We were really excited to finally have a beach day! All of the boys from the hostel wanted to join us, so we all got our beach gear together and headed down to Ipanema. It wasn't a far walk from Copacabana to Ipanema, but you could tell that since it was a holiday Friday that people had off of work, everyone had gone to the beach.
When we made it to the beach, it was wall to wall people and we couldn't even rent umbrellas or chairs because they were sold out. We squeezed our towels between two groups of people and took turns jumping into the water. It was a bit cold but it felt great on such a hot day! There were tons of vendors making fresh fruit drinks and sandwiches so everyone got caipirinhas (I got a passionfruit and vodka because lime juice hurts my stomach) and lounged in the sand.
The boys were very interesting to talk to. There was Kevin and George from the UK, Felix from Germany and Alejandro from Argentina. They each offered a completely different perspective depending on the topic so our conversations were never dull.
After a full day in the sun, we headed back along the boardwalk, shopping at the little stands and watching all of the people milling about on the beach.
The hostel was having a night out in Lapa that night, so we decided it would be fun for all of us to go out clubbing together. We grabbed some dinner in Copacabana and then organized ourselves to head out. Just as we were getting ready to leave, I thought it would be smart to reconfirm the bus transfer we were supposed to have the next morning to Ilha Grande. Of course, the night manager looked in the book and said that no such reservation had been made and no one would be there to pick us up. After arguing back and forth about the circumstances for 15 minutes, he said if we paid him right then for it, someone would probably pick us up the next day. We whipped out our credit cards but then he decided he would only accept cash and we decided we'd had enough of him. We left for the club knowing that we might be stranded the next day with no place to sleep since it was the holiday weekend and our reservation was on an island we couldn't get to.
Kevin, Alyssa, Alejandro and I grabbed a cab to Lapa. Alyssa and I were both out of cash but no ATMs were open so Kevin had graciously offered to be our source of cash for the evening (we would pay him back the following day). Felix had already gone with an earlier group and George couldn't go since he was taking a 4:00am flight to Lima, Peru. When we arrived, I finally got a good picture of the arches, known as the "Arcos da Lapa", constructed to act as conduit in the days of colonial Brazil. They are a beautiful architectural entrance to the overwhelming street party that is Lapa.
We had pre-paid for a certain club through the hostel because we would get a discount, but the line to get in was so insane that we decided not to wait and walked down the street to get drinks elsewhere. We met up with Felix who took us to a bar he had been to earlier in the evening that served shots of some local liquor that we said tasted like Christmas due to the cinnamon and nutmeg flavors in it. We hung out in the middle of the street party, drinking with the locals. We had no idea the liquor was so strong since we'd never had it before and after two shots, we were all pretty good to go.
We headed back to the club which no longer had a line and found out that instead of Samba, they we playing house dance music. We had a great time dancing until around 5:00am, when we decided it was time to leave. In Brazil, all of the clubs assign you a card when you come in and you basically run a tab but at this place there was a huge line to pay your tab before you could leave which was really annoying. We waited at least 30 minutes to pay before we could leave.
As we walked out of the club, we found that the street party was still in full swing. Two of the boys (unbeknownst to Alyssa and I) had done some coke and were amped up to dance. We found ourselves in a crowd of locals, plaing instruments and dancing Samba. The women would take turns pulling us into the middle of the circle to feature our dance moves. Since we obviously can't dance Samba, we did our best to imitate what they were doing and they really wanted to teach us. It was a lot of fun! At one point, some crazy older ladies insisted on pulling Alyssa and I out for close dancing and I could tell that something was off. I took Alyssa's purse while she danced, but when I was dancing one of the ladies was able to open the small pouch of my purse and steal my watch and some other papers that were inside. It was very funny to me that those were the items that they stole because the watch was broken so it didn't really matter that they took it, but I did have my wallet, camera and translator also in my purse which I would have been devastated if they took. I think they weren't able to get very much though since I pretty much knew it was going to happen and had my hand clamped over the large zipper of my purse. Since I immediately noticed what had happened and saw that it might not be the safest place to hang out anymore, I rallied everyone to head back to the hostel. It was already 5:30am and I still needed to figure out how we would be getting to Ilha Grande the next day since we had to check out of our hostel by 10:00am.
When we got back to the hostel, I had an email response from a different transfer service that I had contacted confirming our transfer to Ilha Grande the next morning at 10:30am. Knowing that we would have a pickup scheduled, I set my alarm early enough to make sure we could get some cash, get packed up and eat breakfast before 10:30am, giving us less than 3 hours of sleep.
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