Rio and Buzios, Brazil

above: not Copacabana but could be

above: Rio by night

above: Jesus in Rio



above: Gustavo and Birgitte Bardot in Buzios

For the second time in 2005 I went to Brazil. First stop was the same as last time; work in Curitiba, Parana. One big difference this time was that a friend and colleague from work, Gustavo, was with me when working but we also spent more or less all our spare time togehter. Lucky shot for me since Gustavo is Brazilian and actually from Curitiba. I'm not a big talker in Portuguese so this time I had an interpreter for real not only being stuck with the thumbs up and hang loose language. Work went good and during evenings we planned lots of stuff to have fun. I also spent lots of time with Jonas, a Swedish colleague of mine working in Brazil. Nice company, good drinks and food. That's all you need. The caiprinha was superb everywhere, churrascarias were nice but believe it or not Brazilians are also great with sushi. So except from the amazing, truly delicate capraccio (both in terms of fish and meat) that I appreciate very much when being in Brazil, I had lots of sushi. Probably the best sushi I've ever had.

After a week of work Gustavo and I took a flight to...I don't remember the name of the place but I'll put it down as soon as it strucks my mind.. and from there we rented a car to start our trip towards Buzios. Buzios is known as a relax, surf and enjoy the sun paradise. Especially well known since the sixties when Birgitte Bardot and other celebrities went there to hang out and thereby drew the Worlds attention to this little, by then, unnoticed pearl. Except from a little incident, we had no problems on our way to Buzios. However, this small incident was all but nice. We were stopped by the cops, who somehow decided to search all our belongings through looking for drugs or something. Messing up our bags and so on was ok with me, but they also searched our bodies more than a little bit too much. Let me put it like this; no plastic gloves but still a lot more intimate than I was comfortable with. Obviously they didn't find anything suspicious and reliefed from being released and on our way from these nasty cops our trip towards Buzios continued. In Buzios we relaxed, went around checking out the different beaches, had many good meals and drinks and also some partying.

From Buzios we then went to Rio de Janeiro for a quick stay before going back home again. Our time in Rio was too short so we had to choose between experiencing the Jesus fundament and the Sugartop Mountain. We went for Jesus. But we also managed to in short time checkout the Copacabana and some other nice endless beaches, buying a surf board for Fred a nice meal and some last caiprinhas and beers before saying goodbye to Brazil for this time.

Brazil is fantastic, I have to go there again to get the opportunity to even more explore this huge country with great variety of adventures. Still haven't seen the Amazonas, all the renowned water falls and so on.

Tudo bem Brasil! (should be something like 'Brazil rocks!' or more simply and correctly put 'I like Brazil!' anyhow I prefer the first interpretation so let's stick with that)