Rio de Janeiro Trip 2009

I went to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with some of my family (Grams, an Aunt, & Moms). We stayed in a pretty nice hotel which looked out to the Copacabana Beach. The best part about it was, we could walk across the street and were at the beach. Not that the beach is a huge deal for me, given I live five minutes away from the beach on a daily basis. However, being able to see mountains in the horizon is a whole other view. The sceneries in Rio are breath taking! I took so many pictures of the town, mountain views, flowers in the botanical garden, the Christ Statue, etc...

The food was awesome there, too. Every meal we had was perfect and always huge portions. Viasete was our favorite restaurant, we ate there twice! But I have to say my favorite food while I was there was the last thing I ate and I believe the cheapest. In American dollars it was less than three dollars. It was pizza in a cone! Yup a cone...the cone was the pizza dough and the cone was filled with tomato sauce, cheese, and whatever toppings you would like. It was amazing and delicious!!!

We did a lot of sight seeing and were able to accomplish a lot in such a small time frame. We used the public bus system to get everywhere we wanted to go. I was a little nervous using the bus system due to several buses being put on fire by gang members the day before we left for Rio. Everything went smoothly though with no troubles or scares. We visited Corcovado (the Christ Statue) and used the Congo Train to go up the mountain to the statue, the Hard Rock Cafe, Sugar Loaf Mountain, downtown historic district, H'Stern, and I went to the Botanical Garden (you know me - never am able to stay with the crowd). Plus did some shopping and went to the beach a couple of times.

All in all it was a wonderful trip!


Below is a compilation of photos I took while I was at the Jardim Botanico.