Second day in Rio was a busy one. For some reason, despite the fact that I slept on my flight and on the beach, I still woke up at 11am. Anyway, here's a view from our hostel room. These are the private room "chalets". Ours is orange and is a bottom one (there's a top/bottom to each).
We started out having brunch/lunch in downtown Copacabana. The food here is so cheap - for about $6, Jimmy got coffee, orange juice, half a papaya, eggs, bread, and toast. My sandwich and tangerines juice totaled about $5.
Then we headed to downtown Rio to pick up our Samba Parade tickets. On th way, we saw Sugarloaf Mountain (which we'll see later this week) and our cab driver saw me taking pictures from the car window while driving and pulled over and rolled down the window for a better view. So nice, that one.
We picked up the tickets and looked around the neighborhood. It's colorful but a bit more run down than where we're staying. I saw a lot of favelas as we were coming in.
These are their phone booths. They say oi on them, which is Portuguese for hi.
We went to the Museu de Arte do Rio across the street and saw this cool installation of a favela.
Here's an actual favela, as seen from the 6th floor of the museum.
From here, you get a nice view of the Praça Mauá, which has letters out for the Olympics. You can also see the Museu do Amanhã in white, which was newly built as of December.
This museum was pretty small but neat, with the observation deck and some modern touches.
I took a picture of this because this guy looked like he was hiding cookies under his coat that he's dying to eat while posing for his portrait.
That green parrot from Disney's Three Amigos is big here. They used to have a studio in Brazil and he was their mascot.
Here's a view of the colorful backside of the letters. It says #cidadeolimpica, which is Olympic City.
I saw some boys jumping in the water doing flips.
Here's the other museum, which is the Museum of Tomorrow.
We actually started off in line to enter through this bowling ball looking thing. The whole inside has a video screen and it's so neat.
These two scarves were fluttering around non-stop, controlled by the air around them. It was beautiful to see in person.
Then we walked around for a bit, enjoying drinks at one of the many sandwich and juice shops around and tried to make it to another museum before it closed. We failed.
As we headed to the Escadaria Selarón (Selaron Steps), we could hear Carnival Festivities in Cinelandia. We also passed by this cute street in Lapa.
Here's the alley to the steps, which were a bit hidden but there was a ton of people drinking and lounging in costumes.
We kept walking up the steps and I realized how out of shape I am.
I think we would've walked our way into a favela, if we kept going up.
After we made our way down, we figured out how to take the subway back to the hostel, cleaned up and met my friend Gabrielle and her boyfriend at Comune, this busy restaurant with really great burgers.
It was the first day of Carnival but we didn't hit any of the parties. Long day with a ton of walking, but maybe tomorrow. I'm having a tough time dealing with the heat and humidity here, which puts me in a very bad mood but at least I don't have any mosquito bites (yet).
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