I am glad today is free day for us. Because the past few days are quite long days and every night when I went back to the hotel, I just felt so tired that I didn’t want to do anything. Thus, today I decided to spend my whole day on the beach, lie on the chair, drink some coconuts and make up some sketches I didn’t finish in the past days. Yutong and I wake up at late morning and then we walked along street to find anything for our lunch. The street in our neighborhood is similar and unfortunately we went to the wrong way to the beach.But we found a pretty good restaurant by accident–Brasinha. I ordered salmon here and it was really huge parts of salmon and it tasted pretty fresh!
I also found it was really interesting that they cook potato like this. (In the picture) not like fries and it was really good!
After lunch, we walked along the Ipenema beach to the copacabana beach. We rent chairs and umbrella and just lying down on the beach. Copacabana beach has some differences with Ipenema beach. The store here is more bigger and has better restroom. People here are most families. When we tried to take selfies at the beach. A father of a family told us he is a photographer from Bali and would like to take pictures for us. We played on the beach with the seawater and he took pictures freely for us. He was really nice and we took a picture with his daughter. When we lying on the beach, we also saw teenagers playing soccer on the beach. They play really well and I really want to join them.
Lying on the beach for a long time is a good way for me to observe the beach life of Rio.
When we back to the hotel, we felt really sad because this was the last night in Rio and I believed I will miss the day I spend here.
This is the sketches I made up on the beach. Actually on that day I only drew this one and then fell asleep on the beach.
I also thought that the free day was much needed. The preceding days had been very long and tiring, I also feel right asleep when I got back to the hotel. I too decided to relax on the beach for much of the day. Later though, some of us decided to go to a samba dance club at the request of Reyna (THANKS REYNA!). That turned out to be one of my favorite experiences of the whole trip. In the evening, we took a bus to Lapa, where we found the restaurant/ club in a street that had been closed off and other restaurants and bars extending their seating and services out into it. The restaurant was one of the coolest places I’ve ever eaten and the food was great. Even better thought, was the music and dancing. It was almost intimidating at first, watching older people samba like pros to the live band and having a blast while I watched and tried to figure out the steps in my head. The later later it got, the whole place became a buzzing atmosphere of excitement. We gave up our table and hit the upstairs dance floor. The woman singing there was the best live singer I’ve ever heard and she was making everyone have fun and let loose. I think I fell in love with the music (and her). Anyways, we ran into English speakers who taught us some steps (or tried), and I ended up dancing until sweat was pouring off of me. It was great seeing the young and old mingle and dance together and have fun all under the same roof in the name of a single dance. It was one of the best cultural experiences of the whole trip for me, and I’m so happy to have spent that free time doing something that I’ll remember for a long long time. Thinking about it now even puts a smile on my face, I even downloaded a samba playlist on my Spotify for the plane ride home.