Elron Arrives for New Years

In a quick 27-hour travel day, we flew from Panama City to New York (because it only makes logical sense to connect between Central and South America by flying to New York right), to Sao Paulo, and finally to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. At the ¨Rio Party Hostel¨ we met up with Elron, a good friend of ours from home, who had come to join us for New Years and will travel with us for the next little while.

After making concrete plans to just go to bed the first night, we were easily persuaded to join a group of people who were going to a ¨Favala¨ party. Favalas are historic, lower socioeconomic residential areas of the city where back in the days of the slave trade, slaves escaped to these neighbourhoods to find refuge and live in freedom. Over the years, these areas have been pushed to the outskirts of the city, officially recognized, and have developed their own rich cultures. These areas are relatively safe; however, they are run by very organized drug lords and cops make rare appearances here. Every Sunday hundreds of locals gather in huge underground halls to dance a wicked style of hip hop called ´Baile Funk´- kind of a mixture of funk, hip-hop, and Samba. They truly go there just to dance and enjoy the music and couldn´t be bothered by anything else. Small ¨tour¨ groups of gringos, such as ourselves, are lucky enough to get taken there to see the masses of guys organized naturally into rows and dancing in sync, while the girls do their own thing around them and give new meaning to the phrase ¨get low.¨ While a lot of fellow foreigners stood back and watched, of course Erin, Elron, and I got right in there and some local guys taught us some moves (easier moves us white-folk could handle).

(Fresh off 3 flights and 2 layovers, looking goooood in the Favala). The local guys had some amazing moves and it was awesome to see so many guys organized, moving in unison, and socially comfortable with dancing with each other. These pictures don´t do it justice, but we have some wicked video footage. (Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Elron. Wasting no time and getting right in there!)I should probably mention as a side note: after only spending a matter of hours in Brazil, we quickly realized how ingrained Spanish is now for us, and how horribly irrelevant it is when speaking with Portuguese people. The two languages are technically similar, but sound very different when spoken. We find that we automatically default to Spanish when we are trying to communicate, but we´ve been told we´re probably better off defaulting to English. The big language barrier is pretty difficult, but we´re learning a little basic Portuguese now to try to get us by!

We spent several days exploring Rio. Erin, Elron, and I hit up the massive beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, wandered the streets, and took some time to appreciate the vast array of Brazilian men sporting speedos (refer to the other blog entry). (Note, the busiest part of Ipanema beach, the gay section, where there was no shortage of beautiful men... in speedos)
(And of course no Brazilian beach is complete without access to a full gym, I mean, if you´re going to be wearing a speedo...)
We watched a few glorious sunsets, (no, this isn´t staged, Elron and Erin are gazing up at some birds....Canadian Geese...right Elron?)

we went to a few churches, art galleries, and museums in the downtown center, and we visited the ¨Sugar Loaf¨ mountains, where we took a gondola ride to both peaks for a spectacular view of Rio´s coastline. (And Elron so graciously informs us, whilst packed in the 70 person gondola heading up the mountain, that a gondola in Whistler recently plummeted to the ground with people in it, but not to worry, everyone survived... this did wonders for Erin´s severe fear of heights) (oh yes, our gondola made it to the top)(We have no idea who this woman is, but she insisted on taking a photo with us... we´re just that beautiful)
And before we knew it, New Years was upon us! In Rio, there is a religious tradition at the turn of the new year where everyone dresses up in white clothing and takes white flowers or fruit to the ocean and throws it in the waves as an offering to the gods. They also jump over the waves 7 times. (Sorry I don´t know too many details, and at the risk of giving wrong information, google-it!). So we all put on our white outfits, which of course didn´t remain entirely white as the night progressed, and shared some drinks with fellow travelers at our hostel. (Three...) (Two...) (One...) (Happy New Year!!!!!!). We all walked down to Copacabana beach where about 1 million people gather annually to ring in the new year. There were live bands playing all down the beach and a sea of people all dressed in white flooded the beach and streets. (Erin and Elron throwing their white flowers in the water) Conveniently, with many women clad in white dresses, it poured rain for a little while... but not to worry, our outfits remained G-rated. When the ball dropped, we cracked the champagne and watched the overwhelming half-hour display of fireworks on the water. We danced Samba on the beach until the wee hours of the morning and returned to our hostel. Awesome New Years experience.

On New Years Day, one the guys that works at our hostel offered to take us on a hike up a nearby mountain, but I was the only one with enough energy up for the challenge. We hiked through a little jungle trail to a waterfall and I got to see tons of monkeys, which I was overly excited about. Today we are headed off to explore more of Brazil... and we´ll be back soon for another update!