Advertisement
Published: February 17th 2007
Edit Blog Post
The weird cone-shaped concrete building
Just found out that this is: Catedral Metropolitana de São Sebastião! We did not exactly sleep that night as we had a flight to catch at 2:20am. What was fascinating was that the Manaus airport was full and buzzing at that time of night. It took ages until we got through to check-in. With flight delays and etc we made it to our hostel in Rio around midday.
We stayed at the Copacabana Beach House in Rio de Janeiro's famous Copacabana district. We had to wait awhile until our room was ready for us to move in. It turned out that the other six girls in our tiny room had spread out their stuff all over the place (which wasn't difficult to do) and they had to stuff it all somewhere away from our beds and leave us some space. And there was me thinking that our dorm in Salvador was cramped!
Whist I was on the PC emailing my parents, I heard a familiar voice "Hi, we saw you in the jungle!". I was sure that the person was talking to Vicky. I was right. It was one of the two guys who were not very keen on talking to us when we were in the jungle.
This
guy was called Zach. We had greeted his friend. May be we had the wrong guy, as Zach and Vic spend a lot of time talking in the next four days.
Copacabana Beach house has a great potential as a hostel had it not been for the staff being solely and only after money and not caring at all about their guests. The staff are useless at of giving any useful and helpful information. The only taxi driver they recommended us charges a fortune. (A sweet deal must be going on for both! - I am guessing.) The bathrooms are cramped and wet all the time. Two girls left the hostel knowing they'd lose what they had pre-paid for it and would have to pay even more to go elsewhere. I can go on and on about the things that Copacabana Beach House does wrong for the extortionate price it charges its guests, but I shall stop here. All I'd add, is that for the price Vic and I paid for 2 beds in a 8-bed dorm, we could have stayed in a four star hotel in central London (in a good deal)! And we had to pay separately
for internet even though we were paying for £30 for that lovely bed! (And we had to pay for two nights that we did not spend there because of the minimum 6-day package!).
Having arrived from a week in the jungle and being our second week in Brazil, it was time for us to do some hand-washing and laundry, which took most of the early afternoon.
We were in a surprisingly good state that day considering the lack of sleep. Vic and I decided to go to see the Sugar Loaf Mountain at sunset as it was one of the recommended things to do in Rio. We convinced two of the Australian girls from our dorm to join us, as well. They were nice... at least back then.
We got on the cable car that takes you in two stages up to the top of the Sugar Loaf Mountain. The views were very pretty. However, we were unlucky, because during the day the sky was totally blue with not a cloud in the sky and even now, the clouds seemed to be just where we were and in front of the sun, the rest of the sky
was pretty clear.
Even though we waited for quite awhile - more than an hour or may be even an hour and half - the sky did not clear up and we gave up on continuing to stay there to wait for the sunset.
We left our hostel at 11:15pm, after having spent breakfast chatting with some people from our hostel. I was silly to forget to take the map of Rio that we were given at the airport. I was naive to even think that we'd be able to get another map of Rio when we get to Centro.
As we came out of the tube station, we found ourselves right in the midst of a massive crowd. The carnival festivities were in full swing. We tried to get a map from a hotel. It was of some help but not a great one when it came to showing us the most important attractions worth seeing in the Centro.
We saw a wall and some bizarre cone-like shaped concrete building. I just found out that the wall is: Carioca Acqueduct and the cone-like building is: Catedral Metropolitana de São Sebastião! Vic and I were not greatly
impressed by what we saw, but at least we were happy to have gotten away from the drunken crowds, the streets flooded with piss and spilt alcohol, as well as the people pissing on the streets. Vic and I had to pass right next to a man who was holding his manhood pissing and all that separated us was a tree trunk. Vic tried to stop me going through there: "Mira, but he is pissing!" My respond was that there was nowhere else we could pass through. I would have had no problem checking him out, only if I had wished to turn my head in his direction!
There was a moment when Vic thought she had had enough of the crowds and wanted to return to the peace and quite of Copacabana. Luckily, she followed my idea to check out what was on the other side of the crowd. We found some interesting buildings (like Palácio Tiradentes and Candelária Church as well as some ministerial buildings) and reached the coast. In our attempt to reach Ilha Fiscal, we ended up going up a hill and visiting a small church (the Church of St. Benedict) that looked very simple with its plain white paint and hardly any decoration from the outside. But what we saw inside was very impressive! The inside walls of the church were made of beautifully carved wood.
Later, we made a couple more attempts to make it to Ilha Fiscal, which proved unsuccessful and as we were tired we simply headed back home. On the top of that, everything in the area was closed and we could barely find a place that was open and that offered something to eat.
We found something for Vic, but I did not want to eat that kind of stuff at the time. I was saving myself for the nice "quilo" place that we had seen the previous night.
Later that evening, Bobi, a Bulgarian long-term pen-friend of mine, made it to my hostel and we finally met. This was the fourth time we were trying to meet since we arrived in Brazil. Hip, Hip, Hooray!
Again, we were boring and stayed in the hostel refusing Bobi's suggestion to go out in town. Vic and I were still hoping to make it early to bed and to get in a better shape for the coming days. It is a difficult task in a hostel like Copacabana Beach House in a dorm of eight, shall I say.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.142s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 19; qc: 84; dbt: 0.0828s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb