Copacabana....the hottest spot north of Havana

Barry Manilow was partly right but "......north of Havana......?" has me thinking a bit.....but, we are definitely on the beach at Copacabana. There is lots of water and lots of pretty girls...you are supposed to say that when residing here at Copacabana Beach but a stroll along the sand this afternoon opened some eyes, mine especially. Dress code in this corner of Brazil is a sort of code where this is no code. As I mentioned, while strolling, we, (my first wife and I), encountered a lady (in the broadest sense of the word) dressed in a g-string affair with an acreage of flesh that would have required two bottles of SP50 to cover and there would have been some parts missed due to lack of access. Fortunately my lunch was well settled otherwise things could have been really messy. 

Yesterday we started a day tour with a visit to Christ the Redeemer. There must be a lot of sinners about this side of the World as the place was packed with people presumably looking for redemption. Either they have been sinners or captive at sometime. As I haven't ever been captive (not counting 38 years of marriage, but don't tell Diana that I said that)...redemption only took a few seconds for me. Christ was a fairly impressive type of statue, over 30 metres tall and looking out over almost all of Rio de Janeiro. While some people walk from the bottom up, we took a cog train most of the way and walked the last 250 steps....some of the group took a lift for the last wee bit, however Diana and I are above average fitness for our tour group......but only one of us has had a heart attack!

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 We have had a good look around this interesting city, huge, seems quite safe so far, streets are clean and the people seem pretty happy. We are called "gringos" and I'm not sure if that is derogatory or not but we don't get molested at all. We took a cable car to the top of "Sugarloaf" and had more fantastic panoramic views of the populace and the buildings. We have also been four wheel driving in the jungle which involved a drive through a restored man made forest on a tar sealed road! Hardly needed a 4 wheel drive and the "jungle" did not expose one snake! A couple of friendly monkeys and a toucan but not really a serious adventure.....none the less, it was good fun and nothing like home. Some meals are paid for on our trip and one that we have had here in Rio is a Bar-B-Cue restaurant wher you get yourself salads from a buffet bar and meats are brought out straight off the BBQ. At these dinners they bring out every part of the bullock, every cut possible. At one we even had the "hump" part of the brahman steer. This is boiled for three hours then BBQed and it was very tasty. I thought it might have been full of water or gristle or worse still pus......but it wasn't.

 

Choice meat. We walked in and rolled out...very satisfied.