So today we had our first excursion. We went off to see Christ the Redeemer, Santa Teresa (where the carnival is held), Lapa steps and then on to Sugar Loaf mountain.

Once again up at 6am (this time only me) Andrew wanted to sleep due to the long day ahead. After having breakfast and having a few coffees we went in search for some new padlocks. After trying to translate with my fingers padlocks in the last few places we finally found a lady who could actually speak another language other than Portuguese...French! When she started speaking it I realised that i should of listened in school as i didnt have a clue. However we could see some padlocks on the shelf that we where able to point at :-). After making our purchase we headed back to the beach as the weather was just beautiful.
We walked along the beach for about 10 minutes and then sat in the sand just to do a bit of people watching.   What we found interesting was a guy doing Brazilian jui jitsu (check out pic) in the sand, at first he looked like a crazy man but Andrew then pointed out he was doing marshal arts.
After half an hour of nosing we went back to our hostel to catch the mini bus for our excursion. First we headed up to see the large man himself Christ. It was just amazing. The view looking down on Rio was spectacular and once you see the photos you will know what we mean. We then headed to a place called Santa Teresa where the tour guide (woman) took us to a little shop to buy gifts. Here is where we bought a hole lot of nothing. There was plenty of things that I wanted to buy but Andrew put a stop it. (this was a good idea and I agreed in the end).
After this, she took us to where the Rio Carnival is held. Here we got to try on some of the outfits which i loved and by looking at the pictures Andrew loved too. I did however say to Andrew doesnt he want to pick out a more manly head piece but he's reply was 'maybe I want to dress like a woman' :-?. After hearing about the different outfits etc we headed onto Lapa where we visited the Lapa stairs (these are shown in the Snoop Dog music video beautiful for those of you who might know). These where so good we even met the man who done it all.

After spending 15 or so minutes taking pictures of thousands of tiles and of course getting my picture taken of my snoop dog impression we headed off to Sugar Loaf mountain. The view here was also amazing. You could actually see a 360degree angle of the whole of Rio. Here we got to see the sunset which was lovely. I even said to Andrew this would of been a great time to propose and by no surprise Andrew pretended he had lost his voice ha! After taking about a million photos we headed back.

As we hadn't eaten and because of the massive expensive meal we had yesterday we thought we would go on a bit of a budget so....our dinner consisted of olive cream cheese (tasted of strawberry yoghurt) with crackers, warm white rice what we had to eat with our hands... I improvised with a cracker and some other stuff called Risoli. We have no idea what this was but it tasted ok. After dinner we had desert... fake oreo cookies. Look the same but dont taste the same! But edible :-)

We are now laying in bed knackered and ready for an early night as we are heading to Ilha Grande tomorrow for some sunbathing and snorkelling.

Night xx