Archive for March, 2008

That beach

Starting from Renata´s flat we started walking around the lagoon (Lagua) to get to the Ipanema beach. Lots of brasileiro´s were jogging and cycling past us, it was a real shame we forgot our running shoes in London…

Ipanema beach was as wonderful as I´d always imagined, with beautiful white sands, blue seas and tall, tanned, yound and lovely people everywhere.  Ahhh…

We walked the lenght of the beach and took lots of photos of the Sugar Loaf mountain as we were approaching it. Except that it wasn´t the Sugar Loaf mountain, as we later discovered from Renata who had found our texts trying to explain where we were highly amusing.

The night ended splendidly in Casa Rosa with samba music, a great capoeira performance, and funky favela rhythms. Perfect first day in Rio! 

River of January

We finally arrived in Rio de Janeiro (which means River of January in Portuguese) on Saturday evening as  – to our surprise – did our luggage, which Iberia was unwilling (unable?) to hand back to us on Friday when we were stranded in Madrid. The customer service agent assured it would be checked in for us for the Rio flight, and amazingly both of our bags showed up at the Rio airport!

After a quick shop at the duty-free for Renata (Ville´s friend, who we´re staying with for the next three days) we got a taxi from the airport to her flat in Humaita. We´re very impressed with block which has a swiming pool and a sauna.

Renata took us out for some lovely Brazilian snacks after which we crashed. It has been a long day, but at least we´re in Rio!!!

Si si si, hehehehe

Yes, disappointing but sh*t happens!

I think we may have to get used to the Latino style of “doing” things…nobody at the airport seemed to know exactly what we should do or where we should go, I even suspect that at least two of the airport staff has no actual clue as to where they were in the building.

Of course no apologies were offered to us (or any of the other countless passengers that missed their flights to South America), my favourite moment was when we went to the customer services desk to explain our unfortunate situation and we were greeted by a clerk who seemed content to laugh like some bandito from a bad Mexican movie whilst explaining to us that we would be spending the night at the airport hotel.

However we are content to be in an already warmer climate, its very pleasant here in Madrid, and the hotel room is super nice as we upgraded to the biggest bed I have ever seen – yes, my feet are at least an inch away from the edge wherever I lie!

Time for dinner, hopefully served by the same Spanish version of Basil Fawlty who served us our lunch.

Next post, Rio!!

Wet planes

Courtesy of Iberia airlines, we´re spending the night in Madrid after missing our connection from Madrid to Rio today. Our flight, for which we had to get up at 04:30 – somewhat painful after a few (too many) leaving drinks last night – was late leaving Heathrow because the plane was “wet”. Yes, that´s right, the plane was too wet to leave on time. No, we didn´t know that was possible either.  

Nevermind, we got an extra night´s rest before the 10hr flight to Rio, with three meals thrown in by Iberia.  V´s very excited about the bed in our room – it´s wider than it´s long!! 

P.S. The Madrid airport is like a huge, not very well signed maze and the staff seems to be almost as confused about it as the passengers are – leave plenty of time if transferring in Madrid!

In Ljubljana

We’re in Ljublajana, Slovenia, for the Easter weekend and it’s been snowing really heavy, big, wet-tissue snowflakes all day so did a slow wine-bar-café-crawl and had lots of local mulled wine. Then the weather forecast for Rio (+31C, rain) got us quite excited!