Brazil World Cup 2014 - Day 7

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We were planning to go to a natural park about 200km outside the city, since we had the whole day free anyway. But i read a few reviews about it and found that people go there over multiple days, tours take a whole day and they stay nearby or camp. Moreover we had apprehensions again of the guide knowing only Portuguese so we would be sucked into something we didn't understand. Luis had heard of the place but hadn't been there himself, so given the lack of concrete info we decided not to go.

There was another National Park of Brasilia which was about 10km from the city center. It was supposed to have a couple of trails, but it looked wholly unimpressive when we got there, and just as we started the first trail some guys came and said it was closed. So we just decided to leave. Next stop was Dom Bosco church, which looked quite pretty with its colored glass windows. We came back, had lunch in an apartment nearby and walked over to another temple: Templo da Boa Vantade. We didn't know much about it; just going through a list of attractions on TripAdvisor and that seemed to have a cool architecture.

Turns out it was an Ecumenical church, which is another sect of Christianity. When we went inside there was a sign saying "No shorts" and a lady there stopped us for that reason. We were about to go back but then she took us to another room and gave us some elastic pants to wear on top of our shorts! She also knew English fairly well so spoke a little bit about the church. Inside was a kind of prayer room/shrine; the whole floor was a concentric spiral of alternating black and white. We were supposed to remove our shoes, walk along the spiraling black line inwards to the center, and then walk back out along the white line. It was all very strange and i felt like we were in some kind of cult with matching church pants, but they seemed really serious about this and there were three other people there too walking along very solemnly so i didn't do anything like take pictures in case it might offend. Besides we didn't have much to do and i suppose the silence and the ambience was peaceful if nothing else.

At the end there were blank cards which asked to write down your name, a wish that you want fulfilled, and then put the card in a 'holy sink'. Of course for my wish i wrote "Liverpool to win the league in my lifetime". However, i did put down my name as 'Anniyan' as i didn't want anyone to know who made such a silly wish!

After that the last tourist spot we visited was the JK memorial, which is a memorial to Juscelino Kubitschek, who was the Brazilian president who decided to establish the city of Brasilia and make it the capital. There was an interesting statue of him and a museum that we could enter and see various of his photos and personal effects and read a little bit about him.

All in all, not very impressive at all, and this despite the fact that we did research on trip advisor online and only tried to visit the top attractions. The palaces on the first day were pretty neat, but even still overall i wouldn't recommend anyone visit Brasilia JUST for the tourism. If at all it has to be something like we're doing now: coming to see a big event like the World Cup and just seeing this stuff on the side. But seeing as there won't be a world cup here again in quite a while i can't imagine a scenario where you would need to visit Brasilia. Don't get me wrong, it seems a really nice city to live in and i liked the apartments etc, but definitely not a tourist destination. Ideally we should've been able to spend an extra day or two in Rio rather than here.

In any case, football starts again tomorrow with the quarter finals so all this doesn't matter!

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