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Published: February 28th 2009
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Day 2
So after am pretty much uninterrupted nights sleep we both wake up at 7.30. After making our way downstairs and chilling in the lounge for while the cook brings out an assortment of brekkie, ham, cheese, fresh rolls, coffee, cake and some very odd tasting fruit juice! It finally gets to around 9am and we decide to hit the beach early. We leave the hostel and start walking... Everything is closed with shutters down. This seems a bit odd being carnival and everything? So we get to Botafogo beach and start walking over the beach, as i approach the sea I dodge a few stray jonny's, bottles and bags. The sea is actually minging! So we head around towards the Copacabana, this must be a top beach Craig I said. So we walked on for about an hour or so before coming round the headland and finding this huge beach, the Copacabana. We have made it! So we walk down and after a bit of a mission manage to rent a sun umbrella. There are millions of people and hundreds of millions of kids!
After a couple of hours in the sun its getting up to
36C so we decided to go and get some lunch on the way back to hostel. As we'd found out in the morning everything was closed but i just thought it would be something to with the early start... NOT the case. We walked again for an hour so trying to find somewhere to eat with no joy. Eventually we stumbled across some fast food joint with pictures of food. Ah, this will be easy, we can point to what we want! Only problem was it was hard to tell what anything was as it was all deep fried! Nice. We managed to eat up and headed back to the hostel.
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So we get back to the hostel and a few people are heading to a street party around the corner, so we head along. we nip to a supermarket and pick up some beer and watch the the samba dancing,drums, a mass amount of people rolling down the street (a bit like Mardi gars) and soak up the atmosphere. after finishing all our beers we head back to the hostel and get showed. We begin to realize how cool our hostel is theres a massive chill
out area where people congregate and chat about where there heading that evening. It seems like rio is a big start/end point so half the folk here are heading in our direction and half have been everywhere we are going....so we have loads of tips and info of where to go and places to see. Anyway, we get showed and a load of us have planned to go to the samba dome to watch the main carnival parade but everyone has tickets which were 220res (65 squid) we get in a taxi with an Australian amy and head to the dome. We get out and realize we are on the wrong side of where we need to be, we are at gate 2, but we need to be at gate 13. We start walking in the direction of where we think gate 13 is...... the streets are packed with people ready to take part in the parade and people watching. the costumes and floats are breathe taking!!!! everyone is dancing & singing its such a feel good atmosphere, indescribable really!! we head round and realize we need to get another taxi...we flag one down which takes us via the favelas
and drops us off at section 13. the stadium is massive. it runs for half a mile and has grand stands on either side of the parade route. We find a geezer selling tickets for 200 for 2 we get him down to 40 each, haha laughing 12 squid. We get inside the grand stand and the number of people is incredible, the colorful floats, samba dancing and music is amazing. Tho one problem, u cant move, imagine old trafford with no seats, no aisles, no stewards..free for all sit where u want. So we had to push our way and i mean push to the second from back row!!!! never have i done anything so hard!!!! we got to the top of everest and were really rewarded for our efforts. We were on our step in the samba dome from 11pm - 5am and it was amazing! - catch the pics. we got home at 6ish and hit the sack.
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