Awesome Aussie & Irritable Israeli´s

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Right, so I've been here almost three weeks now and through a combination of laziness and poor equipment this is officially the first entry of my blog since leaving Watford! Ive seen some pretty cool stuff and met some even cooler people!

We arrived at our hostel in Buenos Aires pretty early in the morning and were not able to check into our room until the afternoon! We were just in time for a walking tour of the city though so we chucked our bags down and got involved in that! The highlight of the tour was definitely La Bombonera, the Boca juniors ground! Pretty cool stadium, blue and yellow everywhere! Boca are sponsored by coco cola but due to the rivavlry with river plate who play in White and red, coke have to advertise whiteout either of those colours!

Found loads of memorabilia associated to 'Carlito' Tevez, who is a bit of legend in Buenos Aires by all accounts! Perhaps it would be best if he stayed there!

Got back to the hostel and finally got the keys to our room. Headed up to find two Aussies lads having some banter between themselves! Little did I know that I would probably remember both of them for a long time to come!

After a few beers in our room with these lads, one of them got out his poisonous amazonian blow pipe dart shooter thingy and thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate how it worked! Rather than just shoot it at the wall like a normal person, said lad thought it was a better idea to shoot his pal in the face!! 3 darts...two near misses and with the final shot hit him straight in his forehead!! After everyones initial shock reaction he removed the dart from his head with blood pouring down his face! So on our first night we were in a dorm with a couple of Aussie crackpots! They were good lads though and we had a couple of decent nights out with them!

Did a couple more tours in the four days we were in BA and walked a fair few miles! Good preparation for the Inca trail in early march!

On our Last night in BA we went to a steak restaurant called La Cabrera, where myself Mark and Youngsy thought it would be a good idea to take on the biggest steak on the menu, an 800 gram sirloin! When it came it was an absolute monster and as we were there during happy hour worked out around £15 each including a bottle of Argentinian red!!

Went out three nights our of four in Buenos Aires to some really good clubs! Far better than clubs back home! Although I can only describe the taxi journeys home as one big game of charades! I think it took me three different cabs to get home first night!

We then took a monster coach journey to an island if the cost of Brazil called Florianopolis. The bus was supposed to take 24 hours but took almost 30! Pretty much spent the week on the beach and by the pool. We where there during Australia day so signed up for an all day drinking session with a load of Aussies! Pretty chilled week! Highlight was probably the P12 pool party which was basically just another all day drinking session round a massive pool with various supposedly top Brazilian DJs! Standardly Needers fell asleep in the VIP area after too many beers! Was pretty amusing watching these Brazilian lads try and move him, I think they gave up in the end!

From Floripa we took a short ten hour bus journey to Sao Paulo to break the longer journey to Rio and to hopefully try and catch the Santos match on the 5th Feb! Managed to get tickets on our first day and had a awesome night! Kick off was 21:00 and when we arrived, there was fireworks going off all over the shop! People were literally lighting rockets in their hands and flinging them in the air!

Whilst queueing to get into the stadium we somehow managed to all buy ourselves Neymar shirts! They were about £90 at the place where we got our tickets and we managed to get some very shoddy replicas for less than a tenth of the price! Out of the five shirts, not one was the same! The match finished 1-1 and I can only describe the standard as pretty village, I think the mighty Clough City would probably stand a chance in that league. Was also pretty unimpressed with the main man Neymar. He seemed to spend most of the game throwing himself on the floor. Had a decent touch but in my opinion is not worth anywhere near the amount banded around!

After Sao Paulo, we got another bus to Rio where I am at the moment! Had a bit of a mare with the hostels though, the first one was unbelievably bad, felt like I was sleeping in a furnace it was that hot! We checked out pretty soon and moved to a supposedly livelier hostel but only lasted one night as we broke their one golden rule of silence after 10pm! We awoke to a request that we swiftly vacate the hostel after four irritable Israelis in our room all complained! They clearly didn't appreciate our banter!

That threw a bit of a spanner in the works with regards to our weekly plans as we were due to do a city tour today but had to change that to Thursday and instead spent the morning trying to find somewhere else to stay! Fingers crossed we'll have more success with hostel number 3! So...... 4 more days left in Rio and we have plenty to get on with! Hopefully I'll sort an update out in a couple of weeks or so but until then, love to all! If anyone wants to add me on Skype its benjani_1989. xxx

Oh and I forgot to mention.... lesson learnt this week, probably not wise to challenge Brazilians at beach football at 4am after a heavy night! We got absolutely schooled on Copacabana beach!

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