Rio de Janeiro
Thursday, February 16th, 2006First of all, an apology to the person I accused of hacking into this site and wiping out my journal last week. The site was having problems and lost all my content whilst also asking for a mail address and name from the first person to view it since. This lead me to draw the wrong conclusions and for that I´m very sorry – I owe you many drinks and grovelling on return. The people who run this site restored everything and now (hopefully) all is good.
OK, onwards. So São Paulo was good, a little too good at times, hence the difficulty escaping, but escape I did. Myself and three other guys took the bus to Rio de Janeiro where we were going to check out an apartment. First port of call was obviously the bus station, and what a shitty introduction to the city that was, but what´s new. We took a taxi to the apartment to find it was actually across the bay from Rio in a place called Niterõi. The apartment was nice enough, the area fairly affluent and safe and after the bus station sketchiness we were glad to take it.
The weather has been fairly bad since arriving here but it´s improving. We started the weekend looking out at heavy (I mean really heavy with full-on thunder and lightning) tropical storms so we spent the weekend drinking beer, playing poker, cooking food and being lazy, not a bad thing. The only mission accomplished was to find a tout selling tickets for the football on sunday. We found one, we bought the tickets, we just weren´t sure if they were genuine.
Come sunday and we headed off to Maracanã stadium for the Rio state cup final between Botafogo (the local team) and Americã (some place elsewhere in the state). I´ve never been much of a football fan and usually only watch the big tournament matches with England playing, but I´d promised myself, and Erika, that I would go to Maracanã and watch a game because it´s supposed to be crazy down here, so if I only do it once, it should be here.
From the moment we got on the bus it became pretty clear which team we should be supporting – it had to be the local team Botafogo. The tickets worked and we walked in to find this massive stadium slowing filling with fans. It´s quite a sight, especially for the uninitiated. The first half was fairly poor with ´Fogo conceding a goal and not much else happening – not all I´d been expecting. Then the second half kicked off and we proceeded to put three consecutive goals in the net, each time involved a complete frenzy all around, fireworks going off, mexican waves, beating drums and strangers all around shaking my hand, arms all around cheering and jumping around. Even this cynical fecker couldn´t help but be caught up in the buzz of it all. Not sure I´m about to start obsessing about Bristol City or anything, but I think I finally understand.
Tuesday we came over to Rio, to Ipanema to be precise (next one along from Copacabana). I´d had enough of the apartment in Niterõi, it was too far from Rio and pretty dull on the whole. It took me a day or two to find a hostel with room as everywhere was booked for the weekend due to the free Rolling Stones gig, but I finally found somewhere nice and moved in yesterday. Still trying to track down my friend Omar who I met in Guatemala, but meantime I´ve met quite a few people and think this was a good move. We´ve got the beach within a couple of blocks and it´s a fairly safe area as it goes here in Rio. The city has a worldwide bad reputation for crime, but it´s the same as most big cities, use some sense, careful at night, don´t be flash with your cash. Once you get comfortable here you realise how beautiful and vibrant a place it is. I think this weekend with the massive gig is going to be a blinder, they´re expecting between 1.5 and 2 million people, which I think will beat all records. If I survive I´ll let you know how it went.
Ed