RIO DE JANEIRO -- High atop Morro da Urca, we relaxed on lounge chairs and watched the flickering lights of airliners taking off from Santos Dumont Airport as a full moon rose over Guanabara Bay.

We had the mountain pretty much to ourselves and it added to the feeling of surveying a kingdom that included not only the beaches and the lighted Christ the Redeemer statue perched atop 2,326-foot Corcovado Mountain but also the hillside favelas -- or shanty towns -- whose lights twinkled like glow worms in the growing dusk.

In fact, I decided the only thing that would make the view better would be a caipirinha. So I headed over to the restaurant/bar on this intermediate stop on the trip to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain and ordered the local concoction of the firewater, cachac¸a, tempered with crushed ice, sugar and lime juice.

With the end of their shift nearing, the workers were all congregated toward the end of the bar. As I approached, one announced, ``We're having a conference. Ask me the topic.''

I obliged, and he answered with a laugh, ``We're having a conference on daily life.''

And with that, the most beloved quality of this city I once called home came flooding back: the ability of Cariocas, as Rio residents are known, to live in the present and to celebrate the small things -- be it a sunny day at the beach or a particularly potent caipirinha like the one that the bartender had just mixed for me.

RIO REVELATION

It was the perfect finish to our first full day in Rio. For my two traveling companions, my 19-year-old daughter Ali and Brian Macpherson, a classmate of Ali's at Cornell, Rio was already a revelation.

I had approached the trip with a bit of trepidation. Ali hadn't been to Brazil since she was a baby and it was Brian's first trip to South America. I wanted to show them a city I cherished and revisit some of my old haunts, but I didn't want to cramp their style in the process.

It turns out they were great traveling companions, up for anything and everything I proposed. In a few days they were ordering their own juice at the ubiquitous corner Fruti Vita stands -- even though they were finding Portuguese more distinct from Spanish than they expected. (Most Brazilians understand Spanish, but Spanish-speakers often find Brazilians' Portuguese more baffling, especially when they slip into Carioca slang.)

In the less than 24 hours we had been in town we had already caught a bit of Rio's beach life, taken the ferry across the bay to visit the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Museum of Modern Art and made some serious headway into Brazilian cuisine.

Though the Niterói ferry is designed for commuters, the 20-minute ride also offers spectacular views of Sugar Loaf, Corcovado and the greenish towers of the Arabian-Nights-looking Palácio dos Vice-Reis, which sits on its own island.

Even though I lived in Rio for nearly five years, I never made it to bustling but more provincial Niterói. But Ali, an architecture student, insisted it should be our first stop because of the museum designed by Niemeyer, best known as the architect of Brasilia. We went as much for the architecture as the art.

The futuristic museum looks like a flying saucer perching over the bay and one enters by traversing a curving staircase that winds up to the upper level entrance. The sloping windows jut out over the water and beach far below, giving those who sprawl on a carpeted platform next to the windows the sensation of being suspended in air. The art is displayed in the womb-like center of the building.

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