It’s Just Poison…

I woke up in the hostel with my chest still hurting a bit, but not as bad as the night before. I grabbed my towel and headed for the shower. I experienced a first in during this one. I got electrocuted by the shower head. Apparently, there’s this thing attached to the shower head that heats the water. This thing had some exposed wires and it’s own fuse switch hanging off of it. I saw the stuff, but thought nothing of it… until I tried to move the shower head. Once i got feeling back in my arm, I dried off, and then went back to the room to pack my things. We were going to check into a different hostel. The new one was on Ipanema beach.

When we arrived at the new hostel, we could see a drastic difference in the neighborhood. Much nicer, and a lot safer. The hostel was also a lot better. One of the best hostels I’ve ever stayed in actually. And the best part is that it’s only 1 block from the beach =). After checking in and dropping off our bags, we headed out to the beach to check out Rio. It was a little cloudy, but still nice and warm.

While on the beach, we partook in our first true Rio activity. Drinking coconut water. It’s a complicated process. They cut off the top of a coconut and put a straw in it. Their not the type of coconuts we’re used to (the brown hairy looking ones), they’re a lot larger and green. The coco water was pretty good. Very refreshing.

After tooling around on the beach for a while, we scouted out a place Nicole read about that was supposed to have a good Vegetarian buffet for lunch. I have no idea what any of the stuff was that I ate, but all of it (except for the weird yellow stuff on the salad) was really good.

We spent the remainder of the day just walking around the town and seeing what city life in Rio was like. We mainly stayed in the Ipanema and Lablon area (nicer parts). We did find a mall in the other side of the canal where the parking was on top. I’m guessing something like the top 8-10 floors. At the very top (on the roof), there was a great view of the lagoon / bay. I snapped a couple photos, and then we headed back to the hostel to figure out what we were going to do that night.

For Dinner, Nicole and I did Kilograma. It’s a nice buffet style restaurant where you pay by the kilogram. We went to town on that buffet and got 5 or 6 different types of cake for dessert. I was stuffed.

Back at the hostel, we ran into this British couple (Gaz and Lex) and hit it off pretty much immediately. They told us about this huge on-the-streets city-wide party that takes place every weekend in Lapa, so we decided to tag a long to check it out. We were told that Lapa is a pretty shady area, and that we should be mindful of our things while we were there. They were right. The area reminded me a lot of Teijuana. Bars and clubs all up and down the streets, with vendors and crowds all over the place.

For most of the clubs, there were absurdly long lines to get in (found out the next day that the wait was over 2 hours!). So we skipped those and found a couple smaller places that had live Samba music and strong drinks. I don’t remember everything, but I’m pretty sure I drank caipirinihas all night long (local Brazilian drink made with a sugar liquor).

After a few drinks and some good conversations, we haggled with the cabbies for a ride back to the hostel. Thankfully, Gaz spoke enough Portuguese to get by. When we got back to the hostel, Nicole and Lex crashed out, so Gaz and I went around the corner to grab a few drinks from the newspaper stand and we finished off our evening on the porch of the hostel talking about who-knows-what. All in all, a much better night than yesterday!

Tags: Travels //