July 11-15: Rio de Janeiro

Pão de Açúcar - Sugarloafmountain, originally uploaded by Andrew & Yvette's world travel.

We’re in RIO!!!

We’re in a CITY!!!

After 7 weeks of traveling, it definitely feels nice to be in familiar urban surroundings. Even better, we’re staying at Copacobana. “At the Copa, Copacobana, music and passion are always the fashion, at the Copa, they fell in love”. Sorry, I can’t help myself from getting all Barry Manilow as this is the famous beach that inspired that song. *hehe*

Copacobana is like a cross between Ala Moana (Oahu) and Ocean Drive (Miami) except of course it has the Brazil factor which means in the not too far distance are islands and mountains covered in green. Apart from the beach scene, which was always busy with locals, there was also the food scene and OMG. After just 2 hours in the city, we hit up a churrascaria, and 2 hours after that, our pores started oozing meat. We had the green light on for meat the entire time! After awhile, the servers started joking with us re: how much we were eating. After stuffing ourselves with so much meat, you’d think that we’d give our stomach a break but nope. Just a day and a half later, we found ourselves in another churrascaria. The good thing though was we were there for lunch so at least we had a half day to walk it off. And my goodness, did we need that afternoon! The 2nd place was bigger and better and we got to try other meats too like ostrich, goat and I think rabbit also. The food was sooo good, the caipirinha excellent, the juice made of 100% real mangos and with views of the harbor and Sugarloaf Mountain, we felt this restaurant was a destination by itself = )

Ok so apart from eating, we actually did make it out to see the city. We walked along the beaches of Copacobana, Ipanema and Leblon. We also took in a game of futevolei which is like volleyball except you don’t use hands, which makes it similar to soccer. Check out the video on Flickr (Will be posted soon). It’s amazing and definitely something Artesia cong. should try next Tuesday (in between volleyball Mondays and soccer Wednesdays).
A visit to Rio is also not complete without seeing Cristo Redentor, the famous figure of Christ overlooking the city. For a non touristy month, this place was chocked full of people doing the outstretched arms pose. And of course as tourists, we did the same thing (except we took a shower in the morning which sooo many people obviously did not do!). We also went to Pão de Açúcar / Sugarloaf Mountain at night, so as to get a view of the city from a different perspective.

On our last and final day, we got some bummy news: Our hang-gliding appt at 1 got cancelled because of windy weather. *boohoo*