Celeste & Bill Circumnavigate the globe World Cruise 2015: Rio day 2

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Rio day 2

APRIL 18, 2015 RIO DAY 2

Today starts the final segment of the World Cruise. Rio de Janeiro to Miami. It just boggles the mind how fast this has gone. Even Bill has admitted it has flown by.

This morning we took the shuttle bus into town. We were left off by the Copacabana Palace Hotel across the street from the famous Copacabana beach. We walked along the beach for quite a ways. We ran into the young honeymooning couple who is on the WC. They had left the ship and is just joining up again. They didn’t want to be at sea for 7 days. They spent a few days in RIO. We talked awhile and then headed to the Marriott hotel where we were able to get a private English speaking guide and car. Bill wanted to go to Ipaneba Beach and also to see where the song was written “The Girl from ipaneba”. Ken Reese in his lecture the other day showed the picture of the girl who inspired the song and showed what she looks like today at age 70 and he truly picked the right girl she is still a beauty!

We drove through Ipaneba and our guide Carlos explained that if we should come back you want to stay in Ipaneba instead of Copacabanna. That is where all the good shopping is also. After seeing the beach and the bar the song was written we headed to the St. Theresa section this is also near Cordova (Christ the Redeemer) you would turn left for the statue and right to go to St. Theresa’s is the old old town from the 16 hundreds. All cobblestone streets and only one car fits at a time. It is all hills and was very interesting. At the top of the mountain we went to a museum that was a private house and they knocked it down and replaced it with a modern structure. There was a huge spiral staircase we went up and got the view of the whole city of Rio. We did not go into the museum itself. We stopped along the way for Carlos to show us a section where the poor people live. It is amazing they just keep building up. They can not go out as there is no room the houses are so close together. They just put another level on! He said that it use to be really bad but they put up more police station and now it is safer. We headed down and went to see the Tile Staircase. A local artist started putting tile on this huge staircase. People were so enthralled with this that they sent him tiles from all over the world. It took him years to finish it. Unfortunately, he suffered from depression and when he was finally finished he committed suicide! It was very colorful! After this we headed to the New (1964) Cathedral. It actually looks like an Aztec Pyramid from the outside. We went in and I was impressed with the stain glass. There is a cross in the ceiling made of clear white tiles so the sun shines through and it is beautiful. We headed back to the ship. It was a great tour and we learned so much from Carlos but we needed to be back by 3:45 as we were sailing at5:00 and they wanted everyone back early due to Muster Drill. We did not have to attend but were still requested to be back by 3:45. Since traffic was so bad yesterday we opted to go back earlier so that if we did encounter a lot of traffic we would not have to stress. Today there was no traffic and we were back to the ship before 2pm! Time for lunch and then Bill headed out to the terminal for wifi. They are having a sail away party on deck 12 at 4:30 so I will head up there. Tomorrow is a sea day and the first day of class for our computer course. As I said before time is flying! We are having a fabulous time and really enjoyed Rio! A sea day and then Salvador de Bahia which use to be the capital!!!!!