Rio Day 1

July 6th
       After we got off of the bus we all regrouped in the arrivals section of the bus station while Angelika looked up the address of our bed and breakfast. After we got the location we got in the long line to get a taxi to take us from the northern zone of the city south to Leblon (adjacent to Ipanema). The other part of our group drove to Botafogo to check-in to their hostel, and we had planned to message each other on Facebook at 10:30 since our São Paulo phones did not work in Rio…(really the cell phone system in Brazil is not very useful…). It was about a 20 min drive from the bus station to the neighborhood that we would be staying in, but once we had arrived it was still too early to check-in so we walked around the area looking for a café to wait in. Unfortunately we did not have luck on our side that day in general. We ended up walking around the main street without noticing it because several of the roads were blocked off for construction of the new metro stop. We finally decided that even if it was 30 minutes before check-in we would just go to our bed and breakfast anyways.
        The doorman buzzed us up to the top floor of an older apartment building where we had set up our stay with the owner, Lillian, through Air B&B. Lillian is an absolutely interesting person. She is an older woman who has lived in many countries throughout the Americas and has some fascinating stories. Both of her children went to prestigious colleges in the US (Harvard and Colombia) and one daughter lives in San Francisco, the other lives in Holland. Lillian is also a dedicated tango dancer (picked up from her time in Argentina), and she had been up till 3:00 in the morning dancing the night before (Cariocas, or people from Rio, do not really get up early in the morning, for example the beach was completely deserted at 8:30 in the morning).
       After we checked in we sent a message to the other part of the group and we decided that we would meet at the Corcovado at 11:30 to buy our tickets to go up to the Cristo Redentor. Angelika and I used google maps to figure out the bus routes there and back and then headed off, first stopping by the Portuguese Bakery Lisboa to get some snacks. I had and interesting experience in the bakery when an older gentleman walked up to me and asked if I was German, and when I said no he asked me if  I was sure. This is another example of race, immigration and identity in Brazil, here most people who are light skinned and blond are referred to as Germans whether or not they are actually of German decent or nationality. Even if someone is a third generation immigrant and fluent Portuguese speaker they might refer to themselves as German (and not German-American as we might in the US) if that is their appearance.
      We saw our bus, 522 coming down the road as we were eating our pastries and quickly ran to catch it (another interesting tidbit is that Brazilians do not eat and walk at the same time, every time we do this we get the strangest looks from people on the streets). We asked the driver if he was going by the botanical gardens (the stop that google had given us) and he said yes. Right after we paid our fare and sat down the bus made a U-turn away from the Corcovado. We checked with the driver and he said that we would be at the botanical gardens in about 15 min, just that we had caught the bus in a bend in the route. The drive started off nice enough, we drove along the cliffs overlooking the ocean and it was a beautiful sunny day. However, after a few minutes we turned inland and drove through a more industrial/suburban area. Because we did not know much about the layout of Rio we stayed on the bus, for an hour…and then once we finally got off the bus at the Botanical Gardens we discovered that google had given us the wrong directions and that there was no way that we could walk to the entrance from there. So after getting direction from several different people we finally caught a different bus that took us all the way to the Corcovado.
       At this point the other part of our group had been expecting us for over an hour and a half and we had no way to let them know what had happened. This is a perfect example to squash the luddite illusions of all those people who think that cell phones have been detrimental to our society, sometimes they are just plain useful, as our weekend in Rio exemplified. Once we finally arrived we could not find our friends anywhere and the next available tickets for the Corcovado train were at 4:00 and it was only 12:30. Angelika and I decided to send the other group a Facebook message from the wifi that we were all ok. Normally at the station you can only buy tickets for the train the day of but since international credit cards typically do not work to buy tickets online we were able to get assistance in pre-purchasing for the following day at 4:00. After we purchased the tickets we decided that in order to not waste anymore of the day that we would just go straight to the beach and try and catch up with our friends for dinner. We took bus to the metro to get right to Cobacabana so that we could walk along the boardwalk towards Leblon.
       In an aside; I have no idea how Rio is going to host the World Cup and Olympics. The infrastructure of the city is a challenge… in part this is due to the shape of the city which is laid out along the contours of the coast. This means that it is difficult to get places that seem very near on maps. The transportation infrastructure is also severely underdeveloped. There are only a few metro lines and they do not actually connect many places, they are more like commuter trains. There are also not enough trains on each line. For example, every time we took the metro we needed to wait for about 15 min for a train to come. The bus lines were also problematic, it is unclear where the buses are going and we had problems with several buses just not stopping when flagged even though we were at the correct stop for those buses. All of this really made me miss the awesome modern transport system in São Paulo which honestly has the best metro system I have ever been on with the possible exception of the London tube.
       Once we got to the beach our day picked up! We sat at one of the many little restaurant stands along the beach and got some lunch as we soaked up the sun that had evaded us in São Paulo. After we ate we walked back along the beach alternating between the sand and the famous boardwalk. To provide a general description; the beaches are just as dramatic as they look in movies and TV. The dramatic mountains seemingly rise up out of nowhere and go all the way to the shore. The beaches themselves have deep white sand, are very flat and are completely covered with people. However, the fact that it is full of people adds to the beach culture in Rio. Vendors of everything under the sun weave through the people hawking their wares; pies, acai, ice cream, sunscreen, henna, sarongs (the preferred and versatile beach towel here), jewelry, beer, sodas empanadas, chips and more. On the beach you can also observe people playing beach volleyball and futevolly, they have several schools for beach volleyball along the beach. It took us about two hours to work our way down from Copacabana around the point to Ipanema and Leblon.
         Once we got back to Lillian’s we were able to check in with our friends on Facebook and make plans to meet up for dinner in Santa Teresa, an older bohemian neighborhood toward the city center, for dinner and we planned to join their Hostel’s bar tour of Lapa afterwards. The restaurant that we went to was called Sobrenatural, our professor recommended it, and it specialized in fresh seafood. We took a cab there and actually arrived in the right place and in the amount of time we thought it would take! The rest of our group arrived soon and we split in to pairs to order as all the dishes were made to be split. Several people got the different versions of the Moqueca fish stew we got in Paraty the weekend before. Angelika and I split a delicious type of fish we had never heard of that came with manioc, rice and veggies in a coconut cream sauce. The restaurant also had a good live musician who played traditional Rio Bossa Nova songs, like the Girl from Ipanema. We finished dinner about 8:45 and had planned to be back at their hostel for the 9:30 tour of Lapa. However, this restaurant, like most in Brazil, has not learned the value of the individual check and attempting to get divide up the bill appropriately and then get exact change from everyone was a headache and it lasted for 30 minutes. Once we were finally free we split into cabs and headed back to the hostel hoping that the tour would be operating on Brazilian time.
         We were right! The tour was still there hanging in the common area when we pulled up in our cabs. They actually did not leave for tour for another 30 min giving everyone time to get in order and run to the ATM. We left together as a large group and managed to follow our guide, who was actually the hostel owner, on to the correct bus to get to Lapa. Lapa is a very cool area of Rio. It is similar to New Orleans with regards to the night life which spills out onto the street. It was actually a bit hard to keep our big group together walking through the crowded streets but our guide was no newbie. We walked past several famous samba clubs and bars on our way to the Lapa steps which are a more recent addition to the area and were installed by a local artist to connect the Lapa and Santa Teresa neighborhoods. The steps are completely decorated in tile mosaics that the artist installed over a period of several years. He lived in an apartment overlooking the steps and just died earlier this year. The steps are now a central location for the ‘hippy/alternative’ subculture in Rio. After the steps we stopped by a caipirinha stand where they made fresh fruit flavors and then we ended the tour at the House of Cachaça where they have a seemingly infinite variety of cachaça types and flavors. Afterwards several of the group wanted to go dancing and we did walk over to a balada or club, but once we got in line we found out that we needed to have original copies of our IDs, which no one was carrying. At this point it was getting late and since we had not slept well/long on the bus we decided to head back to Lillian’s and start early the next day.

Me at Ipanema

That's the Corcovado in the backrgound

Mmmm.. Bakery Lisboa!

The empty beach at 8:30 on a Saturday