Rio de Janeiro

Jesus - was the word of the day - and we have seen the biggest in the word art deco monument of Jesus The Redeemer - a bit pricey as to the costs of getting up there but the view of Rio de Janeiro was spectacular. It is certainly true that city is located in one of the nicest settings in the world...

Our adventures started at the bus station where we arrived - I started by fighting with the taxi drivers who wanted to rip us off. Actually we almost missed the bus to Rio because at the last minute in Paraty we decided to rent bicycles and see waterfalls. Unfortuntaley the trip was very much uphill and on the way back we decided to stop at a great restaurant by the road and almost missed the bus to Rio...anyway we arrived in Rio, I had a fight with the taxi drivers and then we eneded up in the hostel in a 9 bed bedroom paying in total EUR 60 for this pleasure...as we have not eaten we decided to get to know the locals a bit more and ended up in surreal place selling hotdogs under the bridge near our hostel. It was purely for real locals but we were so amazed that actually we spend around one hour looking at the people dinning there... We were not brave enough to take out our camera to take some pictures. We were also sure that we will in the end poison us with those hotdogs but somehow it did not materialize.

We have been all around the city and found it beautiful from the point of architecture and little cafe´s - it is a heaven for Rita's constant desire for chocolate cakes. We spent quite some time in them. Of course we had to visit the famours Copacabana beach - and it lived up to its expectations for a beach in a huge city - it also made us understand why the Brazilians always win all world soccer and volleyball competitions. Basically the whole beach is lined up with fields where kids play and train those two sports. Actually what they can do with the ball is quite astounding. The last night Greg and Rita decided to have a coconut drink and both loved it - as you can see below...


As to Brazil - it is still quite a surprise as to how organized and developed this country is. For some reason we expected one more shanty country struggling to put toghether a couple of nice squares and we found something amazing though expensive. This is actually the only bad thing about Brazil - it is expensive to travel around and the places to stay though very nice are also way too expensive in comparison to many countries we have so far visited. It can though be also scary - last evening we took a city bus from Copacana to the bus station where we were to depart for Ouro Preto...the bus took us through neighbourhouds that made as speechless and we prayed that the bus driver does not kick us out...leaving the bus would mean quite interesting problems for us and somehow after all those posh districts we have visited we were not prepared for districts from "Mad Max" movie.

Once more BIG thank you for all donations. We have also created a blog for our BrucePeruCusco center - have a look here and read about our culinary event fundraising...