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Another sunny day today and a perfect opportunity to go visit a couple of the beaches. We caught the metro once more and took it right to the end of the line which is only about 200 yards from Ipanema beach. We arrived to find that despite being a Thursday there were still plenty of people about although we suspect that on weekends you can't move for people. We walked down to the sea where we quickly discovered that it's not a warm as Miami!! We walked from one end of this beach to the other admiring the views of the mountains off to the right and the couple of islands you could see a few miles out. The sand is lovely to walk on, soft and white, with the sun shining as well it was almost heavenly, shame about all the other people!! We soon reached the end of the beach where there is a sort of rocky outcrop which we decided to climb up so we could get a good view back across the beach which with the green mountain as the backdrop was beautiful!! We were then forced to walk inland for a couple of blocks as there is no link along the shore between Ipanema and Copacabana beach!! On the way we had a brief look around a shopping mall we came across and found it to be full of antique and jewellery shops none of which we can afford of course. We soon arrived within sight of Copacabana and realised just how big this beach is. Stretching from Rio's most southern point all the way around to Sugar loaf mountain it must be over 2 miles in total. We however only walked half way along, past the throngs of people swimming, sunbathing and playing football in the sand. Looking at the people around us we noticed that showing off as much as you can is the norm here with both men and women (young and old) wearing the tightest smallest swimming costumes and bikini's they could find in the many shops around here, it's also obvious that a lot of these people spend far too much of there lives lying on the beach and have the premature wrinkles to show it. When we felt ourselves burning in the strong sun (despite the suncream!), we decided it must be time for an ice cream, oddly however none of the hundreds of cafes along the edge of the beach sold them so we ended up having to go to Bob's burger (brazil's version of McDonalds) to get one. Finally we decided to walk to the lagoon which is a huge lake just north of Ipanema beach, or so we thought, it turned out to be somewhat further but worth the walk all the same, it's huge and you could only see about half of it from our location, however the contrast with the smooth lake and green mountains (including Matey) separated by tall skyscrapers was very impressive. We were so tired by this point that when we left to find some dinner Mae wondered if she had actually remembered to take a photo of the lake itself!! We looked around the area for somewhere to eat and found to our disgust that everything here is at least twice the price it is in the business area of the city and sometimes 10 times even. We eventually found a cheaper place though and bought an 18inch mozzarella pizza for the same price as a big mac meal from the McDonalds 3 doors away... We successfully stuffed ourselves with pizza and then went to meet Roger at the Ipanema metro station when we all travelled to the centre of town together. We got off once again at Cinelandia station and he gave us a quick tour, it was nice to find out some more info about the buildings we had looked at a couple of days ago, and also to see them all lit up this time. We then went to a small 'club' which seemed to be a garage which a group of people had appropriated to play some apparently afro-brazilian music. (only 2 of the people were either African or Brazilian!!) It sounded very much like the Rumba music we had heard in Cuba although the group of people were dancing rather differently, none the less it was an amazing sight and we listened to several songs before our ears couldn't take any more. Finally he showed us around the night-life area of Rio which turns out to be a lot smaller than we expected, we had heard people telling us that people in this area dance in the street but we didn't see anything like this, maybe we came out too early, like most places what we saw was a lot of people getting drunk and shuffling and maybe one girl dancing Samba amidst her group of friends. We then went back to the metro so we could all make our way home before it closed, thanked Roger for our interesting tour and made our way back, including a trip on the wrong bus meaning the bus driver had to give us a lift in his car to where we wanted, oops!!!
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