Well, that’s that then. The World Cup 2014 is over. All the worries and concerns about whether the tournament would be a success can be laid to rest because this thing is over.
How do you think it went? Sadly, through an overabundance of work, I didn’t get to attend any of the matches in any of the stadiums, but I was out and about on the streets of Rio throughout the tournament and also met a huge number of tourists who were in town specifically for the World Cup. Here’s my take on the tournament:
https://i0.wp.com/eatrio.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/th_DSC_0121.jpg?fit=600%2C400&ssl=1400600tomlemeshttps://eatrio.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/eat-rio-logo.pngtomlemes2014-07-15 09:18:582024-03-13 09:44:20World Cup 2014 – How did it go?
Rio is a very strange place right now. For the last few days the city has been filling up with tens of thousands of Catholic pilgrims wearing bright yellow “World Youth Day” t-shirts and smiles. By yesterday morning the hordes were everywhere (including my bus to work…) and the feeling of growing excitement was palpable (not that I was sharing in the excitement you understand, but I could still sense it in these groups of frenzied visitors).
Hordes of happy pilgrims have been swarming across the city.
TV Globo broadcast live footage of the Pope’s arrival: nervous last minute preparations at the airport, his plane touching down and finally, after an interminable wait, the man himself. As he made his way down the red carpet he greeted people and everything seemed (to me at least) utterly unremarkable.
If I remember rightly, I arrived in Rio for the very first time on a Thursday. Mrs Eat Rio picked me up at Santos Dumont airport and drove me around town to show me the sights. To be honest, I think she was actually just trying to drive me back to her place, but she kept taking wrong turns, so by the time we got back, I had seen most of Rio…
Now I’m not sure if anyone else has experienced this, but on that first day (and in fact for several weeks after that) I couldn’t really piece Rio together. As I moved around the city I was confronted by one dazzling and dramatic sight after another. First we’d be following a stretch of beach, then we’d turn a corner and there was a huge mountain, then more beaches, more mountains covered in forest, a huge stretch of water called the Lagoa, and then an even larger body of water call Guanabara Bay (in Portuguese Baía da Guanabara). I had no idea how all these places linked up.
Rio de Janeiro – a bamboozling mix of beaches, mountains, bays and forest. Source
As you can see on the map above, as well as all those bays and inlets, there is also what looks like a lake a few blocks behind Ipanema. In fact it is a lagoon, most commonly known simply as Lagoa, though its full name is Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas. It is connected to the sea by a canal which runs through a narrow park called Jardim de Alá.
As if Rio didn’t have enough amazing sights, Lagoa adds yet another stunning dish to this table, already heaving with delights:
I’m a big fan of travel, be it across town or around the world. I’ve always known I liked travelling in the ‘around-the-world’ sense, but I only really discovered that I was interested in how people get around town when I started blogging. After a while I noticed that I was amassing more and more Rio transport related posts – how to hail a bus (no mean feat in Rio), priority seats for the obese, metro travel tips, the sexy voiced announcer at the airport.
So I guess it’s only natural that I would find myself continuing this trend during my 2 months back in England. One of the many pleasures of being back has been catching up with old friends and, through a twist of fate, a friend and I recently found ourselves in what was recently described as “the world’s most wonderful railway station”: St Pancras.
