Porcão, as promised, was a glutton’s paradise. The place was big; there was an extensive and well-stocked salad bar that was the centerpiece of the room. We were sat, given drinks and plates, and more or less pointed at the salad. I shouldn’t have even bothered, had I understood what was coming, but I went and had a mysterious and yummy appetizer. I’d list the ingredients for you except that I honestly didn’t recognize a single one of them, but it was colorful and crunchy and satisfying and covered with creamy dressing. But that’s all really just a warmup. The waiter brings a list of side dishes to accompany our main course, and we choose two–fried banana and something with black beans. And then the madness starts. See, they give you each a little coaster that’s red on one side and green on the other. The idea is that if your coaster is green-side up, that means you want food, and the waiters that are roving the restaurant with sizzling cuts of meat will slice some off for you when they spot your green coaster. The red side up is supposed to mean ‘please don’t bring me any more’. In practice, though, the red side seemed only to slow rather than stop the constant tide of meat-bringing. We intended to take it slow, finish our salads at least, before turning the coasters over to green. Some of the waiters passed us by, but the one with the rump roast marched up immediately and insisted we take some, and really he was right–Sean claims it’s the best beef he’s ever had. It was hot and fell apart in our mouths and the fat was utterly creamy and crispy on the outside. But I think a few other waiters noticed that we had accepted something despite our forbidding coasters, and every so often one would cruise up to our table to offer us something else–the prime rib, sliced off the haunch thinly, before our eyes, and to our taste, was the second best, and then there was sausage and some chicken breasts that were only okay and a medallion of pork and on and on and on. I did turn my coaster to green, once, just to see if it made a difference, and I had to turn it back over in about four minutes when I feared that I would lose my plate under the pile of flesh that descended upon it. Our side dishes remained relatively undimished, due in no small part to the fact that the minute one of us served ourselves from one of the family-style dishes on our table, it would immediately be replaced by a full plate of the same thing, even if the old plate was still nearly half-full. It was endless eating. I had to stop well before trying everything. But fun, it was–like a disneyland for meat. I liked it. I’ll never go back.

After giving up, we paid our bill and waddled down the street in search of something to distract us from our painfully distended bellies. We were lucky! We saw a nice bar on the street and went in the wrong door and ended up going up some stairs and into a packed and intimate little club where a woman was singing beautiful bossa nova backed by an excellent guitarist. We stayed and were rewarded by another band–the main event; we had wandered in during the opening act, apparently. These guys were clearly at least somewhat famous–the place went wild when they took the stage, and about half the crowd sang along every word to about half the songs. It was great. The finale came when two dancers in barely-there, glittering bikinis and a guy with a hand drum came up the stairs; the girls got everyone on their feet, there was much dancing and revelry, and I’m not even sure anyone really noticed when the band left the stage. At least, I didn’t–but I was three caipirinhas in by that point, which may make an exception out of me.

We were rewarded for our indulgence the next morning, unfortunately, with twin cases of diarrhea. Bleah. Something we ate at Porcão? Probably. But all our plans for the day were canned when we realized that we pretty much had to spend most of it confined to our hotel room and the proximity of the toilet. It didn’t make for a super fun new year’s eve day, but fortunately the pains were gone by early evening, so we could don our new white finery and join the throngs headed toward the beach.

And throngs they were. Vinicius had told me that the city of Rio was preparing for somewhere on the order of 2 MILLION extra people to descend on the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema for the occasion. I’m sure I only saw, oh…I don’t know. If there are people in every direction for as far as you can see in a flat, open space with little elbow room, how many people is that? A few thousand? A hundred thousand? But I’ll believe any high number you give me for the number of people celebrating the new year in Rio last night. (Happy new year, everybody, by the way!) Most were dressed in white. We got there (where? we had no idea where to go for any particular festivity, so we just walked the few blocks to the beach we were nearest) before the real crowds arrived, jaunting down at 9 or so. We ordered drinks from a tent on the beach, which apparently entitled us to a couple of beach chairs, which we set up halfway between the ocean and the bar. And so we passed the last few hours of 2005–reclined on the sand, sipping piña coladas, watching the parade of pretty people in white as they trickled in to join us. There were families with their kids and couples like us and older people and grinning teenagers, and the street behind us was packed with street vendors selling ears of corn and churros and flashing things to wear around your neck, and flowers; everywhere these long-stemmed flowers were being purchased. I had vaguely remembered that there was something about the tradition of throwing flowers into the ocean at midnight on this day, and intended to get one when my hands weren’t so full of yummy hot dog (they put crispy, tiny french fries on them! what a brilliant idea!) and then later when I thought about it, there was still plenty of time, I was comfortable in my chair, happy watching a happy crowd. There was a dj playing great beats behind me, and I got up and danced with strangers for a few minutes, though I couldn’t get Sean to join me. Eventually, the beach was well and truly packed. I caught sight of people holding their flowers high and marching down to the ocean, and realized I had never gotten a flower for myself, though I still didn’t know, exactly, what I was supposed to do with it; but it seemed like a lovely ritual and one that I wanted to participate in so I left Sean with our chairs and dodged my way back up the beach to the street to find myself a flower. But the street was far more crowded than the last time I had visited it; I walked past a place I was sure I had seen flowers sold earlier, but there was no one there now; I ducked and weaved my way through the ever-more-dense crowd in a search that, at the time, felt oddly frantic. I did feel more or less like time was running out, and my fear was confirmed when I caught sight of the giant countdown clock on the towering Mariott above me; there were only eleven minutes and some-odd seconds left in the year, and here I was running about in a panic far away from my love! I gave up on the flower and set myself to getting back to Sean and our stakeout before the year ended without me. This is a harder task than it sounds when everybody is dressed in the same color and the beach looks the same everywhere and the people are so thick that to see a particular person (who is sitting down) through them is quite impossible. But fortunately I recognized the tent that had lent us the chairs, and blundered about until I found our spot, and was reunited with Sean with barely eight minutes left in the year. There was a helicopter going back and forth and shining a spotlight down on the beach and people screamed cheerfully and waved whenever it passed and everybody was on their feet and the countdown was at hand, and people didn’t count together or anything, it was more of a rising cheer that broke like a wave at the critical second and I kissed Sean and was happy and then the fireworks started.

This was the thing that inspired the title of this post; in a way, the fireworks display that we saw reminded me a little of the gluttony of Porcão. I don’t mean that to sound like a bad thing; it was absolutely luxurious, it was being rich. There were three barges out at sea that the fireworks were coming from, and when the hour started, they just let go. For those of you reading this who have seen, say, the Seattle fireworks on the 4th of July, which are nicely choreographed to music and build to a crescendo and then a finale and then it’s over–this was a completely different event. The START of this show looked like the Seattle finale. The air was immediately thick with all kinds, all colors, all sorts of fireworks, one after another, overlapping each other, running into each other, illuminating each other’s smoke, and it went on for longer than any firework show could possibly go on, and the entire sky was filled with them from the three different barges. The crowd w0uld cheer evey good one, and there was a lot of them. And then, finally, there came a time when, impossibly, the fireworks came even thicker and faster, and there were some particularly glorious good ones, and the people went crazy with appreciation, and then no more fireworks, and everyone applauded together on the beach, which felt unifying and very good. But before the applause had died down, the fireworks had started up again–maybe the fuse-lighters just needed to catch their breath, or something–and the willy-nilly lighting of the sky went on. At one point, a giant fire on one of the barges was visible from the shore, and it continued to burn throughout the rest of the show–whatever they were dealing with out there, it seemed not to impede the output of that ship. When the show ended, it just petered out, no finale–how could they possibly top what had been going on for nearly an hour?–just a few less in the sky, and a few less, and a pause, and then one or two more as if somebody had found some that had rolled off into a corner and wanted to make sure they got used, and then no more. And everybody clapped again and then there was one more. And everybody clapped again and this time it was really over, and the parade of white started again in the other direction.

When the fireworks began, I was really feeling a little helpless and unprepared. I felt like I had come into the new year without being ready–it’s like those dreams actors have sometimes about being about to go onstage but not knowing any of their lines or having the right costume or knowing where their props are. We didn’t particularly know where the party was going to be (which turned out all right; the party was everywhere) and I had forgotten to buy white shoes so I was wearing these dark green sandals that didn’t go at all with my white dress, and my hunt for the flower at the last minute had been fruitless and aborted, and I hadn’t even THOUGHT about resolutions or anything like that, and really this whole trip to Brazil had been last-minute and seat-of-the-pants planned and I was still feeling like I hadn’t caught my breath or settled in or knew what I was about and as the clock ticked down I was thinking, “already?”. But the moment the fireworks started, it was…okay. It was like I was facing the new year totally naked, sans preparation, sans any kind of expectation. It caught me by surprise, and I felt rather like the whole year is going to be like that–like plunging into a vast cold ocean without knowing if I’m going to encounter jellyfish or dolphins, having left my snorkel on the boat and having forgotten to check my position on the chart, with nothing left to do but swim and try to stay afloat. But it’s terribly freeing, this feeling that all I’ve got to do is the next thing, the only thing, the only possible response to whatever is in front of me. All I’ve got to do this year is move forward. I feel pretty good about that.