Bingeing in the rain

The bad weather continued, unfortunately. It was cloudy, and rained at least for part of the day, pretty much everyday from Wednesday to Saturday. In some cities (e.g., London, San Francisco) no one would care or probably even notice. In Rio, however, life revolves around the sun. When it's gloomy, the city just loses so much of its incredible energy (that I witnessed later on Sunday and Monday), and even our ever-helpful hostel receptionist was at a loss for ideas on what to do on a rainy day in Rio - she suggested shopping or a movie, neither of which got us particularly excited. Many of the famous sights (Corcovado mountain with its famous Christ the Redeemer statue, or Sugarloaf for instance) are also not worth visiting on cloudy days, as the view will not be much to write home about.

So we did what any good Scandinavian does when the weather is too bad to go outside (and we're good at this; we're in this situation 9 months every year): we drank. A lot. Beer for breakfast (often at a steakhouse around noon), caipirinhas for the afternoon's people watching break, and vodka Red Bull (a.k.a. Virtanen in Finland) to keep us going in the evenings. Given our nights often went until 5am, this also took care of the problem of what to do during the rainy mornings - sleeping till noon never felt so good.

We also did some minor sightseeing: a tram tour around the artist neighbourhood of Santa Teresa (crammed so full that Santeri was constantly at risk of falling off), a stroll around the Lagoon with its huge metal Christmas Tree, a few cool buildings in the city center (the Petrobras tower, modeled after a Rubic cube, and the weird modernist Cathedral - very cool on the inside, but surely one of the ugliest churches I've ever seen on the outside).

Santeri left on Friday, and I moved to a dorm in Ipanema to keep costs manageable (and make some new friends to hang out with).