Maracana Stadium

The Soccer Game 

Yesterday turned out to be a blast.  A few friends from the hostel went along and I met some Isrealis and people from one of the other hostels on the block on the way.  The match was actually a celebrity match, so it wasn’t as crazy as a real game (too many break-aways, the refs were far too kind of some of the penalty kicks and some of the players were pretty old), but it was cool to see Zico (a Brazilian soccer hero, now about 60) score three goals and I loved the energy in the crowd.  The best was when they belted out the national songs. 

Samba

After the game, I grabbed a bite to eat and was planning on spending the night in.  I started chatting with the people I had met from the other hostel, though (awesome, very international group that had gone independent of our tour but ended up in the same area) and was having such a great time that I decided to go to a samba club one of the guys was getting everyone into for free.  We cabbed over to the club (the ride in itself was worth the trip) and joined the VIP line, but were ultimately about an hour and a half later than we were supposed to be there once we arrived.  The regular line was longer than ours, which was almost around the block, so once we realized it could be hours until we got in, we decided to grab a few cabs and head back into Ipanema to go somewhere closer to the hostel.  It was probably a good thing as I was definitely underdressed for this club (in a black dress)… and the night turned out to be amazing regardless.  

One of the guys in the group is a semi-professional footvolley player from Germany (think volleyball with no hands – it’s popular on the beaches here) so he led us to this great bar where we hung out for a few hours, even pointing out the van where a lot of locals were buying their beers and sneaking them into the club.  Met some cool half-Brazilian, half-Japanese girls with crazy tattoos when I tried to stop some drama in line at the women’s bathroom (fight over who was in line first) and ran into some Swedish girls I had met on Friday at the Lapa street party.  Small (tourist?) world.  

I was starting to get tired at one point and was shocked to check someone’s clock and find it was past four, so one of my new Turkish-Swedish friends walked me back to the hostel.

Late one, but fun day & night... visiting the Maracana Stadium was a treat in itself, but will definitely look for my seat when the World Cup finals are held there in 2012!