A Day in the Life of a High School Administrator: I Love a Rainy Night-Eddie Rabbitt

The favela tour took up most of our morning, but we still had a lot to do in Rio. After the tour, we walked back along Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. Both are renowned for their beauty and that reputation is well deserved. Along our walk we passed several sand castles that were very impressive, the Murphy family is going to have to step up the efforts to remain competitive in their sand castling skills!

Such detail!

The forecast was for rain and clouds but as we walked along the beach it was sunny so we decided to go up to Sugarloaf and check that off our to do list. Because of the sun I wore a tank top and shorts and throughout the day learned that weather in Rio can change as fast as it does in Montana so you should dress for anything. I was freezing by the time we got to the first stop and had to buy a sarong just to have an extra layer!

On the first cable car

view to the top of Sugarloaf

Trying to stay warm!

the sunsets are supposed to be beautiful from Sugarloaf, but this was the best we could do on a cloudy day. We had a great time anyway.

Sugarloaf is an iconic mountain in the middle of Rio and you access it by taking two cable cars. There are stops halfway up and at the top and despite the clouds, we had amazing views of Rio. The city is fascinating as it winds around the mountains and rain forest in every direction. We spent several hours on top of Sugarloaf and then finally found a taxi in the rain to take us back to the hotel.

Dusk on the way back down

Copacabana from the top of Sugarloaf

On the way back down

We were tired by the time we got home but didn’t want to waste our time in Rio by staying around the hotel so we looked up some restaurants and decided to go to Carretão, a traditional Brazilian barbeque. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this type of restaurant where they grill a variety of meats and bring them around on huge skewers slicing off as much as you want of each type. There was an enormous buffet so we were more or less full before the meat even started coming around. We had fun trying all kinds of things but the craziest thing we had was wild boar-which was delicious. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to try the chicken hearts-you could see tiny aortas! Liza enjoyed the caipirinhas and we somehow found room for desserts of strawberry cream and vanilla ice cream topped with hazelnuts and hot fudge. Mostly we ordered them because the waiter with the dessert tray was so funny and we found ourselves imitating his sound effects the rest of the week.