Rio De Janeiro....

  Rio de Janeiro, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Thursday, September 11, 2008

08/09/2008 (MON)

Finally, I've arrived in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.  This is my first time on South American soil.  However, I was greeted with rainy and cloudy weather.  I took the shuttle bus straight to my hostel at Ipanema.  After taking a quick shower, weather got worse...so I've decided to take a short nap.  I was only woken up by hunger and it was already about 8pm.  I went out for a nice Brazilian dinner with Peter from Switzerland.  We also opened a bottle of Brazilian wine.  I then realized that Brazil is not a cheap country.  A pint of beer was about US$6, and my dinner was about US$40.  There goes my initial budget of US$35-40 a day...
 
09/09/2008 (TUE)
 
Again it's raining today!  I woke up early and went for a walk on the beach, hoping to get a gaze of sunny blue sky on white sandy beach....but it was all gray and wet!  Decided to walk back to the hostel, and booked my Favela tour this afternoon at 2pm.
  
Favela is a Brazilian word for a shanty town (this is actually from Wikipedia J)  It's mostly controlled by drug dealers.  In Rio, there are three major gangs and dozens of favelas.  I visited the Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil, located within the South Zone of Rio.  I was told that there are at least 300,000 people living in Rocinha, and the gang that's controlling Rocinha is known as A.D.A.  Not everyone living in the favela is involved in drug dealing, only about 10%.  Most of the people living there can't afford to live anywhere else.  The rules of the favela are simple; you can either rent a place, or build your own house here.  I saw a lot of houses built on top of each other, some up to about 7-8 storey high with no proper foundation.
 
   
Our tour started off with a motorcycle ride up the top of the favela.  There were about 12 of us including our tour guide, Daniella.  She was very informative and keen on sending the right message to the outside world about what a favela is all about.  From the top of the favela, we slowly descended down through narrow path and stairs.  The whole journey took about 2 ½ hours.  We were told that 70% of what we paid for our tour goes to a day care funded by the tour operator.  This is to provide kids living in the favela to have a safe place to be taken care of while their parents worked in the city.
 
I was actually planning to stay in again, had a quick and budget pizza dinner nearby and went straight to bed.  Somehow I could not sleep, so I decided to do some research on the internet.  Des, an Irish guy at the hostel, wanted to check out this 1st year anniversary party of a club nearby, called The House.  Since I can't sleep...I was like...why not...
We took a cab there because the bus never came.  The place was quite nice and trendy, a little bit small, and a little bit too much use of strobe lights.  Clubs in Brazil uses a kind of drink first pay later policy.  We were asked to provide our names and had our photos taken.  We were then given a card with the drink list on it.  As we ordered from the bar, the bartender will tick and update the drink list.  By the end of the day, we need to pay at the cashier in order to leave.  I left early, about 2.30am, because I was a bit tired and wanted to have an early start tomorrow.  Somehow I had a feeling that the weather will be good to me tomorrow....