We arrived
off the mouth of the harbor before dawn, enabling us to see the famous Christ the Redeemer statue illuminated, albeit from a great distance.
 |
| statue is white speck on top of mountain |
We proceeded
into the harbor. Originally the entrance
was believed to be the mouth of a river. It being January when it was discovered, the
Portuguese explorers named it Rio de Janeiro (“River of January”).
I will spare
you a progression of boring pictures of entering the harbor in a gray morning
haze, instead jumping ahead to arriving at the passenger terminal....
...at one end of
which is the new Museum of Tomorrow. It
is touted to be a museum of ideas, not art.
Due to Carnaval, it will be closed the entire time we are here along with all the other
museums, and almost everything else.
Now we could
identify the source of the high-decibels music we had heard coming across the
water for some time. It was coming from
the pier – a Carnaval party in full swing at 6:30 in the morning. We subsequently learned that the port terminal
complex was a multi-purpose facility used for all sorts of events. In this case, there had been no cruise ships
at the pier last night, and by the time the first one - Oceania’s REGATTA (a
sister ship of the one we will be taking on our cruise next winter) – docked and
VEENHAM was pulling alongside the pier, the party had come to an end. Coincidence or just too much sunlight for the
party-goers?
As we stood
on our veranda looking around, we saw a peculiar convoy working its way along a
nearby road. It was some of the floats
headed to the Sambadrome for tonight’s parades.
It takes lots of time, labor and closed streets to get them from their
sheds the venue and back again the next day.
We may see
these floats on their return trip tomorrow morning. Somewhere along the way they will pass the floats
making their way to tomorrow night’s performance.
- - - - -
This ends the first installment
of our Rio experience.
The next one will be about our
Petropolis your.
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