IN RIO DE JANEIRO.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19697, 26 January 1926, Page 7

IN RIO DE JANEIRO.

Rio, like all semi-tropical cities, seems slumbrous from noon until the heat of the day is waning. By 5 o’clock Avenida Rio Branca, the Piccadilly of the town, is crowded with promenaders. Etiquette in Brazilian society is still very strict. Even married women do not walk anywhere alone. This is not so difficult to understand when one has seen the sailor-hatted men, who stand three deep on the edge of those tesselated sidewalks, making audible comments on the “ points” of the Brazilian belles as they pass with their chaperones. Shopping in Rio is an amusing if expensive pastime. In the Rua do Ouvidor, a narrow street where wheeled traffic is forbidden, are the best shops for Brazilian jewels. Diamonds, sapphires, aquamarines are here in gorgeous profusion. Never except in the Rue de la Paix had we seen such enormous stones. Brazilians give their wives thousands of pounds worth of jewels, and regard it as an investment or sort of “Dot.” They are still very Turk-like with regard to womankind. Nothing impresses them so much as the independence of English women, and the comradeship of our elderly married couples. An elderly woman in Brazil “ knows her place,” and that, in the opinion of her male relatives, is always at home 1 Parisian models are to be seen in the shop windows, with all the latest styles, which come out in January to be tried for the coming summer in the northern world. A story is told in Rio that these garments were once displayed on wax models, but that the too susceptible men of the south became so enamoured of their waxen charms that they had to be removed from the windows!—Grace L. Morrow, in Chambers’s Journal.