So Stone of A Beach is a total party hostel - one of the Swedish girls in our room was totally having a thing with one of the ozzies, was very sweet he left her a nice little note saying how much he´d enjoyd spending time with her in Rio for the past week and all the time on the beach etc .. not that me and lucy read it of course ... no.

Anyways it has an awesome roof top bar wit nice fairy lights and cheap drinks - for most of my time in this bar I would be drinking 660ml bottles of Heinekken for 9real so after checking in this is where we spent our first night, but not before Lucy managed to accidentally lock us in our room (the door handle was broken and she shut it then pullin th door handle off in her hand, more stupidly when I called her a fool she repeated what she had done to show me how easy it was to do, but this time pushing the door handle bar through the door so we couldnt reattach it) thankfully the Swedish girl of ozzie boy romance fame came to our rescue and let us out otherwise it could have been a dull night - and it was St Patricks Day for goodness sake!

So we went for drinks on the roof bar and everyone was going out to Ipanema to the Irish bar there so we decided to follow suit with a cute couple, Matt and Paola. At the Irish bar there seemed to be some kind of bizarre post it system that many places in Brazil employ thats supposed to keep track of ur spending - it makes no sense. They also used it at this shop we stopped at at a bus station where they scanned and handed us a plastic barcode to track our spending in store - we spent 2 minutes in the crappy shop and left where she scanned our barcode and another to signify we had bought nothing. Now stop me if I´m wrong but a shop with as sophisticated a system as a barcode reader is able to track spending through the use of the actual barcodes on the products - silly Brazilians.

We had a nice enough night, a bit short, not that drunken by any means but what can you do?

The nexy day we decided to go to see Christ the Redeemer, as it is the definitive symbol of Rio and its pretty awesome, we´d seen it the night before driving into town and it was huge and on the tallest hill you´ll ever see in a city ever. Alas it turns out Jesus is an ass. We had to wait just over an hour to get the cable car up (during this time it rained so we actually considered ourselves relatively lucky, we could have been stuck in the rain up there), but when we finally got on to the cable car it broke down half way up as the rain had seemingly managed to break a branch causing it to fall on to the electrical line for the cable car and ceasing the electricity - all very safe sounding. 20 minutes of iPod listening later and we were on the move again and were greeted by the sounds of a reggae sounding band at the top alas it was all we were greeted by as the clouds in all this time had descended and you couldn´t see more than 5m in front of you - standing at the bottom of Christ we could only see up to about his waist let alone see any views of the city. We were not impressed - Lucy got rather mad at the situation - standard.

So for our afternoons activities we thought we´d go with something a little safer and not weather contingent and opted to go sightseeing around the city centre. Our first stop was the Metropolitan Cathedral as reknowned if not as iconic as Christ (and somewhat in keeping with a religious theme that will begin to develop over South America). Its hard to even describe (for this reason I suggest you check out the photos) very modern, massive floor to ceiling windows, which considering its like a 20 storey kind of sized building is beyond awe inspiring. Seriously check out the photos.

Further waundering around town took us to the Perobras Building (that looks kinda like a rubix cube), Convento de Santo Antonio, Praca Tiradentes (a nice square with a lot of statues) and Real Gabinete Poruguese de Leiture (a reading room, which sounds stupid but is actually ridiculously funky and really tall with thousands of old leather bound books.

After feeling a bit ripped off by taxis, particularly our non free airport transfer we decided to save some money by getting the metro back to the hostel - easy enough surely? No one useful ever speaks english in South America. Fact. Despite the ticket for the metro in Rio actually having the word ¨single¨ printed on the ticket asking for ¨dos single por favor¨ is met with a confused silence and a lack of action, as is pointing to the sign with the price as is asking for 2 tickets to the station you wish to go to in fact at times it is very unclear if they do not understand english or are in fact just simple idiots.

We got back to Copacabana pretty late and as most people in Rio seem to eat pretty early weren´t able to find much else than fast food places open so opted for a Dominos. Well they don´t do dip in South America and we were at a loss, we tried asking for some (in english) he thought we were asking for chips, we then asked for sauce - they had none - giving up on the dip we tried to order water. We understood that he was asking us whether we wanted still or sparkling but had not idea which was which (still as it turns out is sin gas, meaning without gas, so you can understand our confusion) this with metro employees would be the start of a long relationship with South Americans where we were completely unable to communicate.

The next day we got up early and headed down to the famous Copacabana beach to catch some rays. The beach is gorgeous and the sand utterly white.

We were also excited to finally be able to communicate with someone as the guy trying to get us to take sunlougers and a parasol started speaking to us in French, which I was able to speak in - success! However, it was short lived as it became apparent that he didn´t speak very good french as he wasn´t able to respond to my questions, at this point he switched to Pòrtuguese and after some more (attempted)conversation english - we´re still not quite sure as to his nationality or to where he thought we were from, but we got our loungers and brolly for 10real (3 pounds) so were happy.

I somehow managed to burn whilst wearing 35SPF and sitting under a parasol the whole day. I didn´t think it was that bad until the Swedish girls gasped in horror upon entering the room later in the day. I also checked facebook for the first time on our travels using the wifi on my iPod - I was very excited to be able to check facebook whilst on the beach, numerous people it would appear from their comments were jealous.

For the afternoon we decided to go to Sugarloaf Mountain to finally get to see these views of Rio that we´d been trying to see the day earlier. So we got on the metro, after another nail pulling conversation with the woman at the ticket counter and got off at the correct stop and managed to navigate ourselves in the right direction with the help of our Lonely Planet guidebook, alas when innocently stopping at a pedestrian crossing some Rio-chav equivalent came up quickly from the side, pushed into me and in one VERY swift movement managed to steal my sunglasses from off my face - I s*** you not. I was too busy hanging on to my iPod, camera and wallet to have even considered trying to hold to somehhing like my sunglasses I was wearing and before we knew it he was half way down the street just before the traffic had started going again with my sunglasses - b******.

So treading somewhat more carefully we continued to make our way to Sugarloaf, boarded the cable car and finally got the views we´d been waiting for. Rio looks awesome from above. And some very carefully choreographed timing meant that we saw it before sunset, as the sun was setting and at the begining of the night when all the lights were flickering to life one by one - it was awesome and definately worth the wait (although perhaps not the stolen sunglasses)

Our last day in Rio we chose to spend on the beach again - this time Ipanema beach on the trendier side of town, definately comparable to that of the other day on Copacabana.

Being Friday night and being our last in Rio we felt we had to go all out. So Lucy, Erran (the new Isreali boy in our dorm room) and I started in the hostel bar before moving on to the closest bar we could find down the street - a real small bar, 10 seats that clearly was not used to having anyone but locals in. I had caiparinas ie the best drink in the world kind of like a mix between a mojito and a margarita using Brazils national alcohol, cacshet - I HIGHLY reccommend it. They also had a tv show on that largely seemed to be about sluts singing spanish covers of english songs, which amused us. We´d heard about this street party in Lapa. Oh my god. We thought it was going to be kind of people drinking in the streets whilst meandering from bar to bar and into clubs - no. This was a professionally organised street party, professional lighting, bands, thousands of people on the streets. We were raving it up properly. We so wish we´d taken our camera to take pictures of the thing, but we were warned not to and quite right because someone tried to pick pocket me (unsuccessfully and badly I might add) and got my fingernails lodged into his wrist. I drew blood. I was pleased with this result.

The night is somewhat of a blur involving a number of bars and dancing in the street. What I do know is that at somepoint Lucy and Erran started pulling in the street and I was briefly left in the awkward position of being a third wheel. I went for beer. The conversation with the street vendor went like so¨-

Vendor: 5real for uno cerveza
Me: No
Vendor: 4real for uno cerveza
Me: No
Vendor: 3real for uno cerveza?
Me: No
Vendor: 2 for 5real?
Me: Sim

Lucy, Erran and I returned to the hostel, Lucy and Erran went to bed I decided to rave it up with my ipod in front of facebook so as to avoid having to have my brains explode whilst Lucy and Erran did the dirty.

The next morning we said our goodbyes, Erran trying to convince Lucy to stay another night, got a taxi to the bus station and after some confusion over just how exactly to buy a ticket to Sao Paulo - they separate the companies by their destination and seemingly over numerous floors - managed to get our somewhat hungover selves on to the rather comfy bus. Alas as was becoming far to frequent it was not to be for long.