Rio!

Ryan and I spent our last days in Salvador essentially doing nothing. Plans to see folkloric shows and go to the beach quickly disintegrated into basically sitting around the hostel and playing fuseball. We did check out the nightly concerts that kept us awake each night until 2 in the morning and would usually just end up mock fighting the little kids who try to pickpocket you constantly, crazy little gaffers! All in all we were happy to leave on friday morning. Got to Rio after a 27 hour bus ride (ugh), during which I pumped myself up for the Stones concert by listening to 12 of their albums. Met up with Jason, Mukuda, Andre, Blair (and his brother) soon after arriving here and began preparing for the coming festivities. Copacabana seems like a really nice area, although there are some shady undertones to it. The place was absolutely packed yesterday with people arriving all over for the concert. Went down to the beach at about 5:30 and pushed our way into the crowd until we were about 60 metres back from the where the VIP section started. Compared to most people, we definitely had some of the best seats on the beach. Stones came on at about 9:50 and did a solid two hours before finally departing. The whole thing was awesome. The crowd was fairly well behaved, the Stones played an awesome set and it was cool just to get up on each other´s shoulders and peer out over a sea of a million plus people. Not sure where they get all their energy from, but Mick especially is insane on stage and I only hope that I can party like that when I´m 2500 years old. Was strange being in a crowd that big, since we were right up by the stage, we´d look back along the beach and simply couldn´t see the end of the crowd. We were warned by everyone not to bring anything that could be stolen, so we bought disposable cameras instead. Although probably sound advice, at no point did any of us feel in danger of being robbed or pickpocketed and saw a ton of people with cameras out. Regardless, Andre is getting the disposables developed as I type this and hopefully I´ll be able to get some shots up here within the next few days. Not sure what else is planned for our stay here so we´ll just play it by ear. Tonight we´re grabbing the metro and heading down to see a soccer game in the gigantic stadium here (apparently the biggest stadium in the world, but this has yet to be confirmed). The games are supposed to be legendary, with rival fans throwing dead chickens and cups of urine at one another, so I´m going to try to go in with a full bladder. Finally caught our first 5 minutes of a hockey game last night, but were crushed to watch as the Swiss struck down our mighty Olympians...not cool, but hopefully this will wake them up a little. Until next time!