Me in Rio on Valentines Day

Bear with me........these computers are in Portugese and are very complicated.

The hotel I am staying at offers internet for $10 USD an hour........ eeks! Good thing they think I am "Bella" ......so they recommended this place around the corner that only charges $1.50 USD per hour.

I like being cute. It pays off sometimes.

I still can,t believe I,m in Rio............WOW! It always sounded like a cool place to be going to. I,m going to Rio. I am in Rio. Cool! This also is true of Miami. I,ve never been to Miami........other than the crazy busy airport today....but I imagine it to be a very cool place to go. I,m going to Miami. I am in Miami. Wow. How can you tell that I am sleep deprived???

My morning of Feb 13th started off kind of crazy. The taxi was supposed to come pick me up for 5 AM so I could make my flight time of 7:30 am. It takes awhile to go through US customs at the Calgary airport. At 5:10 AM I am wondering where my cab was. So what that it was snowing. I tried calling the cab company and while I am on hold, the cab shows up. All he spoke about was how his wife almost was killed the other day with their 23 month old on the Deerfoot. ,I am going to take Barlow,. No problem I say. I certainly understand. He drove all the way to the airport at 40 kms. He is a worse driver than I imagine I would be driving in the snow.

I flew American Airlines. We left one hour late. 4 hour flight to Dallas. Almost a 3 hour flight to Miami and then a 8.5 hour flight to Rio. Huge planes my last two flights....totally full. I,ve calculated that Rio is 5 hours ahead of Calgary time.

I payed $31 USD for a cab ride to my Hotel from the airport. It was a white pre-paid airconditioned cab. There are signs all over the airport to be careful on which cabs you take. They are color coded. Yellow ones are metered. Crazy place. Warnings everyone. Traffic was insane and it took almost 30 minutes to get to the hotel. Very ugly ride as this is one of the slummy areas of Rio. Yucky. Not impressed.

Most people that I,ve met so far think I am from here, so they start speaking Portuguese to me....very fast. I have no idea what they are saying. Whoever said Portuguese and Spanish are very similar are wrong....especially when spoken very fast. These people sound like my friend Gorete when she speaks Portuguese, and I,ve never understood her. I respond to them in Spanish, Italian, English and the two words of Portuguese I know.

As I,ve said before...being cute does payoff at times.

The exchange rate is 2 Brazilian Reals for $1 USD........easy to calculate. You have to think fast sometimes so people don,t rip you off. I have no idea where the apostrophe is on this keyboard and the computer is set for only one hour, so things might get a bit messy. I will have to edit later once I figure it out.

My hotel is in the Flamengo area. Hotel Paysandu. Nice place. Close to the Copacabana beach area.

By the time I got to the Hotel I was so tired. No sleep. I had to take a 3 hour nap. Time differences and flying for so long can sure screw up your system. You might be able to tell this by this entry.

While I was waiting for my room I saw a girl sitting in the waiting area, so I just asked her if she was with Dragoman. Turns out she is on the Rio Carnival tour and then off on another tour (not like mine). Late 20,s, teacher and just hanging out for a few months. She is meeting up with her boyfriend in Equador late April. Alice is from England, just got in today from Australia (visiting family). We decided to hang out together, so we tried to walk over to Copacabana beach later this afternoon. Wrong thing to do......the roads are fast and some places don,t have pedestrian walkways.........so we ended up taking a bus.... 2 Reals (1 USD) each.

Very nice spot......loads of restaurants, hotels and the beach area is set up for lots of volleyball and soccer games. Some even had soccer schools going on. They love their soccer here (just in case you didn,t know this about Brazilians).

Wow..I just noticed this internet place is full of young boys playing games on the computers. They must be playing against each other. There are about 12 of them. Interesting. Does this happen at home? No idea. I don,t even know where the internet places are in Calgary. Doesn,t everyone just have a computer at home?

I hope that kid standing behind me is not reading my blog entry and he really is helping his friend with the car he is driving on the computer screen. If they look at mine....I,ll look at theres.

I,m sooooooooo tired. It,s only 8:45 pm, but I think it,s time for bed.

Can you believe that I will be partying at Carnival and that most events start at midnight?

I need to get my cute sleep so I can keep up!