We woke up and got ready for the 9AM pickup for hang gliding. If you don’t know this already, I am scared of heights. So the idea of hang gliding has been spoken about the entire trip and I sort of dismissed. I wasn’t trying to think about it too much. So when the guy picked us up at 9AM, it started to seep in that this was actually going to happen!
The hang gliding Gods were not with us that day as we were heading out the door and the guy picking us up received a phone call indicating that the winds weren’t good at all so we would have to postpone until the afternoon. Free day to ourselves! Without any plans! What to do?
Chris, Vero and I headed to Copacabana beach which we had only seen in the night with three million other people. We strolled down the sidewalk (which as a very famous cobblestone design), checked out some merchants wares, bought some excellent percussion shakers. I am quite jealous of the giant fish shaker that Chris bought (named Bob the Fish). He was going to be the star of the new shaker band “Bob the Fish and the Minnows”. Classic title!
It was getting hot so I decided to take a dip in the water while Vero and Chris hung out on the beach. The water was cold. Refreshingly cold! It was quite the change from the warm water over the past week. I loved it! When I returned to the beach, we got some cheese on stick with some herbs on it. It’s really good. Essentially, think of a giant block of cheese curd on a Popsicle stick sprinkled with herbs and then grilled for a few minutes. Yummers!
Copacabana definitely had a lot more merchants around trying to sell you stuff. It got annoying when you are trying to relax on the beach and there’s people walking up to you trying to sell their bottles of water or tanning oils. All in all, I prefer the Leblon beach a lot better.
We headed into the street along Copacabana and bought some souvenirs. We also called the hang gliding place but no dice, we weren’t going to fly today. It was time to return home to tell Audrey and Florent as they were waiting to hear back from us.
When I got home, I took a nice afternoon nap and after that, headed down to the beach where I enjoyed the nice refreshing water. I even swam for awhile as it was gave me lots of energy! It was a great afternoon of just relaxing and enjoying life.
That night we had to wait a long time to eat but it was worth the wait. When Philipp and Erica showed up, we headed out to this amazing buffet where you have your standard buffet tables but at the same time, the waiters are carrying around giant swords of meat that they place onto your plate. You have a sticker on your table that you turn over to the green side (“Green is Go!”) and they’ll just keep hammering you with selections of meat…pork, beef, chicken, roast, awesome filet mignon. For all the days that we had not eaten much, we gorged on all this meat. I want one of these places in Ottawa!
After the gorge-fest, Philipp and Erica went home as it was getting late and we headed out to some bar which played some good old rock and roll music. This was quite the hopping place and reminded me of all the bars back home…grimy pub chairs, small dance floor, random artifacts around the bar. Excellent! I feel at home again. Especially since they were playing a killer mix of tunes from the early 2000s..a lot of Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, JET! The only problem is that they would also intermix the ladies favourite…anything from the 80s. This proved to be the only downfall of the DJ that night.
We started off the night with a few drinks and Vero took one sip of her Caipifruita and then realized it was not for her! Chris and I ended up finishing it during the rest of the night up on the dance floor. The dance floor had its motley crew of people…I swear I was dancing with some Egyptians at one point (as they reminded me of Mina. That’s my only basis to that assumption) and there were some hilarious dancers out there as well. I especially enjoyed the homosexual trying to bring me up some stairs to ‘show’ me something. He kept saying “Just go up to the third step, you’ll see.”. Chris figured he wanted me to go up to the third step, turn around so he can check out my ass! In the end, no stair climbing occurred but it made for a hilarious moment in the night.
The air-guitar had to end at some point so we headed home around 2AM as we knew we would have to get up early the next morning to go hang gliding. It also didn’t help that the DJ threw in some Madonna around that time which made Vero go wild, but made Chris and I realize that we would rather be home than here!