So it seems like every trip should have at least one
huge-tour-group experience to remind me how lucky I’ve been to be able to avoid
the crowds and the superficial exposure during most of my travels. The tour was certainly an efficient way
to see the city’s most popular sites but it’s hard to feel intimately
acquainted with anything when you are part of the picture-taking mob. So I was the only one on the morning
tour bus under the age of 50 (the vast majority were post-retirement SKIPpers
“Spend the Kid’s Inheritance in Paradise” as I learned from folks today). But they ended up being fun to talk to-
most of the morning, I spent with two Australian couples- one from Perth and
one from Brisbane, which made me think of Jimmy’s semester abroad on the Gold
Coast. Sugarloaf Mountain was the
first stop. You take skytrams up
to Morro da Urca (Urca Mountain) and Pao de Acucar for spectacular views of the
city and the Bay. I learned that
“Rio de Janiero” translates to “River of January” because the Portuguese landed
on the first of January and they mistakenly thought the bay was a river.
The next portion was a (mostly) driving tour around the city
with a stop at their Metropolitan Cathedral, another interesting example of
modern architecture. It was
actually designed to look like a Mayan temple and it’s so massive, our tour
guide compared it to a nuclear power plant. The inauguration of the new pope in June is actually going
to happen in this Cathedral for World Youth week. So many global events happening in Brazil these days! I look forward to exploring the city in
more detail tomorrow afternoon with a walking tour with a CS friend- the
Portuguese/European influence is much more obvious here than the past two
cities.
After that, we had a lunch break and they swapped up the
tour groups slightly then went to the oh-so-famous “Christ the Redeemer” on
Corcovado “hunchback” mountain.
Originally they were going to name it “the Pinnacle of Temptation” which
is interesting. Here, we took a
cog railroad through the Tijuca forest and national park to get up to the
monument. Apparently, several
decades ago, all that forest had been destroyed to make way for coffee
plantations but that caused the city’s water supply to dry up and so they
decided to replant and were surprisingly successful, thus leading to the
nickname “miracle forest”. It’s
amazing how you can see the monument no matter where you are in the city- it’s
even most of my Sugarloaf pictures.
So that was fun to see- once again, there were beautiful views of the
city.
At Christo... the photographer told me I look like an angel haha |
During that part of the tour, I met a Davidson graduate who
worked with Disney for twelve years but currently she’s the manager of the
Jonas Brothers so she follows them around the world (she’s here since they play
in Rio Tuesday and Sao Paulo Sunday).
After the tour, they dropped me at Cococabana Palace “the
most famous hotel in Rio which hosted celebrities from Stevie Wonder to the
Rolling Stones” just in time to watch the sunset while walking the beach. It was a very nice beach with many
Brazilian men in speedos, people playing sports informally and there’s a
stadium where teams compete in “futevolei” (a cross between beach volleyball
and soccer) among other things.
Then just kinda crashed at my hotel. Ideally, I wanted to go to the Rio
weekly couchsurfing meeting but the internet’s been too inconsistent to figure
out to get there. I got on the
wrong tour bus for awhile this morning and befriended this awesome guy from
London who was telling me how to navigate the various sections of Copacabana-
kid’s section, gay section, nudist section- among other things. He hadn’t heard of CS but was excited
about checking it out tonight… however, I had to switch buses suddenly without
exchanging contact information so he probably won’t be able to find it either.
Copacabana at sunset |
Looking forward to talking to some chemistry education
people tomorrow morning at the University of Rio then a walking tour of the
downtown and hopefully going out on the town. However Lucio who may be taking me out just came back from a
vacation in Uruguay where he “ate too much meat” so I don’t know if he’s still
recovering. Another benefit about
being a vegetarian is I don’t run into that! Boa noite!
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