Rio!

Oi!
We survived Rio de Janeiro!! And what a crazy, beautiful city it is. The people were beautiful, but the land was unbelievable. We were constantly surrounded by mountains, white sand beaches and beautiful clear blue water.
The city itself is a series of contrasts, most notably the close proximity of the very rich and very poor. It was common to walk by million dollar beach apartments backing up to miles of favelas (slums). In fact there are more than 900 of these favelas in the city!! We took a tour through the largest one in South America, known as Rociera (sp?). Little did we know that the tour would actually begin with each of us being tossed on the back of a motorcycle that sent us speeding through the windy, traffic filled streets of the favela to the top! Micah and I screamed the whole way as our drivers decided to race each other up, knowing we were terrified! Anway, we survived and were completely taken aback by the favela. The tour guide led us through the small side streets, filled with decomposing garbage, barely wide enough to walk. He told us all about the politics and economics that go on within a favela run by a drug lord. The item we paid attention to most was the fact that when all the kites disappeared from the sky (they flew them as a sport, much like in The Kite Runner, with glass on the string to cut down opposing kites), it meant something was going down, either a police raid or an opposing gang was coming. We kept a keen eye on the skies...I wish I had time to go into all the details, but if you are interested you might watch the movie "City of God", made about one of Rio's favelas. Its pretty graphic and violent, and definitely not a happy, feel good movie, but worthwhile if you are curious.
During our stay in Rio, Micah and I discovered that being a foreigner had many perks. We took to pretending we were staying in one of the fanciest hotels along CopaCabana beach. We would pull out our blackberry, and strut past the many security guards like we owned the place and never got questioned. We would then proceed to the roof 31 floors up and enjoy an afternoon reading a book at the private pool surrounded by giant windows overlooking the city and ocean. Awesome!Another great experience was going to the Flamingo vs. Fluminense soccer game at Maracana Stadium. We were told it was Rio's biggest rivalry in the worlds largest stadium. The stadium used to hold 200,000 people before it was made smaller because of safety concerns! Our seats were at the top of the crazy Flamingo fan section. Flamingo is Rio's working class team and also the most popular, boasting 33 million supporters! The atmosphere was unbelievable with singing, chanting, jumping, flags, and flares and on top of that we even got a great game. Flamingo came back from being down 1-3 to win 5-3. I don't remember the last time I saw 8 goals in a high quality match, but I'm sure glad it happened while we were there!

It turns out we happened to be in Rio the week before Carnaval, Brazil's largest holiday and week-long festival full of music, dancing, and performances. For a city that is known for its wild nights on any given day, leading up to Carnaval it is insane! One night we went to a samba school where the performers did a practice performance for us. I have never seen people wearing less or shaking more! Quite amazing actually. And we thought we were just going to WATCH the performance, but we were soon swept onto the dance floor and samba'd the night away with an old Brazilian man and the great Argentinian men we met at the hostel. Evidently our samba skills were less than par though, because a girl actually approached one of us and condescendingly asked if we were from the US...Haha, good stuff.
Another sign that Carnaval was fast approaching were the numerous street parties throughout the city. We went to one with about 12 guys from the hostel who served as our body guards, until we began losing people one by one to the crowd... It was crazy! The brazilian with us said it was the craziest one he'd ever seen, and the next morning we learned there were more than 40,000 people there!! We attracted a lot of attention being blonde women, but we felt self with all of our guy friends and the huge police presence. The only issue were the little 12 year old boys that would weave in and out of the crowd checking people out for bags and feeling your pockets. Fortunately we made it out with everything, but our friend had his wallet picked straight out of his side pocket!Apart from the Carnaval events, we also checked out the typical touristy things. We went to the top of Corcovado to pose with the Christ the Redeemer Statue (the second largest statue in the world, after the Statue of Liberty), we took the cable car up to the top of Sugarloaf to watch sunset, we walked throught Tijuca National Park (the largest urban rainforest in the world), we drove through the streets of bohemian Santa Teresa, went to Ipanema and rubbed shoulders with the correctly named "beautiful people", shopped at their famous Hippie Fair, drank coconut water and slurped acai, and even made some monkey friends during a nap on our terrace.

Of all of these fun things we did, the most entertaining moment of the whole week might have been watching the 3 year old girl walking in front of us as she stopped every few steps to pick the wedgie from the thong style bikini she had on. Haha, they sure start early! While its true that they wear very little in this city, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that speedos actually look quite good on certain men...

Lessons learned:
Wear LOTS of sunscreen
Don't eat chinese food in Rio, or any food for that matter.

Tchau,

Emily

I'll try to add photos whenever I get a chance.