Saturday in Rio - Seeing the Sights

On the seventh day in Rio we got to rest a little. At least rest from working in the favela. We hopped on a big tour bus and set out to explore this beautiful city.

There are always some really cool sand castles along the beach. The pace of life here is slow, but when you drive "floor it!" so it was difficult to get pictures that weren't blurry.

I'm not sure I would want this job.

Many of the beautiful buildings of Rio were built when it was a Portuguese colony back in the 1800s.

Our first stop was Corcadova, the mountain where the gigantic statue of Christ is. It is called Cristo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer. Princess Isabela freed the slaves in the late 1800s (after the USA slaves were freed. They wanted to build a great statue of her and call it Isabel the Redeemer. She said if they built a statue of a Redeemer it would have to be of Jesus because HE is our Redeemer. Good for her! So the statue of THE Redeemer was built in honor of the lady who freed the slaves. Cool.

As we waited in line, there was a funny "hippy" statue. Then we noticed that the statue moved. Someone said, "if you drop money in his bucket he'll make you something." Lisa, never to miss an adventure, dropped in some coins. I'll have to find Charlie's video of it for you to see, but here he is presenting Lisa the flower that he made.

To get the Cristo Redentor you ride a train straight up a hill, well, maybe not straight up, but you can see out the window how slanted the view is outside.

The statue is HUGE.

You can't help but think of Christ's words, "come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest."

There were a lot of people posing like it.

Next, we went to lunch. We went to a charrasaria (I'll check the spelling later). It was great. I don't have food pictures today.

Late afternoon we headed to Sugar Loaf. It's a giant hill sticking up out of the ocean. As Cheryl puts it, "you hang on strings to get there."

Cheryl doesn't do heights. Here she is hanging on as we rode up.

Here's our missionary, Ray, taking a picture.

We stayed for sunset - incredible!

Everyone took lots pictures.

Right in the middle of this picture, the little bump above the mountains is Corcadova. If you enlarge the picture you can see Cristo Redentor.