Rio de Janeiro suffocates you upon arrival. Its heat and its density and its poverty are intense and unavoidable. Masses of people line the streets wearing mostly nothing, heading towards the beaches. Endless rows of shacks clutter the hills in the steeply positioned neighborhoods known as the favelas.

After a 12-hour flight, I had no choice but to take the city head-on. I went to my hotel room, collapsed on the bed, and took a long nap. When I returned to consciousness, it was dark out, and after a pineapple and steak sandwich at the hotel, I wanted to get a taste of Rio's nightlife. My cousin had been living in Rio for six weeks, studying the language, Portuguese, and she served as a guide for myself and my family on the trip. They speak very will little English in Rio, and things like navigating a cab ride or ordering off a menu can be difficult without a translator.

We wound up at a typical Brazilian nightspot, an Australian sports bar called The Office, where American football was being shown. The place served as a good example of the diversity of Rio. There's a certain comfort in knowing you can be below the equator in South America, walk into a bar, and have a conversation with a large, friendly, red-faced Australian man wearing a hat.

Mike was his name. He was the owner of The Office, and he had been married seven times. It was a Brazilian woman, his latest wife, who brought him to Rio 12 years ago. What brought me to him was American football. He was the only man in Rio who had somehow figured out how to pipe in a feed through the internet, from a satellite he owned in South Carolina, into his bar.

I would return there more than once, and it was like some kind of underground club for Americans who didn't understand soccer. A place where you could intensely discuss the Bears and everyone knew exactly what you were talking about.

As for soccer, the real sport of Brazil, that was the next day's activity, a trip to Maracană Football Stadium. It's known as Brazil's "temple of soccer," a place that has seated up to 200,000 people. There weren't nearly so many people when I was there. It was a seemingly meaningless, late-season game between a local Rio team and another from the even bigger Brazilian city, Sao Paulo. Even still, there was a whole section of fans treating the game as if its result would determine the fate of the nation. There were people waving giant flags, banging drums, jumping up and down, and setting off smoke bombs.

I would later find out that Brazil's soccer championship had already been won by another team. It made me question not only the enthusiasm of the fans at the game, but why the game was even being played? It took many tortured conversations with the locals to find out that teams go on playing for second, third, fourth, and so on. Why they didn't have a more traditional playoff system similar to American sports was beyond my comprehension, but it certainly didn't detract from their passion for the games.

I should go back to how hot it was in Rio. You step outside and immediately you're drenched in sweat as if you just climbed out of a hot tub. You begin to understand why all the people wearing tiny little swimsuits consider themselves fully dressed.

It's so hot that you can't exactly think straight. As a tourist, you're in a daze, milling your way through thick crowds of people, desperately seeking some landmark, some sight you have to see. With due diligence, my family and I saw the major sights: Christ the Redeemer with his arms outstretched, watching over everything, sitting atop the clouds; Sugarloaf, a mountain you can take a cable car to the top of and see Rio in all its glory; the Ipanema Beach, where you let your feet sink into the white sand while a man tries to sell you a purse made of zippers; and the Fort of Copacobana, which looks out on the ocean and houses a museum of the country's history, its occupation by Portugal, its struggle for independence and democracy.

We were even able to see a "small" version of Rio's famous Carnaval celebration of samba dance and music, which takes over the streets for a week in February. Our preview of it was in an enclosed area called Samba City. It was a festive concert of nonstop drumming, singing, dancing, and outrageous sequined costumes.

I was in that humidity-scorched state of mind while we were searching for another sightseeing opportunity at the Metropolitan Cathedral, a church the size of a skyscraper in the shape of an inverted cone. My family was moving quickly. They tend to do this on vacations. It's as if they're being timed. We had to get to the Cathedral.

It was located in Rio's downtown area, Centro, where the streets were literally covered in people. I was becoming claustrophobic, and so I wandered towards the only open space I saw.

For some reason, a crowd had gathered around a circular patch of brick, and they all seemed to be waiting for something, smiling, holding cameras.

I vaguely realized this was a stage for some type of street performance as a I was walking through it, but I was never quite able to get my brain to tell my body to get out of the way. As I say, I was so hot. At this point, someone came up behind me, squeezed the back of my leg, and screamed, "AHHHHHHHHHHH!"

For a second, I thought I was being attacked. I had heard so much about the rampant crime and bandits in Rio that it seemed reasonable to assume I was being mugged. But when I turned around all I was saw was a 6-foot., 5-inch, 250-lb mime. He was the biggest man in Rio. The crowd laughed, and I think the mime expected me to be scared, and inside I was, but I could not react. I stood there, limp, looking at this giant mime, pushed so far by my trespass on his stage that he had broken the very code by which he is supposed to live. There was nothing to do but move on.

Later that night, we had dinner at Porcăo, a well-known Brazilian steakhouse. It quickly turned into one of the most intense eating experiences of my life. The way it works is, you sit down and flip over a small card that says, "yes," and then huge slabs of steak, sausage, and lamb are thrust in your face repeatedly by dashing, well-groomed Brazilian men. Fried bananas and cheese pile up on your table in large quantities. Three different types of fish are servedŠat the salad bar. If you don't flip your card over so it says, "stop," the food will keep coming, and you'll keep eating it.

It was the heavyweight championship of eating. The kind of bout where the fighter is never the same afterwards. You're finished off by a knockout punch from a strawberry covered in chocolate and cream. You know you can't, you'd never survive it, but somehow you want to go through it again. You'll be ready next time. You'll know that when the card says, "yes," the bell has rung.

Eating in Rio is reason enough to go there. It seemed that at almost every restaurant I went to, when I bit into my food for the first time, I got the sense that it had just been picked fresh from a field. The time it took to prepare reflected that. No meal in Rio is completed in under two hours. They don't bring you the check when you're done eating, and they don't bring you the food when you're done ordering.

We've all had that unsettling experience eating in the U.S. when you order, and the waiter seemingly reaches behind his back and puts your plate on the table. "Boy, that was fast," we say. Really, though, we're thinking, someone else sent this back to the kitchen and it's been sitting under a heat lamp for about an hour and a half.

That doesn't happen in Rio.

I had a sandwich at a place called Cafeina. It was pastrami with brie cheese on ciabatta bread. I waited an hour for that sandwich, but it was worth every second.

It seemed that you could top off every meal in Rio with some kind of ridiculous banana desert dripping in chocolate.

Every morning at the hotel, they served fresh pineapple, sweet and lacking that tart kick you get here. This wasn't shipped in and taken out of a box. It was plucked from the jungle that very morning, and carried by hand to the buffet table.

In Rio, they don't just make food, they care for it, raise it, and then allow you to eat it.

This was never more evident than on my last day of the trip. I went with my family up into the hills to a quaint little area called Santa Teresa. We went there on the bonde, a streetcar that's been in operation since the 19th century. It rattles its way up the hills, against the rain on that particular day, and people jump onto the sides of it so they can ride for free. It leaked rainwater, and barely seemed like it would make it, but it provided beautiful views, and it took us to a restaurant called Espirito Santa.

Espirito Santa is on a cobblestone street next to art shops and colorful apartment buildings. The restaurant is part of a restored mansion. We were the only ones in the restaurant when we sat down to eat. It stayed that way for the next two and a half hours, and when I left I had been changed forever.

There comes a point on a vacation when you reach a level of exhaustion where you feel like you can't take another step. Your feet are aching, your neck is strained from looking at so many beautiful sites, and you're contemplating going back to the hotel room to hide until it's time to go home. I was at that point when I entered Espirito Santa.

I ordered chicken with fruit, and a basket of bread. Sounds simple enough, but with no one else there, it took an hour and forty-five minutes for the food to come out. I was starved and nearly delirious from climbing up hills, and trying to determine the worth of travel souvenirs. I just wanted to eat.

When the meal finally arrived it was a revelation of almost spiritual significance. The chicken had been grilled in white coconut milk sauce with mangos and strawberries and pineapple. The bread was warm and carefully torn up into small pieces. As the hours had passed while I was waiting for this, someone was in the back killing a chicken, cleaning it, gathering each individual piece of fruit, and baking this bread from scratch.

After biting into the first piece of chicken, and tasting the bread, I stopped. I looked around the table and said to everyone, "You realize, we'll never eat anything like this again."

In some ways Rio is like that meal. It's not easily duplicated. It's a place that can madden you with its slow pace and punish you with its urban realities. Its buildings often look crummy up close and it smells. The subways and buses are clean and efficient, but a cab ride will cause your life to flash before your eyes. Some of the worst slums you'll ever see are a short walk from the amazing beaches and restaurants. The police are not to be trusted. We saw them beating a group of fans with their nightsticks after the soccer game.

Yet it's intoxicating, too, with its samba music and food and constant stream of people, luring you back into the heat. We took a boat ride one day, and although it didn't seem to be a very popular activity for tourists (we were the only ones interested in this particular schooner tour), it's easy to see the city's magnificence from the water.

As I traveled back down the hills on the bonde train, rattling and clanging and sometimes needing to stop, with the rain coming down, I didn't want to leave.