Game Day

VAMOSSSS ECUADORIANOS... ESTA TARDE, TENEMOS QUE GANARRRRR!!!!

That's a chant we would sing at least 30 times the day we went to watch Ecuador play France in Maracana.  Eric was able to get an Ecuador jersey but he unfortunately got the last 'white person size' available so I was left to go in a regular tee.  We decided to take the metro to the stadium - there's a station literally right outside our apartment - which was an experience in itself.

Signs to Maracana in the Metro were everywhere, it would have been impossible to get lost

Their metro > our metro; they have TVs and AC that works

This was a shot of the stadium in the distance; we got off one stop before and decided to walk with the majority of the crowd

There was also a group of Ecuadorianos on the metro which were singing all kinds of chants and waving flags, shirts, etc.

Day 2 - Reconnecting and "Mudge Budge"

We got up around noon the next day and after the obligatory checking of email, news reading, etc., made our way out to watch a bit of the games, get some food and plan the rest of the evening/night.  I had been in contact with a girl I knew when I was down here who still lives here named Aline - Miguel knows who I'm talking about, she randomly comments on pictures of me on Facebook with things like 'Beijosssssssss' or 'kkkkkkk muito bom', speaks almost no english and is not particularly attractive.  I told her to grab a friend and meet us out somewhere in Copacabana.  She picked a place called Mud Bug (pronounced by Brazilians as 'mudge budge' - they really have a problems with the following letters: t, d, g, and r) and my brother and I made our way there.  When we got to the bar it was pretty crowded and there were a line of Americans trying to understand how the whole "get a temporary card at the front door that has money pre-loaded on it and use that card for all drinks" works.  Before we even entered the bar Aline spotted me and came out to say hi.  We hung out inside, ordered some food that wasn't terrible but wasn't great, and had 3 or 4 drinks before leaving and coming back to our place.  Aline's friend Isabel, or as Eric called her, the grenade who was hotter than the target, was not a whole lot of fun but at least spoke English well enough.  This was also the first time my Portuguese had been tested and it started coming back to me pretty well after talking for a while.  Here's a picture of the group at the bar.

We came back to our place and after some antics, which involved me coming out of my room naked to get a glass of water and Isabel freaking out, we said goodnight, the girls left, and we went to bed.  Just as we were getting ready to shut it down, Chris (who was a late addition to the trip - he works with Rahul which is my brother's friend who joined us) arrived around 2am.  He had been traveling all day with flight cancellations and was eager to get to bed.  Rahul was expected to arrive in the early morning.  My brother and I had a big day ahead of us - our first World Cup game, which happened to be at Maracana, one of the most famous stadiums in the world and certainly the most storied stadium in Brazil.

Getting Here, Day 1, and U-S-A!

So, the much awaited trip to Brasil for the 2014 World Cup is finally underway (well, almost over).  It's been a cycle of 1) wake up, 2) get shit together and/or go to beach or get a salgado (salgado means snack - more on that later from Eric regarding the 'Misto Quente Challenge'), 3) get a nap in or begin drinking, 4) watch more soccer and/or begin drinking heavily, 5) hit the night clubs or botecas, 6) rinse and repeat.  It's also been a revisitation of Portuguese being here in Brazil.  The first day I was a bit rusty; by the 3rd day I had downloaded duolingo and made a pact to myself to continue to keep up with the language in preparation for the Olympics in 2016.  Ok, that's the intro, let's get started with the story.

In order to tell the story, I need to provide a little background.  We didn't actually leave from DC, instead we traveled up to New York (near where I went to Prep School) and attended a wedding and left from JFK the following day.  The wedding was beautiful but the night before I planned to spend the night at my brother's place.  Andy Rallis happened to be in town and, as such, I ended up in DC and late night went back to a friend's place (Mina) and, after much conversation, ended up back at my brother's place at 4am setting my alarm for 6am to get on a bus the next day.  In a word, the trip to NY was terrible.  I slept for as long as I could on the bus and when we got to Philly I disembarked in robot-mode, made my way to the bathroom and then immediately looked for my parents who were there to pick us up.  Side note: when we couldn't coordinate with my parents on a location for pickup my Dad called us and first said "I'm on the river side of the station!" to which I responded "stop yelling at me I'm hungover and if I go outside to see which side the river is on I will get lit up by the sun and literally want to end my own life".  He then said "Ok there's a couple marvel characters walking around here - Superman and Spiderman are here" to which I responded "those aren't really fixtures of the location; naming people who are walking near you is not helpful in identifying the location you are at since when I may see them they most likely won't be in the same location".  My brother and I finally got to the car and we were on our way to Pawling, NY for the wedding.  I immediately went back to sleep.

After the wedding we had a small dance party with just my immediate family at the place we were staying.  Here's a selfie with my Dad, both rocking sunglasses while dancing to Juicy J's 'Bounce It' - fond memories.

The coolest guy I know (on the right, of course)

The next morning we were dropped off at JFK for our 6pm flight, checked in to get our boarding passes (the guy who helped us gave us a couple laughs when we told him we had been to Rio before and exchanged a few stories which wont be mentioned here), and proceeded through security to the gate.  We got to the gate early (3 hours before we had to start boarding) and I plugged my laptop in to do some work while my brother scouted out a location where we could watch the Portgual-US game.  We found a bar close to our gate (literally, right across from our gate) and decided we would head there around 5:30pm to watch the pregame and set up for at least the first 30 min of the first half.  During this time, we heard over the loudspeaker in Portguese (and then English) that people who were traveling to Rio de Janeiro on flight 8097 needed to check in at a new gate. We didnt pay much attention to it until 4pm when we looked ar our tickets and saw that it 8097 was actually our flight.  I stopped by the gate and asked the ladies who were working there when we actually HAD to be at the gate to make the flight since we were going to be watching the game at the bar up until the last minute possible.  They said at first, be here at 6, ok no you can come at 630, ok 640 and then finally, dont be here any later than 645.  We ended up staying at the bar until after 715 because the flight was delayed (well into the second half of the game which started at 6pm ET) and when we got on the plane, I continued to watch the game on WatchESPN - we actually saw the entire game before we took off, much to the chagrin of the flight staff who were trying to hawkeye my electronic devices.  I was convinced the flight crew held the plane just because they wanted to see the end result of the game before we left.

On the plane I sat next to a guy who just graduated from Stanford's MBA program, we discussed the merits of attending an MBA program - my main argument was for rebranding yourself/entering a new industry and/or leveraging the network.  I asked him where he was eventually going to end up and when he said Carlyle Group in DC I asked if he thought he really needed an MBA from Stanford to do that.  We didnt speak much after that.

When we got to Rio, we got our bags, oddly enough got escorted to the side of Customs that didnt' require any kind of x-ray of our bags, and quickly found a cab (per Vicente's instructions) in the arriving terminal.  The filha-da-puta cab driver tried to charge us for '2' base rate but I quickly corrected him to change it to '1' (2 is for weekends and holidays and is 30% more expensive). Here are a few photos from the ride to the apartment from GIG airport.

We got to our apartment close to 830am after a 30 minute ride and 50 Reais trip in which we immediately acclimated ourselves with the mother of the owner of the apartment who sounded and smelled like she went through 3 packs of cigarettes daily, went downstairs to get a quick salgado, and then took a nap - the other two roommates were not scheduled to arrive until the following night, at the earliest.  When we got up from our naps we headed down the street to grab some food and watch the Brazil game (they played against Cameroon at 6pm local time on Monday).  After Brazil handily beat Cameroon 4-1 we decided to walk along the beach and make it a low key night.  I had been chatting with Vicente (the guy who's family I lived with when I was in Rio 8 years ago) on WhatsApp and we decided we'd grab dinner somewhere and chat about plans for the week.  Eric may or may not have set up a meet with a brazilian girl electronically and we left the apartment to meet her and her friends and grab a bite to eat.  After some awkward conversation with two of the girl's friends who were gay - and not in the way I refer to some of my friends as gay, but honestly homosexual.. and very touchy - I ordered food and pretty much talked to Vicente the rest of the time we hung out with them.  After the meet, we decided to walk from Rua Xavier da Silveira where we ate and is the same road our apartment is located (Rua Xavier da Silveira 115, to be exact), along Avenida Atlantica all the way to Puta lane where all the strip clubs in Copacabana are located.  I snapped this photo of La Cicciolina (the club I took Iz and Claude to the first night they came to Brazil -- where both Iz and I got on stage and did some questionable things) before heading back.  You can tell 'as putas' are not happy with the photo taking.  Afterwards we walked back to our place along the beach in which there were an inordinate amount of females aged between 12-16 who were eye-fucking the shit out of us - which I didn't mind but made my brother uncomfortable.

La Cicciolina; a staple of Puta Lane