento

I popped into any number of churches during the day but the monastery was one of my favourites. The other church which stands out is a complete contrast. Rio's cathedral is, from the outside, an absolute montrosity - a giant concrete cone, opened only 40 years ago - but inside it has four enormous stained glass windows which are entrancing. I loved it. It was kind of bonkers but it worked.
 

Cathedral interior

The other church which I suspect is on most agendas is the Igreja de Nossa Senora de Candelaria, stuck on a traffic island at the end of the busy four-lane Avenida Presidente Vargas. Inside, it has beautiful paintings on the ceilings and the light coming through the windows high in the dome made for stunning effects.

Apart from churches, the other two main sights of the day were the Museu Historico Nacional and the Escadaria Selaron.

For a mere R$8 (less than £2) the museum takes you through Brazil's history, from prehistory to independence. I hadn't realised that the Portuguese royal family were so enamoured with Brazil that in the 19th century Don Pedro I declared he was splitting the country off from Portugal (which it had previously been united with under the Portuguese crown) to become an empire. The empire lasted less than a century and saw just two emperors, Pedro I and Pedro II, before independence in 1889. The museum had all sorts of interesting artefacts, like coins, paintings, weapons, furniture and so on, from all eras of the country's history, and was a really useful primer for two months here!

The Escadaria Selaron was a bit of a surprise because I hadn't been planning to cross the line between the Centro district and the Santa Teresa district quite yet. Rio has a walking trail and there were useful signs all over pointing towards sights, and as I was working out which way to go next there was a sign for the Escadaria.

Escadaria Selaron

Basically this is a stairway up a hill in Santa Teresa, which artist Jorge Selaron has decorated with hundreds of brightly-coloured tiles. At the bottom a description explained that he's now collecting tiles from all over the world, and when he gets a new one, swaps it with an old one. So the stairway has tiles with pictures of British telephone boxes, Alcatraz, Dutch windmills - all sorts of things. It's quite bonkers and is quite lovely. It's also the only thing I saw on my whole day where it was teeming with tourists and I had to be patient to get pictures which didn't feature someone else's selfie. At the top, most people turned around and went back down the stairs; I turned left and went down the street instead which was much nicer. The houses were a little shabby but there was painting and graffiti everywhere, music playing inside and a real sense of atmosphere and the real Rio.

Santa Teresa street

 So, so far, I like Rio. I'm very much looking forward to starting work today, meeting my ONS colleagues, getting my Rio 2016 uniform, and getting stuck into whatever the next few weeks have to offer.

Rio here I come!

So here I am at Heathrow Airport. After months of planning it's finally time to leave the rainy Brtish summer and head to Rio de Janeiro to join the Olympic & Paralympic News Service for two months.

During the course of the few months in which I've known for sure that I was off to Rio a lot of people have asked what exactly I'll be doing there. Essentially, ONS (and PNS during the Paralympics) acts as a sort of news agency for accredited journalists. Anyone who is a member of the accredited media is able to use ONS's services during (and just before) the Games. Our team will produce news stories, race reports, quotes from athletes and other bits of content which can then feed into the media's reporting of the event. You won't see my byline on anything but keep your eye out as sometimes the papers credit ONS for content with a little 'ONS' at the end of an article, much like you might see 'PA' or 'Reuters' on a major mainstream news story. I think I will be focusing primarily on rowing, and possibly canoe sprints, but will hopefully also get pulled in for other sports too.

I'm joining an immensely experienced team of journalists. I did a similar job in London and on my first day I confess to being a little overawed by the skills and experience in the room. Most of my colleagues had worked on several Olympics, World Championships and similar events. I'd done two short stints as a volunteer in the media centre when the rowing world cup and world champs came to Dorney in 2005 and 2006.

The job in London was a challenge in many ways but I made it through and went back to the day job bitten by the events reporting bug. I then managed to secure a reporter role for the Rugby News Service for last year's Rugby World Cup, where I discovered that being a good journalist and doing your research can make up for not knowing a huge amount about a sport.

But Rio's different. I've worked all my other events as a sabbatical from a full-time B2B journalist role, and all of them from home. This time, I've ditched the job. I've found a flat sitter (thanks Nat!), said goodbye to my friends, and have planned six weeks of travelling after the Paralympics are over. I'll be going from Rio to Paraty on the coast, then on to Sao Paulo, before flying to Iguacu Falls on the border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. From Iguacu I'm flying to Lima in Peru, from where I'm going to get a bus to Cusco to walk the Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu. Then it's on to Lake Titicaca, Arequipa and finally Paracas before flying home again via a couple of nights in Miami. And then ... well, who knows?

At this point, I'm just looking forward to the challenge of working at the greatest sporting event on earth, surrounded by the people in the world who are the best at their jobs - whether that job is making a boat go fast, or doing any of the thousands of other tasks which are essential to make sure that the Olympics runs smoothly.

I'm going to use this blog to share experiences, photos and tips, so please follow to join me (virtually) on my big adventure!