Woke up quite tired. Couldn’t sleep. No more night swim for me! Vero let me sleep in for our second attempt at the Cristo Redentor statue.
Anticipating the worst, but hoping for the best considering it was a Tuesday, we took a thirty minute bus ride to discover great success! No lineup whatsoever! Turns out that it was so cloudy that you couldn’t even see the statue if you were next to it. We thought about it and decided to get a ticket for 1PM when it might clear up. That was three hours away so we had a morning to kill!
We walked around on this hot muggy morning. It was quite a disgusting walk being amongst the morning traffic and the smells of the city of Rio in the morning. Vero commented a lot on the smells that were found in Rio. I think she prefers the stagnant smell of Ottawa.
We soon realized there were no activities on the street to Cristo so we sought an Internet café. They couldn’t break a $50R for the $4R/hr charge, so w went to the bar next door where locals where already into the sauce at 10AM. They couldn’t break the bill either so we finally found a store that could.
We checked the weather report which reported different outlooks on different Web sites. After killing an hour emailing and updating the blog, we headed back, enjoyed a ham and cheese sandwich (without that crazy liquid cheese that was a favourite in the apartment) and had some ice water. I loved taking the water from the freezer each morning. Yum!
Before we knew it, we were heading up the mountain to the train. Thirty minutes of scenery later, we arrived at one of the new wonders of the world. Walking up the massive steps, we finally arrived at the summit of the statue. We walked away from the statue into the hundreds of people and continued without turning. Finally, when we were far enough, we turned and I was taken aback by how majestic this statue (built in the 1930s) was. How they got the statue up there is a wonder in itself. It was quite an impressive sight, standing over Rio, protecting both the rich and the poor.
Heading to the snack shop, we picked up an iced tea and a bag of chips as there was not much else to choose from. We missed the next train back and waited for the next one while asking questions like “Favourite Tom Hanks film’ or playing “What would you choose to do?” on the iPod. Did I mention it was killer hot that day?
We returned to the apartment to find Chris in better spirits today.
This is where my original journal entries end and everything else from this point will be from memory. I personally hate when this happens to me as I forget some minor details and they are lost forever.
Chris and I had some fun taking pictures of our underwear flying from the ceiling fan. Phil’s camera takes some excellent photos! Phil had a good laugh until he noticed we took a picture of our underwear on his nice camera bag. Sorry Philipp!
I am assuming we headed to the beach for a swim before supper that night. I do recall that night of supper being a pasta and rice dish. Philipp and Erica arrived fairly late from work that day and we were starving! It’s hard to eat around 9-10PM! They also left pretty soon after dinner and I remember a few of us heading to the beach for a night beer (no swim for me anymore!) as we were going to call it an early night due to us going hang gliding the next day!