Last few days in Rio

I just got to Lima and I´m on my own for the day since Adam and I messed up our flights. I had organized an airport transfer so all is well so far. We´re staying in Miraflores which is where tourist are told to stay bc of the rest of the city is a bit dodgy. I will be the dudge of that when Adam gets here - not going to venture around too much on my own. Its so hard now to switch from the little bits of Portuguese that we learned to Spanish although Spanish is a million times easier to understand...close enough to French


So I´m sad that the Brazil part of my trip is over...it was fun travelling with my sister although she was a party pooper at times - lol. Love you Nadia! Well, lets just say that Nadia was probably looking forward to going home after venturing back to the hostel world. They messed up our booking and so we didn´t have a private bathroom but all in all, I´m glad we stayed there since we met a few cool people that we went out with on Friday and Saturday night.


Friday night was crazy! We went to Lapa with two New yorkers from our hostel. I have never seen so many ppl on the streets ever in my life - way more ppl than the full moon party in thailand! You will have to see pics to understand although we were hesitant to take too many pics since you always told to careful of pickpocketers there. Basically is what a huge street party with people playing samba music and people drinking and dancing in the street. There are a bunch of clubs too - we went into one after paying cover but it was makeout central and none of us could handle it. We left at 4 am but the guys we went with came home at around 7 or 8 am. Lapa definately lived up to its hype!


Earlier in the day fricken 9 am, we went on a favela tour of the largest favela in Latin america, apparently. We went to a lounge on thurs night (Melt) and came back late-ish so it was hard to concentrate on everything we were being told. The favelas were definately different from the touristy areas but not quite as bad as i expected which is a good thing of course since it means that the gov´t and private investors are providing more basic services to the ppl in favelas. We wanted our tour guide to point out some of the drug dealers that apparently make the rules for favelas but of course, we wasn´t going to do that.


For all you soccer/football fans, Maracana stadium in Rio is fricken massive! Apparently seats like 120 000 people. people were playing samba music, chanting from random anthem in Portuguese which of course we didn´t understand...nadia and I just started to make up the words to sing along - similar to what i do when i sing along with hindi songs! I´m not much of a soccer fan but it was cool to go to. We went this a tour but really it wasn´t violent or over rowdy like we were told - unnecessary to have a guide with you but oh well..better to be safe than sorry.


The trippy-est thing happened this morning though when I was leaving for the airport. As I was getting on the bus, someone yells my name. I thought I was hearding things bc who the hell do I know in Rio besides ppl from my hostel but it was the Aussies that we met in Salvador! It was the weirdest thing. We were wondering what happened to them since we were supposed to meet up but they just came a day later than they planned. I obviously haven´t talked to Nadia so maybe they hung out before she left.


All in all, Rio was not as close to as dodgy as the stories esp if you stay in Ipanema. Thank god nothing happened to us. Such a cool city though with a lot of things to do and a lot of culture. When Adam and i go back to Brazil (some other time), there will still be things that will be new for me or that would be cool to do for the 2nd time.