South America Part 29 - Rio Day 4 and "New Years Eve" Eve

Another day - another sh""ty hotel breakfast. Again - we always manage to go down just before 10am - when the breakfast closes - and it is hella busy.

This was going to be our cultural day in Rio and we headed off to Centro (aka Central Rio aka Downtown) to visit a couple of Museums and stuff. Our first cultural stop was the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - the national gallery of Brazil if you like. There was plenty of Brazillian art on show but the building was hella run down. It is probably a worrying sign for the paintings if the paint on the museum walls is starting to shed. Also some sound proofing could come in handy - we could hear the Crazy Frog song being played in a nearby club whilst in the gallery.

After that - we wandered around Centro attempting to do the LP walking tour. In a crazed attempt - we could not, for the life of us, find the Arco de Teles due to the LP dodgy maps.

One thing of note about Centro - was the fact that people in skycrapers everywhere were chucking out what looked like confetti all over the street. We thought it might have been some sort of NYE ticker-tape parade but on closer inspection - I think this is how the Brazillians do recycling in offices. Very odd.

We stumbled across the "Justice Cultural Building of Rio" which was for free. This was an old justice building which now houses cultural exhibits. You can probably guess what two exhibits were on - a photographic exhibit covering Centro in the 1800s and a Polish poster art exhibit (makes logical sense?¿). Ant loved trying to find the pre-communist and post-communist posters amongst the exhibit. After that - we made tracks to Gloria - a nearby suburb (sort of between Centro and Copa).

We checked out the Museu de Republica - a museum which was half a restored presidential palace and half a brazillian history musuem. It also includes the room where Getulio Vargas (an ex Brazillian president) topped himself off by shooting himself in the chest. The museum also includes his bullet-ridden pj´s, the gun and the bullet - sweet. Considering that it would be a good place for Brazillians to show foreigners more about their history - it would have been great if something from the muesum was translated into English (or Spanish for that matter) - the whole thing was in brazillian portuguese.

Speaking about Portuguese - Ant picked up a Portuguese phrase book from some backpackers at Santiago. It is fairly obvious that the people that wrote it have a sense of humour. The "socialising" section has such phrases/pick up lines including: "Is my portuguese that bad? May I kiss you? Would you like to come back with me? Thanks for the evening. I`ll give you a call."

For food - "I can`t eat this. This food is cold. This isn`t clean. I forgot my wallet."

For car repairs - "How much will it cost? That´s outrageous!". After Gloria - we wandered up the road (not knowing where we were going) - of course we arrived at the same kilo restaurant as the day before.

We headed back to copa for a bit of a siesta. According to Ant - the pool was filled to the brim of little kiddies and urine. We headed out to the streets of Copa for some food. Thinking that it would be too embarrassing to head back to the same Kilo Restaurant (that we had gone a couple of nights before) - we headed 1 km down the road to another kilo restaurant (same chain, different location). I think I was becoming even stingier with my food (I only dished up less than 300g of food costing me $4AUD including 2 cervejas aka beer).

After dinner we headed to the club district of Copa. The club we went to had three levels and a couple of different bars. It also played bad trance music which I hate and Ant loves. There were gogo dancers and a dodgy drag show (we could hear a couple of Amercian tourists moaning about the lack of quality in the aforementioned show). Something which was a bit of a surprise (in the context of expensive Rio) was the price of drinks at the night club - it was Southern Cross Club Drink Prices peoples! Most drinks would cost hardly anything more than what you would pay at a restaurant in Rio or a supermarket. Our night was a bit subdued (didn`t want a repeat performance of Santiago) so we headed back home around 2am.