As we walked through the cruise terminal, a repurposed warehouse on the waterfront, the taxi touts standing by the murals along the street tried to get us into a cab.

“You will get lost.”
“It is dangerous, I know the neighborhoods.”
“Get in my cab.”

While there is street crime in Rio we were not interested in taking a cab. Rio’s trams are clean, convenient, fast, and for us, free. People over 65 ride free. I don’t mind paying for mass transit but the convenience of being able to get on without downloading an app and filling it with money or buying a card and charging it in machines with instructions in a language I don’t understand is a real plus. Just get on and ride. If you come to a station with a barrier show an id, “1946” got me on the tram. The inspector who got on at the Candelaria station to check fare cards or fare apps seemed embarrassed to be carding us, but we got a big smile when we showed him our ids.

We went to the Cathedral and the Candelaria Churches on the tram, (see separate post) visited the old city where it all started, and the ferry terminal all on the tram.

We stopped at Museum Plaza. Both museums we wanted to visit were closed on Wednesday. The closures were not on the webpages. Apparently, this started March 1 at the end of the summer. The Museum of Tomorrow is Rio’s science museum. It was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava who is styles himself as a neo-futurist. Neo-futurist uses new materials and construction techniques. Bucky Fuller is one of the fathers of the movement, Renzo Piano, Eero Saarinen, and Norman Foster were early leaders of the style. Calatrava designed the transportation center at the World Trade Center. I wanted to get into this museum, not necessarily to see the exhibits, but to experience the building. I did get to circumnavigate the building and take a close look at the exterior.

The museum is built on landfill jutting out from the waterfront. Fishermen take advantage of the location.

We got lost a few times. Once we took the wrong line and ended up in a neighborhood where a group of men were trying to put an air conditioner compressor onto a roof. The guys on the top were hauling on the ropes but the unit got stuck on a building cornice. The guys at the bottom hauled on their lines to pull the compressor away from the building but for a while they only succeeded in pulling the bottom out and pushing the top tighter under the cornice. We could watch without being conspicuous because we were waiting for a tram.

At another point we were looking for a scala, a set of tiled steps. We never found them, but we found ourselves in what I would call a transitional neighborhood. It was made up of fine old Art Nouveau buildings that had seen better days. Many 202of the paving stones that made up the mosaic of the sidewalk were not in place. There were a lot of homeless people, several of whom approached us for money.

I am not sure if the neighborhood was transitioning up or down. There were new McDonald’s and Starbuck’s. Many buildings were under repair with scaffolding around the buildings. All of the scaffolding had razor wire.

We were approached for money by a group of young people with flamboyant makeup. They were raising money for a class project. They spoke varying degrees of English but said they were raising money to pull a prank, “But that’s okey. Our class at university is expected to pull a prank.” I gave them 10 Real (a little under $2) and asked if they knew where the scala was. They did not, they were from a different neighborhood, but they heard this was a good place to ask for money. They found another student, also in makeup, who told us to turn left and look for a large group of tourists. We turned left, and found a large group of people who didn’t look like tourists, there were also a lot of police, drumming and shouting. In the past I would have waded into such a scene to find out what was going on. Today I decided not to, perhaps age brings wisdom. I looked up and saw a familiar building, a place we had been the day before. We gave up looking for the scala. It was hot, we were tired and the tram was air-conditioned.