Honeymoon Três – Rio de Janeiro

This is (finally) the final installment of my blog entries about our honeymoon. Go read parts Uno and Dois about our time in Buenos Aires and at the Iguaçu falls. For the last leg of our honeymoon, we spent four nights in Rio de Janeiro. We stayed at a hotel in Leme along the Copacabana. If we were to go again, I’d stay a bit farther down the Copacabana. There wasn’t much going on near our hotel, and the area was a bit seedy.

Silke’s friend Clô lives in Rio. She scheduled a private Samba de Gafieira (Wikipedia, YouTube) lesson for us at Carlinhos de Jesus. Thanks to everybody who gave recommendations when I asked last May. Samba de Gafieira is a terrific dance, and we still dance the bits we can back at home. I wish there were some place to learn more here.

We did the regular tourist stuff: walked along the Copacabana, went shopping in Ipanema, went up the Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain). As usual, we didn’t do any tours. We just like walking around the town together.

Clô took us out to a club where the locals were dancing Samba and Forró. It was a really friendly atmosphere, and even though we were probably the only tourists there, we felt welcome. We got on the floor and danced our few Samba moves we’d learned earlier. They would occasionally play a Salsa or a song we could dance West Coast Swing to, which allowed us to get a couple of dances in where we don’t look like complete n00bs. One of the guys there gave Silke a crash course in Forró.

All in all, it was a terrific end to a wonderful honeymoon. View the entire gallery for more pictures.