Day 46 - 11/21/23 - Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

 Today began the first of two days in Brazil that marked a couple of items off of my very short bucket list.  Early in the morning I received an email from our tour operator that a last minute participant needed to pay in advance for the tour.  So I went ahead and paid for them and then gifted the tour to them.


The ship was scheduled to arrive at 10am but we arrived an hour early and had a very pretty sail in despite not being able to see Rio's iconic landmark (Christ the Redeemer) I assembled our excursion group in the Ocean Bar at 10:45am for our 11am tour.  There were just under 40 people divided into 3 groups.  We disembarked the ship and successfully found our guides.  For the most part, we only saw them infrequently throughout the day even though we visited the same excursion points.  


I'll not go through a blow by blow description of each of the 5 excursion stops, but I'll list them here with a brief comment.


1.  Cinelandia Square - It's historically known as the Broadway of Rio and is ringed by the Municipal Theatre,  the National Library, City Hall, Superior Court, and the Museum of Fine Arts.  There are a couple of subway stops in this area.


2.  Selaron Stairways - The colorful creation of a Chilean artist, Jorge Selaron.  200 plus steps all done in colorful tiles provided by the artist. Angela climbed all of the stairs while I limited myself to about 3/4 of them.  








3.  Buffet Lunch at a Japanese restaurant.  It was very loud, but the food was good.  It was a little bit of a hassle to have to separately pay for drinks and there were lines to go through the buffet lines and to pay on the way out.


4.  Christ the Redeemer statue.  We had pre-sheduled tickets on the cog train that took us to the elevator and after the elevator, we rode up two escalators to the base of the statute.  It was VERY crowded up there and the cloud and fog conditions made it challenging to photograph from the front side.  This was a bucket list item for me and it didn't disappoint me.  The symbolism of the name of the statute was not lost on me as I'm a believer in Christ as Redeemer and this statute captures this essence so well.

5.  Ipanema Beach - This beach was made famous by the song, The Girl from Ipanema and is a popular venue for swimming, sunbathing, and people watching.  Angela and I walked about 1/2 mile down to a sculpture and back where we rejoined the group for a quick cold drink before heading back to the ship.  


Because our day was so full and traffic was so bad (partially due to a major soccer match between Argentina and Brazil), we were about two hours late in getting back to the ship.  We were able to see the Oi Brazil stage spectacular performance at 7:30 and afterwards we had a late dinner in the Main Dining room before retiring totally exhausted from our first day in Rio.



Tomorrow's excursion has a visit to SugarLoaf mountain as its key attraction.


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