Thursday in Rio de Janeiro

Thursday I told the students to go to the beach in the morning by themselves since I had some work to do :( in my hotel room. They told me that they had fun walking up the beach and swimming in the water. Then I let **them** figure out how to get to Corcovado, the mountain with the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking the city. Of course we got lost trying to find the correct bus stop (was it the 538 bus? The 583 bus? A different bus?) and how do we know which bus stop is for which bus (bus numbers aren't always posted on the shelters). Anyways, we took the bus to the end of the line (that wasn't hard to figure out, just wait until the bus driver says "end of the line" in Portuguese and everyone gets off the bus). Then instead of the short railroad which goes directly up to the statue we took a private shuttle bus up to a lookout point where we could first see all around the city and then continued up to the Christ the Redeemer statue. Very nice trip. We took the shuttle back to the bus stop and then took the 584 bus back to Rio. Again, it was hard to figure out where the bus was going and because of that we didn't really pay attention to where we were (of course, we don't know the layout of the city here!). So, when we suddenly saw that we were going through the tunnel from the Copacabana neighborhood to the Ipanema neighborhood we jumped off the bus and walked back though the tunnel and down the street to our hotel. Maybe tomorrow we should try to find bus maps for Rio. Quite an adventure and a lot of fun. Pictures will follow with captions. More photos are available on my Facebook page for my Friends.