Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Recap of Rio de Janeiro with pictures

Wow, this trip is going faster than I thought. Here's a very brief recap of the front end of the Wharton Internation trip to Brazil and Argentina.

Rio de Janeiro, Thu 09-06-2007
We arrived very jet lagged at 8:35am in the morning vis a vis Miami. I slept as much as I could on the plane and tried to drink as much water as I could, as I was fighting a cold. Rio was warm and about eight of us negotiated a van ride from the airport to the Sheraton Rio Hotel. It was about a 45 minute ride from the airport to the hotel. We checked into the hotel and then headed straight for the beach. While sitting by the beach, I had a fried calamari appetizer with my first and second caipirinha, the national Brazilian cocktail made with Brazilian rum.

Rio is very much a beach town, much like Oahu. Lots of tourists, lots of beach, beautiful women, and they even have bars right on the beach strand. You can spend forever just people watching. Everyone is friendly, especially if you attempt to speak a little broken Portugese. Most of the hotel and restaurant folks speak a little English, so it's not too hard to get around.

The weather was warm and mild, in the low 80s to high 70s during the day. The evenings were warm enough that we could walk around in short sleeved shirts, which was great.

Rio de Janeiro, Fri 09-07-2007
A group of us spent the day on a guided tour of the Christ the Redeemer monument and the Sugarloaf mountain tram. Check out the pictures. It was totally worth it to hire a tour guide because we got to skip all the lines. Otherwise we would have been waiting for a long time all day long, as it was a holiday.

Most of the pictures are from this tour here: link to rio pictures

Rio de Janeiro, Sat 09-08-2007
I was really sick and stayed in from Fri night to Sun morning. I heard that I missed some good and not so good parties in Rio but hey there's always another time....I figured that we have another 10 days to go and I needed to get better. Obrigado to Dr Lim, who hooked me up with some antibiotics. They really helped me and next time I am not going to travel without some.

Rio de Janeiro, Sun 09-09-2007
We left Rio and flew over to Sao Paulo, where we checked into the Renaissance Hotel for the study tour portion of our trip. More on that later.....

2 comments:

Sean said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sean said...

It is beautiful city! The city is famous by the Statue of the Christ located in Rio de Janeiro. I have being there a couple of times and I always feel a lot of good energy coming from the atmosphere of that place. Another reason why you should visit Rio is because of its most popular celebration known as Carnival. Country is becoming a very popular destination in the world due to its low coast expenses , for example people buy in Brazil property and spend their holidays there! And each year a lot of tourists visiting this exotic country!