Rio De Janeiro WOOOHOOOO

We arrived in Rio, it seemed much more welcoming to tourists, however, our first concern was money as we had none and had to get to our hostel. There were several cash machines but none of them were giving us any money not even the HSBC, luckily the final machine of about 8 gave us some cash, enough to get to the hostel. We later found out that the cash machines in Brazil are very particular who they give money to and that we can only use certain ones and at certain times they will only hand out 50 BRL...handy to know!
We headed to our hostel, the lovely Che Lagarto at Copacabana beach, hoping it wouldn´t be too bad as we still weren´t feeling right and hadn´t eaten for a couple of days. We had a very simple double room, all clean but no bathroom! It was nice enough but no one around, we assumed all were at the beach but later found out that 2pm is early in this hostel and most people were still in bed!
We spent the next few days chilling out and seeing the beaches around us. The beach nearest to us was Copocabana beach which was so long and wide, we walked the length of the beach then round to Ipanema beach which is the new trendy beach, again this was long and wide and full of people playing football and vollyball. The Brazilian men love their little speedo shorts and this seems to be the uniform for all sport playing on the beach, the women don´t wear much more!
We found after one day that the secret not to be disturbed on the beach is to lay face down on your towel, but even then people will try to sell you things. On our first day every 10 seconds we had some one come up to us selling a range of things from hot nuts, dresses, sun glasses, fake sun cream to water melon. If I said no they went to Brett and tried to convince him that he should buy it for me! They are only trying to earn a living but its still very annoying at the same time, especially when you´re perfecting chilling to the core!
When we came back to the hostel on our second night there, we were given a note to say that we had to be out of our rooms by 10am the following day as the whole hostel was being fumigated, we had to take our back packs too, a little annoying. We later found out that one for the guys in the hostel had woken up that morning with 42 bites...BEDBUGS ahhhh... gross so they were acting on it and getting the fumigators in. One of my travelling nightmares was coming true!!
As we were up and out so early we took the opportunity to go to Christ the Redeemer and Sugar loaf. We did a little city tour and went to the football stadium and to the cathedral which seats 25,000 people, its much prettier on the inside than out as from the outside it looks very ugly. Seeing Christ the Redeemer at the top was amazing, to see the statue that it such a huge symbol in Brazil so close was just fab. You could see all the beaches surrounding Rio and all the amazing sights. From CTR we went over to Sugar loaf which was another amazing sight in itself. We were there for sunset, which set just behind the Christ statue. It was a spectacular sight. We got back to the hostel just in time for the Caprivodkas which were free due to us being evicted for the day...what a treat!
The crowd at Che Lagarto were young and lively and so friendly. There was a bar there that had happy hour 6 till 7 which was buy one get one free. So most people were getting up or returning from the beach. So the drinking began at 6pm and went on till the bar closed at about 1am which is going out time in Brazil.
On the Friday, we did the usual drinking at the hostel, then headed to Lapa at about 1.30am. There was quite a crowd of us and we were taken there by some of the locals from the hostel which was fab as they obviously new where they were going! The buses here are just transit vans you can stop them any where and they will take you almost any where so we jumped in one of these and headed to Lapa the street party.
Lapa has loads of bars which you can go in to or loads of street parties with musicians and bands playing. You can buy drink or bring your own, it is just basically a huge street party and so much fun. We were told to only take cash and absolutely nothing of value, but I couldn´t resist taking my camera and am so pleased I did as I got some fab shots of it all, see flickr for the pics. We had a fab night here and ended up getting back to the hostel just in time for sun rise at about 7am. We headed straight to bed where we didn´t come to until about 1pm, pretty early considering!
The hostel had a tv room so we spent most of Saturday afternoon chilling in there and getting over our sore heads and watching the football final!
Our first 6 days in Rio had been soo much fun...the beach by day and parties by night we were living in Rio in true Brazilian style!!!