Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America

I woke up to another beautiful morning here, although it looks like it’s going to be another hot one. I met up with Becky at the Cantagalo metro station and we headed over to the lake to walk around it. It was a really nice walk, and took about two hours, and a great way to start the day. It felt completely safe and comfortable to walk around. When we got almost all the way around the lake, Becky took off and met some of her friends at a hostel nearby.

Instead of just walking back to where I had started the walk, I decided to head down to the beach instead and got to see the west end of Ipanema beach by Leblon. It’s a really beautiful beach, and hard to believe it’s right in the city. I walked down by the beach for about an hour, relaxed at a cafe for lunch, and got some acai.

I got the metro back to the apartment and worked on my blog for a bit. It’s taking a while to get through all the videos I took while scuba diving in Paraty and Ilha Grande, but I’m getting there. At about 7pm I went out to get some dinner and could hear there was a carnaval party going on. This is the first night of carnaval, so I thought it would go check out the bloco to see what it was all about. As expected, it was a bunch of people who were drinking, in stupid costumes, and dancing in the streets. This was a party on a small side street that just had a DJ playing with some huge speakers, but it was enough to get about a thousand people out in the street to dance. It wasn’t organized samba dancing like I thought it would be though. This was not a samba school, this was just a bunch of drunk people dancing. The party really wasn’t my scene, but I’m glad I checked it out.

Tomorrow I’m going to go back to the downtown area and possibly see some more of the carnaval scene. I’m not looking forward to it too much, but I’m in Rio, so I feel like I really should see carnaval while I’m here.