Ipanema!

I finally got my first beach day of the trip! I´ve been anticipating the beach in Rio since almost a year ago, and I´m just elated to have gotten to do it. It´s not as intimidating as the pictures make it look - there are ugly people mixed in too, and not everyone wears the skimpy little shorts. It was an amazing site though. Looking out from Ipanema, the few rocky islands in front of you are the only things blocking the view of the horizon. Then, looking to the right is Leblon, then a huge, beautiful, densely forested hill with a favela at the bottom. Behind you are the hotels and expensive aparments, and then to the left is more beach; a big rock ends Ipanema and the land cruves and you´ve got Copa Cabana. So anyway, there was plenty of fun to be had on the beach. I went with the same English girls I met yesterday and we just tanned, swam, stared, and burned a little bit. The only thing I´ve burned is my scalp, (un)lucky enough. I´ve never done that before.

Last night we got a group together at the hostel and went in search of an advertised street party. It was pretty awesome. The official start time was 7pm and we thought that was outrageously early, so the English girls, a new guy from Kentucky, a Canadian couple and I went out to find it around 9. We had directions to a point, and were told to follow your ears from there. On the way, there was this wild, spontaneous parade of people in outrageous outfits..... imagine the sesame street wardrobe shaken and poured over a group of people. Oh, and imagine a few drag queens fell out of the mess too. They had drums and stuff, and we joined the parade which stopped traffic when they decided to have a dance party in the street. No one honked or anything-busses, cars, trucks, just waited, then when we all moved, they waved and yelled funny things that I couldn´t understand. We didn´t make it to the street party, we went to a club instead, which was really fun anyway. Usually back home, the music breaks up at points into something that you don´t want to dance to so you can stop sweating for a second, but at this place that was not the case. The music is so good! So we shook it up all night. The girls had a bit much to drink, but I actually maintained a little buzz and not much more. Normally, that statement would be a complete and utter lie. The truth is, I didn´t even want to drink because it was interfering with dancing, not out of some moral obligation to be responsible. Thanks to the humidity, my shirt was still soaked this morning when I woke up. A disgusting indication of a night well spent.

So that´s the rundown for Rio so far, I´ve made quite a bit of headway in the two days. People here are really friendly and helpful. The guy who sold me the map yesterday showed me where we were and laughed and corrected me every time I pronounced something wrong. My neighborhood is Catete, pronounced Catetchy, more or less. I was saying ´Catetch´ and he thought it was really funny. Then this random girl walking next to us yesterday gave us some advice for Carnaval. Basically, be careful and dance your ass off. You can´t go to a bad party. Everyone on the beach is nice, to the point that you don´t know if someone is flirting with you or just being cool. I could get used to this!! So I´ll probably buy a hat so I can go to the beach again tomorrow. I can´t believe I burned my scalp, how weird is that? It really hurts! We all just stopped off at this cafe, and I think the girls are headed to Copa Cabana - we figured we HAD to go drink some caipirinhas in Copa, ya know?? And we´ll be singing that song the entire time.