Copacabana Beach - "Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl..."
Ahh, our last day in Rio. We expected a nice leisurely day, starting with a romantic sunrise walk on the beach. That sunrise walk started off fine until these four dudes came up to us asking for the time. I quickly told the ugliest of them (we’ll call him Ugly) what time it was in Spanish (close enough) and kept walking. Ugly and his entourage kept following us and asking Clyde for the time again which Clyde didn’t know.
I turned around to tell Clyde to come on and keep walking and lo and behold, Ugly pulls a big rusty knife out above his head and aims it at the love of my life. “Oh no!”, I scream, remembering the websites on Rio that warned me not to go on the beaches at night. Dangit but it was 8 in the morning! So I run up the beach as fast I can, screaming “Help!”, not remembering or caring what the heck the Portuguese word for help is because Hello! I’m panicked and running on a beach with the fear of death in my voice!
The few locals who are on the beach having their morning jog or sunbathe witness the entire mugging and are just idly jogging/sitting by chitchatting about life. Ok, this mugging the tourists thing is more common than I thought. All the while, Clyde is fighting for his life. About halfway up the beach I decide to turn around to make sure Clyde is still there, not dead or injured. Turns out he has the knife in his right hand pointed at one of the guys who he has hemmed up by the collar in his left hand. He’s yelling at them and for a couple seconds so I consider flipping my cell phone open and capturing the whole thing on video because it was just too much of an unbelievable sight to see. Yeah, Clyde's from
The Bronx.
So I finally get to the sidewalk and I’m yelling at random people for “la policia” and they are so sweet and helpful and finally a tourist police officer comes over. Ok, so the tourist police officer does not speak English. He’s asking me questions in Portuguese and severely broken English, I’m translating to Clyde and I’m answering the officer in severely broken Spanish with a few Portuguese words sprinkled in for good measure. In terms of capturing Ugly and crew and retrieving Clyde’s cell phone, things are looking grim. So after about an hour of “questioning”, Clyde, the officer and I come to the conclusion that one of the suspects was wearing a red shirt. Oh, and that muggings are a really common occurrence.
That’s when the officer’s backup finally shows up. She is a self-described “policewoman”. Clyde and I later deduced that “I am a policewoman” was the only phrase she knew. It’s ok as I think of the first officer saying “My name is…” and pointing to me and me answering him “Meu nome é Monica” exactly the way I heard it over and over on my Portuguese language tape. It’s hilarious; you gotta listen to that tape. They drove us to our hotel and told the front desk attendants everything.
The front desk guys were so nice and told us that if we tried to press charges we may be in the police station for the rest of the day. We had a plane to catch and were really eager to go home by then so we declined.
Luckily, the only thing that was stolen was Clyde’s cell phone. After we got home, our friend, Ursula, called in a panic and asked what had happened to us as she was sure we had been kidnapped and were being held for ransom. Turns out American cell phones really do work in Brasil and Ugly had called Ursula and told her that he loved her many times, repeatedly. That Ugly… so loving, so kind.
Sunrise a mere seconds before the mugging. If you visit Rio, don't go to the beach for this.
