Blogs from Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America - page 141

So it's been an eventful last few days. The last entry, I believe, was just before we went to the Parade of Champions, the winners of the formal Parading of the Samba Schools. To sum up, there are no words that come close to appropriately describing the event. (I seem to be saying that alot lately). We arrived at 2100hrs, to see the Sambadrome, the site of the event. This is a really long structure, made entirely of concrete. It was constructed by the famous Oscar Neimayer, the same architect who designed the city of Brasilia. To get an idea of what the Sambadrome is like, imagine the Commonwealth Stadium, stacked about 6 lengths back to back, with a long white stretch of 4-lane pavement in between the 2 sides of the stadium. On one side ... read more

The Carnaval in Rio is a competition between 14 samba schools from all over Brazil, 10 of which are from Rio. It is much more commercialized than the carnaval in Salvador, but still amazing in many ways. The Carnaval takes place in the Sumbodromo, which is a huge stadium that was built especially for the Carnavals. Each school has something like 2,000 - 3,000 dancers. A school starts the preparation for the carnaval a year in advance: first it chooses a theme, than draws a competition to compose a song for it, and at last invents different customs and samba dances for the song. This competition is a very serious business in Brazil. When the winning schools where announced on the TV, the streets were empty and quiet, like during the final 4 in Israel. This ... read more

Favelas are regions of big cities in Brazil, where the poorest population leaves, and considered the most dangerous places to be in. Local bands control the favela, and the police is usually afraid to enter a favela, and if it does enter it - only in big forces. My hostel organized a tour to one of the favelas in Rio, with a local guide. This is absolutely safe, as he has an agreement of protection with the locals, and the locals are interested for tourist to come in. I was at first concerned about it, but when I heard from everyone that it is absolutely safe, and that this tour was proposed in many hostels, and from people who did it that it was great, I decided to sign up, and wasn't sorry about it. Actually ... read more

The only flight I could book from Salvador to Rio De Janerio was at 3am! it didn't leave on time this was the start of a bad day. We that's Luke, Mike and myself next found ourselves on a Rio street corner at 9am the address of the hostel in the Lonely Planet was wrong. Eventually made it to the right address but then had to wait for our beds to be ready, no probs.......6pm still no beds! we got shuffled off to a sister hostel in Copacabana which wasn't very nice, but given free booze for all the hassle so a happy ending really! We stayed at the Che Lagarto hostel in Ipanema, one of Rio's nicer areas and only two minutes walk from the beach! Rio life revolves around the beach which was quite ... read more

I went at evening to a football game in the Maracana stadium. It's one of the biggest football stadiums in the world. When it was first built, it contained 200,000 places, but there was a problem with it's foundation so they added chairs, which lowered it's capacity by half. Unfortunately the stadium goes threw a renovation, so the lower floor is closed and the stadium contains only 55,000 seats now. The game we went to was a minor one - it was in the middle of the week, Flamengo is one of the best teams in Brazil and Madureira team is considered a week one, and the win of Flamengo was a sure thing - So the stadium wasn't full, and there were only :-) 40,000 fans there, unfortunately all of the Flamengo team (Madureira is ... read more