And John says :

I´m days behind, but I´ll start with the most recent
full day: my birthday.
It was a really fun day, although I´d actually
forgotten it was my birthday until Rhia mentioned
it.]In the morning we took a walking tour of Santa
Teresa, where we stayed in Rio and a nearby slum with
a couple local guys. We´d read about these tours of
favelas, as they´re called, and they sounded kind of
distasteful: you go around in semi-armoured vehicles
gawking at poor people. This though was a slum tha~´s
got some social supports and isn´t controlled by drug
traffickers. Our guides Rodrigo and Rafael were
buddies with a lot of the people we encountered and
everyone was really friendly. The people are poor but
proud. The slums are real communities and not squalor.
They talked about how when someone needs a new home,
they´ll set up a barbecue and others will come and
help build a new flat, often on top of someone else´s,
with bricks and cement.
The highlight of this particular favela was Morinho, a
city in miniature built by local kids over the years.
They use individual bricks for houses and lego blocks
for people and they´ve recreated favelas from all over
Rio. They play out their daily lives including the
violence and conflicts with police. It´s really
remarkable.
We squeezed in a quick trip to the vast beach at
Ipanema in the early afternoon. Yes there were many
girls to make one go, Ahhh, and Rhia got singled out
as beautiful by a local. I concur. It was nice to bask
in the hot October sun in such gorgeous surroundings,
but we couldn´t linger too long because we needed to
make it back to home base to catch our lift to the
football game at Maracana.
We went with a Gringo tour to the huge stadium for a
match between longstanding local rivals Flamengo and
Fluminese. We were seated in the Flamnego section so
we were instant black and red fans. UNfortunately, the
game didn´t go our way. But it was a huge rush to be
in a record breaking crowd of 73,000 passionate fans
cheering on their teams (a quick youtube search finds
a few videos from last night, like this one:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6u3G0mmAWuY).
We sang and clapped along with them.
We had a late birthday dinner at a local pub with a
great Brazilian meal.
What really made the day was when we were walking home
at about 11:30 Sunday evening, through the dark local
square,we found a woman selling massive slices of
homemade chocolate cake for the equivalent of about
$1. A birthday treat.
Several modes of transportation got us to the lovely
island of Ilha GRande today and we plan to spend much
of the next few days lying on beaches, hiking through
the rainforest and snorkelling.
Rio is so diverese and gorgeous I can´t do it justice
in a few minutes here. I think some new photos made it
to Flickr.
Thanks all for birthday wishes. Hope you´re enjoying
the fall.