he is watching...
favela and samba - right next to each other
a view to kill for
a view to kill forscared miriam on sugarloaf
Embracing the city
Embracing the city Rio de Janeiro. The Carioca's (inhabitants of Rio) say: Deus e Brasilero - God is Brasilian. Probably because it is one of the best situated cities in the world. Who could have ever thought I would make it untill here. I, for one, did not. We arrived by night and we were lucky that we had a place to stay, because the Pan American games (Panamericana) are in Rio this year! These are the games that preceed the Olympics in a big city in an American (North, Middle or South) country. We had no idea :-)
Arriving by plane we were picked up by our taxi-driver, and he showed us a bit around in Copacabana, the most famous part of town. It is rather small...and not that noisy and loud as I expected. Amsterdam has much more people walking about, that hour of night..It looked nice, with the lights along the costline...And also in the daytime it amazed me as the days passed and we got to see more and more - All the songs about Rio are true, all the stories are true, it is truly a beautiful city. It has amazing beaches, it has rainforest (the biggest rainforest whitin a city), it has mountains with Christ watching your every step, it has numerous districts with each different aspects and nice specific features. It has a big lake in the middle of the town. We walked along the Copacabana beach, we walked on the famous Ipanema beachwalk. We went with a very old tram up the mountain to the "barrio Santa Teresa" where nowadays all the bohemians and artists live, a very nice part of town. You could see from the tram how the "favela's" (the slums) are built. There are special slum-tours even!! I found that weird but, they say, the money goes to the slums. I do not believe that that money really goes to the poor people, but instead it will go to the druglords, who own the slums...So no favela-tour for us. We even read about the fact that the beggars in Ipanema and Copacabana rent a place on these streets from the Rio-mob (2,000 Reales a month) and they rent babies so they get more money from the tourists that have no clue. I can not judge any of this, because I always had a roof and food, but it seems to horrible for words.
One day we got caught in a street fight! We were nicely walking along the beach, buying an ice-cream, when all of a sudden Ellen shouted, lets move, trouble...and people started to run, the police was hitting people with big sticks, coconuts were flying around. Ellen ran, I was pushed into the ice-stand by the owner, to keep me safe. The troublemakers were throwing coconuts at the police and to the police-van. Police in return drove with the van into the people and hit them over and over. It was quite scary...and then as sudden as it had started, it stopped. So we could still by the ice-cream.
We watched a football game in a bar, the final between Argentina and Brasil of all countries and we expected that hell would break loose with whatever outcome, but it was rather tame for such a football-mad country. I nearly shouted more than the people itself....Brasil won and it was too quiet for words...Used to the fame of winning I guess..
We went to Pão de A¢ucar (Sugarloaf), we went to the big Cordovaro, Christ the Redeemer Statue, which is 30m high and the arm width is 28m. It stands on a mountain in the middle of Rio, watching over the city. We saw the street where the Carnaval is celebrated in February. We saw the biggest football stadium in the world, Maracana. We did the lot and it was beautiful...
Arriving by plane we were picked up by our taxi-driver, and he showed us a bit around in Copacabana, the most famous part of town. It is rather small...and not that noisy and loud as I expected. Amsterdam has much more people walking about, that hour of night..It looked nice, with the lights along the costline...And also in the daytime it amazed me as the days passed and we got to see more and more - All the songs about Rio are true, all the stories are true, it is truly a beautiful city. It has amazing beaches, it has rainforest (the biggest rainforest whitin a city), it has mountains with Christ watching your every step, it has numerous districts with each different aspects and nice specific features. It has a big lake in the middle of the town. We walked along the Copacabana beach, we walked on the famous Ipanema beachwalk. We went with a very old tram up the mountain to the "barrio Santa Teresa" where nowadays all the bohemians and artists live, a very nice part of town. You could see from the tram how the "favela's" (the slums) are built. There are special slum-tours even!! I found that weird but, they say, the money goes to the slums. I do not believe that that money really goes to the poor people, but instead it will go to the druglords, who own the slums...So no favela-tour for us. We even read about the fact that the beggars in Ipanema and Copacabana rent a place on these streets from the Rio-mob (2,000 Reales a month) and they rent babies so they get more money from the tourists that have no clue. I can not judge any of this, because I always had a roof and food, but it seems to horrible for words.
One day we got caught in a street fight! We were nicely walking along the beach, buying an ice-cream, when all of a sudden Ellen shouted, lets move, trouble...and people started to run, the police was hitting people with big sticks, coconuts were flying around. Ellen ran, I was pushed into the ice-stand by the owner, to keep me safe. The troublemakers were throwing coconuts at the police and to the police-van. Police in return drove with the van into the people and hit them over and over. It was quite scary...and then as sudden as it had started, it stopped. So we could still by the ice-cream.
We watched a football game in a bar, the final between Argentina and Brasil of all countries and we expected that hell would break loose with whatever outcome, but it was rather tame for such a football-mad country. I nearly shouted more than the people itself....Brasil won and it was too quiet for words...Used to the fame of winning I guess..
We went to Pão de A¢ucar (Sugarloaf), we went to the big Cordovaro, Christ the Redeemer Statue, which is 30m high and the arm width is 28m. It stands on a mountain in the middle of Rio, watching over the city. We saw the street where the Carnaval is celebrated in February. We saw the biggest football stadium in the world, Maracana. We did the lot and it was beautiful...
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