Ola! The trip has officially started. I´m in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro. Which is portuguese for ¨Rio of the Janeiro.¨Check out my portuguese! Carlos´book is coming in handy.
I´m in an internet cafe in Aproador, which is between Copacabana and Ipanema. Rio de Janeiro is a small city of 6 million, not the largest city in Brazil, but 6 million sure does feel huge right now as I hear cars speeding around out front.
Getting to South America from San Francisco has been a game of patience. It´s been about 24 hours of traveling, including many delays, food court meals, a potential OJ sighting, and on my flight to Rio from Miami, one smelly foot in the row behind me, apparently trained to turn on and off the overhead light at will. More on that later.
I´m pretty darn stoked to be here - although it´s a bit strange that I´m not meeting someone here later or tomorrow or Sunday. That´s the getting used to part that I need to, well, get used to over the next 35 days.
I´m going to try to add in some pics now from today. This is a first for me, so patience people. I have to confess. The real reason I´m on this trip is that a couple of weeks ago I stole a bunch of OJ´s football memorabilia and have flown to South America to hide from him here.
My backup plan to coming to South America was to check in at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas for a few weeks and hide from OJ there, but I think I made the right choice. It was pretty funny though, last night in Miami as I was waiting to board my flight to Rio, I heard that OJ was flying in from Vegas. Must have just missed him. Everyone please keep me updated on this story. Not.
On to cooler stuff. My flight to Rio was pretty uneventful, although....Below is a picture of a very talented foot, belonging to the sleepy Brazilian gentleman behind me. You can see the armrest and the red blanket, and between the two you will see a gray sock, toes upturned. He had the entire cabin buzzing when at about 4am the entire cabin of the plane, which was completely dark, suddenly became Studio 54, complete with a very bright flashing overhead light and every 8-10 seconds the ¨BING¨ of the attendant call button. Everyone was ticked and wanted to move the foot, or wake him up. For 5 minutes this debate went on, all the while more flashing and binging. I chose the third option, which was to laugh and take a picture.
¨DJ 90/10 Poly Blend in the heezy!
Who here has had too many pretzelllls?!¨
As I got into the Rio airport, I hailed a cab and started this way - it´s quite a ride - very smoggy, beautiful mountains, very poor favelas visible everywhere, and then - Corcovado (shown), and Pao de Acucar and the ocean. My hotel (Martinique Copa) is on the West side of the sweeping Copacabana beach, about 30 yards from sand.
I got in and immediately went for it - a fantastic 2-hour nap. I fell asleep flipping channels in my room - the one that I got a huge kick out of was this Jewish Evangelist. He was going bananas on the crowd. They were Brazilian too. Pretty cool.
But then I woke up and took a nice walk on Copacabana beach. A few cool pics.
These dudes were playing some mean games of cards while maintaining a tan a shade of the Coppertone bottle.
This guy below was just hangin, reading the paper. The guy on the right, don´t know what he was doing.
Tomorrow, I´m going to explore a little more, maybe climb Corcovado and hit the beach. I´m going to check out Ipanema and have a capirinha now. $1.50 each. I´m buyin whoever wants to come down!
3 comments:
Where is the Rio? All I have seen are pictures of smelly feet, flabby guys with waistlines that match their age and some weird guy with a beard and a ball-cap....! But seriously, looks like you are having a blast out there. Enjoy!
Googlemaps has a feature that could help you keep track of your travel.
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mymaps/create.html
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