Avenida N.S. Copacabana has seen some small changes recently. The two right-most lanes of the four-lane, one way street have been bordered by painted blue lines. This denotes that the lanes are only for bus use.  Taxis will now use the left-most lane, and all other vehicles will use the lane immediately to the right.  If a someone lives in a building on the right side of the street and must use the right lane to enter their building, they can travel one block, and one block only, in the right hand lane.  There are cameras set up to catch offenders, and they will be fined automatically.  This means that anyone wishing to grab a taxi on N.S. Copacabana must now cross to the left hand side of the street.

The new system is called Bus Rapid Transit, or something like that (the name provoked ire with some Brazilians who wondered why their own language wasn’t good enough to use in the title).  It has yet to be determined if the new system–which goes into full effect tomorrow, actually improves transit time for buses, however.  As far as I’ve been able to tell, it seems to take a little longer, if anything, to get downtown.  This is largely because the buses now actually stop instead of just cruising by waving pedestrians three lanes over.  Which hints at the real motivation for the new system: by transporting more passengers with each bus, the city can maintain fewer buses in the fleet.

Another change (which is certain to cause confusion among Brazilians) is that the bus stops have now changed.  There used to be two sets of alternating stops; half the buses would stop on one block, half on the next.  This leapfrogging continued all the way to Princess Isabel.  Now there are three sets of alternating stops.  I have been told by Rio Onibus that signs are planned for each stop, informing passengers whether where they are standing is where they indeed need to stand to catch their bus.  But the signs are not up yet. This means, as of tomorrow, lots of people will be standing right where they’ve always stood and watching their bus drive right by them.  Which is not so unusual.  What is unusual is that the bus will now be in the lane right next to them as it passes them by.

Fortunately for you, you’ve come to the right place, and we have a handy, downloadable map that shows you which buses service which stops on both N.S. Copacabana and Barata Ribeiro.

New Copacabana Bus Stops PDF

If you’ve never been on a bus in Rio before, it’s nearly as fun as Space Mountain.

Today, Thursday June 3rd, is a holiday in Rio. As with most holidays, expect nearly everything to be closed. However, shopping malls will open from 3pm to 9pm. Friday everything should run as normal.

Rio de Janeiro has been voted the “happiest city in the world.”  And not to my surprise.

http://shine.yahoo.com/event/tastefulliving/the-worlds-happiest-cities-508202/

I love Portuguese.  I love the language, I love understanding it, and I love that I speak it.  It’s a very musical sounding language.  Lots of soft sounds–none of the guttural grunting of, say, German.  The right voice can make every sentence into a little poem.  There are things you can say in Portuguese that you can’t say in English–or at least, not as easily, or with exactly the same connotations.

That said, one of the drawbacks of learning a second language–one that few people seem to mention–is that your knowledge of your first language can, apparently, deteriorate.

I used to be an awesome speller.  I would look at other people’s writing and misspelled words would jump out at me.  Now, I swear, I find myself misspelling atrociously (took me 3 tries to get that one) in English.

Portuguese does not use very many double letters.  No “tt” no “ll.”  Very little “ss” or “rr.”  The spelling rules are completely different.  So when writing in English, I often find myself either not using double consonants where I should or trying too hard and putting them in when I shouldn’t.

So while misspellings are still a peeve of mine, I actually have less idea of when I’m spelling correctly.  It’s disconcerting.

I guess I could be relieved that all the horrible spelling on the internet doesn’t jump out at me the way it once did.