Braziiiiiillllllll!!!!!!!!!

So I finally made it to Brazil to my momma and my Ceca and we had the most incredible week in Rio de Janeiro. I don’t know whether it was being with them or Brazil itself, or probably a mixture of the two, but it only took me a couple of days to fall in love with this place. Incredibly I had never wanted to come to Brazil in the first place and I only really agreed to go because it had been my mum’s dream to see Rio since she was a little girl. But it didn’t take long for this city and its wonderful people to become my favourite place on this trip so far. All three of us had an amazing time and operation “marry Maja and/or Ceca off to a carioca (resident of Rio) so we can have a summer house there” is already well under way.

So for this part of my trip it would be impossible to stick to the old method of one blog per city because we did so much here it would be the world’s longest blog entry so I have decided to split the entry into different themes. The first will be an overview of Rio.

Apparently the city first got its name from the earliest Portuguese settlers who entered the bay “Baía de Guanabara” in January 1502 and mistook it for a river, giving it the name Rio de Janeiro (January river.) The sugar plantations and the slave trade made the Portuguese colony into an important settlement and the gold rush of the 18th century in neighbouring city Minais Gerais brought even more fame and trade to the region. A coffee boom (at one point in the 19th century coffee was Brazil’s primary export and supplied three quarters of world demand) and increased immigration from Europe in the early 1900s made Rio into an exotic holiday destination for international high society. The city has been a popular tourist destination since, earning Unesco World Heritage status in 2012.

The first thing that struck me after arriving in the city is how beautiful it is. Rio’s got it all, mountains, deep blue sea, beautiful white sand beaches (much more beautiful than I expected for a city beach) and beautiful people (I’ll leave that for another blog). We rented out an apartment in Copacabana from Sonia, our favourite carioca, who helped us out with top tips throughout the week. I arrived only a few hours after mum and Ceca but they had already managed to make themselves at home. They had been shopping in the market and already established our local juice bar, where we drank amazing juice and delicious Brazilian coffee every morning, as well as breakfast paõ de queijo (little cheesy bread balls) and the pastel portugues that mum and Ceca obsessed over.

We had the beach a few minutes away and lots of little shops and bars close and just the atmosphere of that part of the city was perfect. We felt so at home in our little apartment that we decided we had to return to Copacabana for carnival.

But it wasn’t just Copacabana that charmed us in Rio. All the cariocas seem to have this amazing attitude of living without a care in the world and they all love their Rio soooo much. Almost all cariocas I spoke to said they would never leave Rio and they even have internal jokes about how much better Rio is than other cities in Brazil. No offence to the Saõ Paolans, but apparently the best thing in Saõ Paolo is the airport that takes you to Rio.