Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl...

So here I sit, ready to tell everyone all about Brazil and nothing is coming to me.  Why?  Maybe it's feeling that my first "real" post needs to be really good, or maybe trying to come up with a post title is throwing me off...who knows.  BK and I loved Brazil and thought it was a great trip, so here it goes!

We visited two places in Brazil: Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.  And, although the cities are just a short one-hour plane ride from one another, they are two very different places.  Rio is exactly what you're thinking: beach city, relaxed, great nightlife, days in the sun and lots of outdoorsy stuff to do.  Sao Paulo is all business: a concrete jungle spanning as far as the eye can see, traffic at all hours of the day and night,  numerous "financial centers" throughout the city.  Fittingly, Rio was our vacation spot and Sao Paulo was where we headed when BK had to work.  This is a long one; I'll work on that.

Rio!

What's the song that immediately comes to mind?  Copacabana of course! That's the first place we hit when we arrived early on Friday morning.  It's not quite the glamorous place that I was envisioning, but it is a nice beach.  As a warning, it won't be a peaceful walk; there are many, many vendors selling anything and everything, and we were immediately pegged as tourists.

The next two days in Rio were great!  We hired an English-speaking tour guide (highly recommend) and finally had a chance to ask all of those pressing questions about Brazil!  She took us to the Corcovado (the Christ statue above the City), which is even more amazing than the views you see on TV or in the movies.  The statue is situated in the perfect place, with 360 degree views of the city; on a clear day you can see for miles.  It is extremely crowded, but totally worth the climb up and battle for pictures.  If you ever go, don't be alarmed by the line to go up- it moves fast.

After Corcovado we headed to Sugar Loaf, another well known view point in the city.  It's named Sugar Loaf because the shape of the rock looks like the canister that they used to carry sugar in (way back when).  You go up in cable cars and when you get to the top you're rewarded with another great view of the city.

The next day held the real adventure- BK and I ventured out and went ocean kayaking.  Don't worry, we had a guide and a couple other kayakers with us.  He might have been being nice, but I was proud of us because our guide kept asking how much we had done this and that we were really good!

I kept saying that it was a marriage exercise, in that BK and I had to constantly work together to make things work, especially when we crossed the SHIPPING CHANNEL.  Yes, you read right...the normal route that they typically took was too wavy so the instructor decided that we were good enough and could cross the channel.  It had lots of big waves, but we made it!  3 hours of ocean kayaking later we had gotten a great workout.

The one thing that we didn't get to do in Rio that I thought would have been really interesting is tour a favella.  The social worker in me wanted to visit these places; favellas are unincorporated parts of the city that sit on nearly all of the hillsides.  The people who live there are poor and have no access city services such as sanitation, water, electricity or education- even the police stayed out.  They used to be run by gang and drug lords, but in recent years Rio has begun the "appeasement" process.  There are guided tours available (don't worry we wouldn't have gone by ourselves), but we just ran out of time.  I feel certain that we'll be putting something like this on future agendas when we visit new places in foreign countries.

Sao Paulo is yet to come, but we'll share soon enough!  Hope you'll keep reading!