Wednesday.....Buzios

Wednesday the weather was beautiful again, after a few cloudy, rainy days, which worked out perfect for us since we had scheduled another boat trip. The boat/city tour included a stop at two beaches and an island, along with lunch, Caprihans, and a tour of a small city called Cabo Frio. The trip was fun and very very beautiful but it's kind of useless with out pictures so I'll keep it short and sweet for today until I can upload some pics. The tour was nice and had a few interesting moments. At our second stop the had snowboards available to rent for roughly $3 for an hour. You then climbed a sand dune and snow (or really sand boarded) down the hill. It was fun and I was surprisingly better than Ryan at it....hahaha. On our way back to the big boat (you can be ferried by a small dingy) when the driver went to pull start the motor he broke the handle off. Hahaha. We drifted for about 5 mins before we could get another boat to come pull us into our big boat. It was pretty funny to hear the guide and driver yelling at each other. We don't understand 99% of what happens here but we understood that part.


A quick pic of our boat for the day.





The Monkey Face...can you see it?  Hint: It's a side view of the monkeys face.  The brow forms the dark triangle shadow towards the top left of the picture.





Ryan before he tried sand-boarding,  I wish I had some great action shots of him actually boarding but sadly, they all came out blurry.


Since our dingy was now broken, we had to skip the island part of our tour and went straight to lunch. Essentially the equivalent of Old Country Buffet. P.S. Don't pick out sushi at OCB. .....you will be very very disappointed. Then, they made you pay for whatever you didn't eat so I ended up wrapping my sushi pieces in a napkin and tossing them in the bathroom. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I should have know better!!


A live Blowfish.  He was really really cool.  One of our guides found him to show everyone.



Cabo Frio was very uninteresting!! It was a huge shopping area which might sound fun but here is a basic rundown of the stores: bikini, bikini, sandals, crappy t-shirt, bikini, bikini, bikini. It was seriously 100's of stores selling bikinis and more bikinis. Even I was bored after about 10 minutes so ryan and I shared a nice little beer outside while the rest of the group shopped and bought....you guessed it.....bikinis!

I'll post pics later and a movie or two of the snowboarding. Oh....and we found a blow fish too....that was cool....pics later.

In the mean time, here are some random cultural things we've found interesting along the way:
1. there are no pepper shakers. A salt shaker just doesn't look right on the table without it's ore half. It's like peas without the pod, ice-cream without chocolate sauce, or peanut butter without jelly.....you've got to have the pepper too.

2. We haven't seen one cemetery while we are here. We've been in Rio which is a huge city and through plenty of small cities in our travels but we've yet to see a cemetery. I wonder if they are above or below ground....maybe cremated???

3. Driving here is crazy. There are speed bumps everywhere, even on the highway. Cars literally double pass over double yellows. On our way back to Rio from Paraty, we were in a bus and passed a slow moving truck over double yellow, we were simultaneously passed by a car, passing us both.

4. Toilet paper in most public places isn't on a roll like we are used to. It's like little tissue paper hung in dispensers on the wall.

5. Bedays everywhere. Everyplace we've been they've had them. Maybe as Americans we are missing out on something???