Lunch at Casa Momus

A short walk from Praça Tiradentes in downtown Rio de Janeiro, at Rua do Lavradio 11, there is a charming restaurant called Casa Momus. I had been meaning to check it out for a long time, but somehow I had never gotten around to it.

A quiet Saturday morning after visiting Crab at Praça Tiradentes I decided it was time.

It was easy enough to find, and even if the tables on the sidewalk looked nice I decided to go inside and up to the second floor.

I was not disappointed!

The restaurant is owned by three friends, foreigners who love Rio de Janeiro, they have restored an old building, filled it with beautiful furniture, art and even part of the famous cabinet from the Lidador store. There is more information here: http://casamomus.com.br/en/

It's a restaurant with plenty of charm, and the food turned out to be fabulous! It was a great choice for a Saturday lunch. As luck would have it this was the first Saturday of the month, time for the traditional street fair at Rua do Lavradio, complete with music and good deals. This is Rio my way!

CRAB - Centro Sebrae de Referência do Artesanato Brasileiro

Back in Rio where I belong! Time for some new walks around town!
Some time ago I visited CRAB - Centro Sebrae de Referencia do Artesanato Brasileiro - The SEBRAE reference center for Brazilian folk art. SEBRAE is an organ in Brazil that offers support to small and medium enterprises.http://www.crab.sebrae.com.br/

Crab is located at Praça Tiradentes in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Sebrae has restored three old buildings so that they are now interconnected and together they form Crab.The biggest building is what used to be the Solar Visconde do Rio Seco, it was bought in 1812 by the Count of Rio Seco to be his family home.It was later used by the Secretary of State and the Ministry of Justice, it now belongs to the City of Rio de Janeiro.

It was a rather grey Saturday morning that I ventured down to Praça Tiradentes:

The square is a short walk from the metro station Carioca. It is a beautiful square with a statue of Dom Pedro the first high on his horse.

The square has turned into a cultural center of Rio with two theatres, a music school, a cultural center, a library and more. The area has been rather abandones and run down, but with the restoration of the three buildings that form CRAB, the square already looks different.

As a great fan of Rio de Janeiro's old buildings it always makes me happy when I see a building that is carefully restored. These three buildings are gaining new life, and they look great!

The day I went there was an exhibition of Brazilian folk art, showing art from all over the country.

I just loved the way they showed how the material used turned into an object.

These are made of rubber from the Amazon.

And then there were lots of animals, but I especially loved the birds:

Another thing I liked was that the public was allowed to touch the objects, and to feel the materials. There was a whole "forrest" of seeds and nuts of different kinds:

There was also an exhibition called "Retratos Iluminados" - illuminated portraits - where traditional embroiderers from Sergipe and Alagoas together with the Campana brothers - two famous Brazilian designers - have created embroideries of faces:

The faces are the faces of the embroiderers themselves, so that they were for once the protagonists.

After seeing the exhibitions I visited the store, since the idea is to create new businesses, the store was, of course, wonderful!

After shopping, and deciding to come back for presents whenever I need something authentically Brazilian, I stopped to look at some more details in the building - it really is great!

CRAB is hereby reccomended! A great iniciative, a beautiful place and with the possibility of great buys.

A week in Mexico City! Part five.

Day six:
All good things must come to an end, and our week in Mexico City was almost over. After all that we had seen and done we were ready for a quiet day. We decided to spend the day in Xochimilco a borrough of Mexico City. Most of Mexico City was built upon lakeland, the whole city was made up by islands and canals, over time the lakes were drained and the canals filled in. Xochimilco is the only part of town where you can still see the canals and their ecosystem, in order to try to preseve them, the area was declared a world heritage site in 1987.

We took the metro to the final station - Xochimilco - from there it was a short walk to the "embarcadero" where we boarded a "traijenera". This is a non-motorized boat, that reminds you of the venezian gondolas.

On Sundays we were told hundreds of families come to be taken around the canals, the boats are fitted with a table and chairs, and you can buy food from other boats along the way.

We were alone in our boat and asked the boatman to give us a two hour trip. We really wanted just a quiet and peaceful day. As we floated along we saw that the islands around us where places where people lived, everybody gets around by boat.

It is a very beautiful and green area, and peaceful, just as we had wished for. One of the islands is called the Island of the Dolls, it is an island where hundreds of dolls hang in the trees:

The story has it that a man called Julian Santana Barrera found a girl drowned there and to pay her respect he put her doll up in a tree. Later he kept putting up dolls that he found until his death in 2001. The place turned into a tourist attraction and visitors bring more dolls.It is a very strange and sad sight, quite scary.

We were happy to move on! Further ahead we met a boat with "mariachis"playing for tourists in another boat.

We were quite impressed with the inhabitants that we saw moving from one island to the other standing up in the small boats. We however after two hours were ready to get back on dry land, We found a charming place close by to have lunch.

  

We headed back to downtown, and just had time to drop by the exhibition by Yoko Ono at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance.

It was a great exhibition, especially strong for calling the attention to the abuse so many women suffer daily in Mexico City.

We had only one day left of our week before heading home. We spent it shopping! Close by our hotel we found a space dedicated to Mexican design - just our kind of thing:

The last picture from our trip is from one of the streets as we were walking back to our hotel:

Sort of sums it all up; Catrina, the pink and white taxi, the bar...Mexico City turned out to be everything I had wished for and much more. It was a great place to celebrate my birthday!

A week in Mexico City! Part four.

Day Six:
After seeing the pyramids, could there really be an experience that would match it? Well, turns out in Mexico City there could! It was Frida Kahlo day!
As some of you know I have already declared this my Frida Kahlo year, for some reason Frida has just seemed to pop up everywhere.
Frida Kahlo's life began and ended in Mexico City in La Casa Azul - The Blue House -  and that was where we were headed:

Frida Kahlo was married to Diego Rivera - the artist whose murals we had already admired. For most of their tumultuous marriage it was Diego who was the famous artist. Today Frida is considered one of Mexico's greatest painters, she is known for her self-portraits, for her vibrant colors, for painting her passion and her pain.To see her house, to walk in the rooms where she lived and to sit in her garden was to get a little closer to her, and it just made me admire her even more.

There are not many of Frida's paintings at the museum, but there are a few, here are two:

Before coming to Mexico City two books had made me especially curious about seeing La Casa Azul, "The man who loved dogs" by Leonardo Padura Fuentes and "The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver. Both highlight the affair between Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, and both speak of the Blue House where Trotsky and his wife first lived when they came to Mexico, and of "the red house" where Trotsky lived until he was assassinated. So after we had visited La Casa Azul we headed a few blocks down the street to see the Leon Trotsky Museum.

The house is red, but it is also sad - the closed off windows, the iron doors between the rooms, it all shows what kind of fear Trotsky lived with.

We left the house talking about how two houses could evoke such different feelings, how one made us feel happy and at home, while the other made us sad.
But it was Frida who stayed with us, her love of life - present even in her last painting: