Arriving in Rio: bit edgy

So we plan a city break to Rio for five days. We’ve booked a Bargain apartment 150 metres from Copacobana beach which we cleverly saught out on booking.com and are looking forward to chilling on the famous beach minutes away from where we are saying in tropical temperatures. Obviously we plan to do a little bit more than that but that will definetly be a main feature.

We arrive after getting the (quite comfortable actually) night bus from Ouro Preto at 5.40am it is pissing it down. We can’t check in until 9am so we wait a while in the bus station – by 8 it is bound to have started brightening up anyway so this is OK. The bus station provides us with a decent breakfast.

We get a taxi at 8am. The rain has turned torrential…and the traffic is horrendous. It takes 45 minutes to get to our apartment on a very busy street. We are let into our apartment in an extremely secure building – there are guards on the door 24/7 and they’re the only ones that can let you in to the block. What we’ve heard about Rio and it’s crime levels this makes us feel reassured and safe.

Our studio apartment is very well equipped and if you turn your head out the window you can see the beach. But you can also see two bars right below our apartment that we discover soon after are frequented by alcoholics who are most likely also drug addicts, who look like they are drinking to forget. There is a family of five  sleeping on a mattress opposite our apartment in the rain. There is no sound filter in our apartment – we can hear everything all night and I can’t sleep hearing everything and thinking about the family across the road. When we stick our heads out the window at 10am the following day the street view has turned very ugly as the same people who were drinking at 11pm are still drinking. Suddenly our apartment doesn’t seem such a bargain afterall.