Rio de Janeiro

Bom dia from Rio.

We´re in Rio! No, we haven´t seen anyone with fruit in their hat . . . yet.

Back to some things that I was going to write about before my time ran out at the last place. They say if you like humidity and beer, head for the city of Blumenau (the city where my German came in handy). I think you know that I like beer, and as a person who grew up in Houston, the humidity didn´t bother me too much. So, we enjoyed the beer and the German-style breakfasts. After having travelled for a while in Argentina, anything more than toast and butter is more than welcome.

After Blumenau, we headed for the little city of Penedo, which is in the state of Sao Paulo. This is another community founded by immigrants to Brasil - Penedo was founded by Scandinavians, mostly Finnish and Swedish. We stayed at a pousada the was owned by an older gentleman who came to Brasil from Austria when he was one year old. This place was one of those places you hear about - an old house with an amazing verdant garden on the edge of an alpline-looking stream in the middle (well, the edge) of the rain forest. One of the better places we´ve stayed.

Penedo is on the edge of a national park that preserves some of the last remaining Atlantic rain forest, so this sounded like a place we would like to visit. We might even get to see some monkeys, we thought. Reality is a bit harder to deal with, though. Things are set up for people who have cars around this city (and many other places in Brasil), so we didn´t make it to the national park. We did get to hike up a very large hill close to the city and got a great view of the valley with the city, as well as some bumble bees that were the size of my thumb. We hiked to several waterfalls outside of the town.

On to Rio. Melanie asked me what pre-conceived visions I had in my head about Brasil. I told her that I didn´t have too many - mine were mostly about rainforests and mosquitoes. One thing that I really didn´t expect to find was - get ready for this - popcorn with bacon. That´s right, popcorn with pieces of bacon in it that you can get practically anywhere on the street. This is my kind of place.

Seriously, though we haven´t seen too much of it yet, Rio promises to be interesting - good interesting and bad interesting. On the one hand, you can feel the energy of this place when you are walking down the street, on the other hand you are walking down the street with multitudes of poor and indigent people. The buildings are beautiful, but almost every vertical surface has some sort of grafitti on it. We will be exploring today and I will write more about Rio in the next post. And, yes, we will be careful.

Tchau!