Welcome to Rio de Janeiro! We are hosted by our friends Gabriela and Nicolaas, who make the impossible possible to help us make the best of our stay in the city.
This is the Sugarloaf mountain — one of the city’s landmarks.
We go to the top of the mountain by cable car.
The other landmark is the monument of Christ the Redeemer, who keeps watch over the city...
...and hundreds of tourists.
Christ has a stunning view over the bay,...
...and the ships in the bay.
If he’s lucky, he can even see an oil platform that is moved into the bay.
If he turns his head, he can have an amazing 180° view.
He also keeps watch over the favelas. These are accumulations of houses with no plan, streets, or infrastructure...
...built by the poor and often controlled by drug gangs.
On our way down, we use the public shuttle. For entertainment of the clients and the driver, it offers television (bottom) and near-accidents (left), with the accompanying swears (not in the picture).
Fruit
Brazil is a paradise of fruits. Pictured are cashew nuts. The nut is inside the little stem. Each cashew nut you eat had an entire fruit on it.
Clockwise from the top: Mango, Star fruit, Pinha, Kaki, Guava, Jaboticaba. The Kaki is imported from European supermarkets and becomes red when it arrives here.
This is a coconut. You can drink the coconut milk (which is actually more like sweet water) with a straw.
This is another interesting piece of flora: a tree with thorns. (Yes, the Kaki supermarket story was a joke :-) )
Food
Brazil also has an amazing variety of food. In this charming restaurant, we had the best lunch of our trip so far:
A palm heart as a starter. This is the inner part of a palm tree stem, served in a bamboo stem.
As a main course: Pork medaillon served with spinach-banana sauce.
And for dessert: baked banana with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and cashew nuts.
As a plus, the restaurant has a great view.
Another food option is a sweet pizza, here with strawberry-chocolate sauce and guava-jelly with cheese, ...
... or pulled pork with fried Tapioca root (top left),...
...or a mango dessert.
Central Bank
Gabriela invites us to give scientific talks at the Central Bank of Brazil.
Afterwards, we’re invited to a traditional Brazilian meat restaurant, where waiters go around and cut the meat for you at your table.
There are different types of meat. The trick is not to fill your stomach upfront with the chicken, but to wait for the Picanha (a special beef cut).
To relax from all the meat, the restaurant also offers a buffet.
This is a Pecorino-like cheese — in its entirety.
Appropriately, the restaurant offers dental floss in the restrooms.
Museum
Rio’s national history museum is very informative, and offers explications in Portuguese and English.
At the end of history, and the beginning of the present, the main message is clear.
We also want to go to the Fiscal Island. The map of the quai does not really help. We ask guards, policemen, and soldiers how to get there.
But as so often in this world, the uniformed are the uninformed. The boats go only on weekends.
Night Life
Rio has a very busy night life, with people flowing through the streets like water in a river, and bars with live music.
People mix easily across creeds, cultures, and ethnicities.
Sudden rain torrents turned this street into a river. Note the ship–wrecked bus on the right.
City
While the Spanish colonies broke up after their independence from Spain, the Portuguese one did not — leaving Brazil as one of the largest countries on Earth.
The Portuguese king actually resided in Brazil for some time, thus putting the mother country and the colony on equal footing.
The city architecture mixes colonial buildings with modern ones, with various degrees of maintenance.
Here in detail: the colonial ones...
... and a modern one — the headquarters of Petrobras, built to ressemble an oil platform.
The city also had a tramway that passed over this aquaeduct, but the tram was abandoned after a tourist fell from the tram and died.
This is a church. The picture would look so much better in good weather. The sky would be blue.
Rio is probably the only city that has a statue of a nude woman in front of its metropolitan cathedral.
The city also has its chique streets, ...
... and cute restaurants...
... with their own pittoresque mix of care and abandonment.
Beaches
This is the Copacabana promenade with its famous pavement patterns...
...and this is the beach in one of its creative shapes.
The sand is so hot that people spray it with water so that it becomes walkable.
Coconut juice is sold by the unit.
This is the neighboring Ipanema beach promenade...
...and these must be the Ipanema Girls.
Click here to continue to Iguazu
