Rio Trip: Directors Cut

All right, so my last post wasn't all that interesting or detailed. This time I'll try to be more interesting.

I've decided that Rio de Janeiro is at the same time one of the most ugly and most beautiful places on the planet. While I'm in São Paulo I'm always slightly paranoid. That was amplified a great deal in Rio, since we could see a lot of the favelas as we drove in. We were staying at a hotel right by the Copacabana beach, so we were relatively safe, except we couldn't go on the beach at night. (Guess what happened to the three guys who broke that rule? It starts with 'r' and rhymes with "sobbed....").

While driving from São Paulo we stopped in a city called Aparecida, where they have Brazil's national basilica. Its main attraction is a wooden doll some fishermen found and thought looked like the Virgin Mary (except it's black) and it became the patron saint of Brazil. I think it's really creepy, but Catholic people love it. There was a lady walking up the ramp leading to the statue on her knees.

When we got to Rio we went to some historical sites, which were kind of boring. The rest was cool though. On Saturday we went to the Cristo Redentor statue, spent the afternoon at the beach, then at night went to Pão de Açucar, a huge hill that overlooks most of the city. It was night and all lit up so it was way cool.

When we left Rio I was kind of sad, but there was some cool stuff in Belo Horizonte, our next stop. Our hotel looked like it was made in the 70's. It was still way cool, just retro. In Minas Gerais we went to some old rococo style churches full of gold carvings and stuff, but the coolest parts were the mine and the cavern. We got to go down in a mine and ride a real mine car. We also went to a huge cavern with 7 chambers. When we got to the last chamber they shut off the lights and we got to be in real pitch black darkness for about two minutes. One of the girls started freaking out and turned on her cell phone for a little towards the end, which kind of bugged me, but what can you do?

After a long bus ride, we finally got back to São Paulo, then it rained all weekend so things have been kind of boring since then.

That's about all for now. This week we go to Foz de Iguaçu, the world's second largest waterfall, so I'll have a post on that sometime next weekend.

Tchau

-Kevin