Two’s company, three’s a crowd, four’s a squeeze!

So carnival time is nearly here and everyone in Rio is on holiday for a week. Stupidly we didn’t start booking places to stay until about a month before we were due to arrive so every hotel in the whole of Rio de Janeiro had been booked out this weekend 🙁

Last time me and Paul were away we booked a few places on airbnb.com so decided to see if anything was available, we found a few apartments but the prices are cranked up for carnival week. In the end we booked a one bedroom apartment in Ipanema (the next beach up from Copacabana).

We were picked up from Angra dos Reis about 10.30 this morning by Marcos (pictured below), his first language was Portugese but he also spoke quite a lot of Spanish, but no English. Between me and Paul we managed to have a reasonably good conversation for the 3 hour journey!! We arrived at Daniel’s apartment in Ipanema about 2pm, Daniel kindly recommended some places for us to go and showed us the ropes. As you can probably guess from the title the apartment is pretty small, 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, a mini kitchen and a sofa bed in the lounge area. It’s only for 3 nights and we are really close to the carnival so we are not too bothered!

We then went to grab some lunch and headed for the beach, or what used to be a beach before it was covered with thousands of people and umbrellas. We found a patch about a metre wide and propped up our umbrellas and chairs, seriously I have never seen anything like it 🙂

We are just on our way out for a pizza tonight, the apartment is in a really good location so we only have to walk about 30 seconds to get to restaurants and 2 minutes to the beach. You can feel the excitement in the streets tonight, smaller parades and parties will be taking place at various times in preparation for the main event at the Samba Drome on Sunday night. Woohoo can’t wait!!