Dominica May

Friday 9th November

Doyle is officially 10 months old today. Where has the time gone?!

Anyway, we were up bright and early at the bold time of 6am to pack and check out by 7am. We then caught the first taxi we found to the airport.

My final, lasting thought on Lisbon is this: Why are there so many one or no-legged people in the city? I’m not against the disabled in the slightest, there just seemed to be a whole lot more of these people in Lisbon than I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

Upon getting to our gate at the airport, I found a wifi zone, and decided to check it out. Jeremy says I somehow managed to hack the system to get free WWW Internet access, because he couldn’t get the free access himself, and had to pinch my computer temporarily in order to post his change to his Portugal blog entry. I just chose free local access as my first choice, then went back and chose the access of the logo I’d seen in the area. I figured it was all free, so I just told Jeremy to do my second choice. So that’s where I posted my blog from yesterday – Lisbon airport.

Pretty much the entire rest of the day was spent flying to Rio de Janeiro, where we are now. It was something like 10 hours or so. The main highlight of the flight was that I got to watch the Transformers movie, finally. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and a few spots definitely had me in a fit of giggles.

We arrived in the city at approximately 6:10pm Rio time. It took forever for our luggage to come through, and Doyle’s stroller was one of the last things to come off the plane. Then once we got through customs, we couldn’t find an ATM. They were all lopped together in the most inconvenient place possible. Then Jeremy couldn’t use his card in any of them. He eventually had to go back and find a money exchange place to get some cash. We get about 1.5 Reals for our dollar. That doesn’t necessarily mean things will be cheaper, though.

Our next task was to get to the apartment where we’re staying. The ONLY option for leaving the airport here is taxi. No trains, no buses, nothing. Although you can hire a car, we weren’t about to do that. A taxi driver approached us and told us it would be 74 Reals, or about AUD$50. Our eyes boggled because we thought that was expensive. So Jeremy went to check if another one would be cheaper. Our driver didn’t speak much English, so while I was waiting with him, I said “mucho deniro” which means “a lot of money” in Spanish, and I guess it does in Portuguese, too, because he understood me. He told me he could give us 10% off, even though the cost he originally said was the standard price. Jeremy confirmed this when he returned. So all in all we didn’t do too badly if I managed to get a small discount by being able to speak Spanish!

It was nearly 9pm, maybe even later by the time we got to our apartment in Copacabana. It’s pretty nice, and Jeremy did well choosing it. We even have free Internet access here! Jeremy probably especially appreciates that, now that the IGF will be going on. We only really have one tourist day here, I realised, and that will be tomorrow.