Finally my terror is over, we returned the car uncrashed and intact. I no longer have to drive on these streets of motorbikes and insane parking. It was handy to have, but we didn’t use it as much as we had planned and Ubers here are so damn cheap. A 30 minute ride will cost about $12 NZ. We’ve had some great drivers, and the standard tips are $1, $2 and $5 which amounts to 29c, 59c and $1.46 – for the great drivers we’ve been tipping a whole lot more since the petrol is about half of what it is here, but the pay is so damn low.

Which reminds me, I was worried about the whole filling the car up before returning it because they have all sorts of different fuels and possibly strange ways of paying for petrol etc. Then I remembered – it’s full service here. We pulled in to the station, popped open the fuel cap, the lady (look how modern and equal we are, sitting in the car while a woman pumped our gas) filled it up. She then came back with the mobile eftpos machine, we paid and off we went. The most amount of effort we used was pushing the fuel cap button and the window buttons.

After this we went for a coffee and I got to try some of the Brazilian delicacies. First we have carrot cake. Yep, I checked, this is carrot cake. It was good, but mum’s classic NZ recipe with cream cheese icing cannot be beat. We also had brigadeiros which were good, and their chocolate sprinkles are far better than ours.

I asked for a filter coffee and this contraption arrived. It was kind of like the opposite of a tea bag but made a fantastic cup of coffee, with a little bit more faffing about. Probably won’t be my go-to method but might be worth checking out back home.

Next week headed to a shopping mall, which had the best view out of the front door I’ve ever seen.

We found a Hering store, which I got some shirts from in Rio, but I managed to mis-remember my shirt size. They have G, GG, EXG, EEG and all sorts of other combinations. After some pointing, Google Translate and some Louie assistance, I got the assistant to bring out all the EEG shirts they had, and bought one of each. She asked if I wanted to try them on, but I knew the size and it was a really hot day so I didn’t fancy wrestling with a new shirt being all manky. Yeah, I got the wrong size, but happily it was a size bigger so I now have six new loose comfortable shirts.

We also went into another Americanas and raided the Havaiana stand. This is was $60 of jandals looks like. I think you can get 1 1/2 pairs in NZ for that, here I got 7 pairs, including some slides.

For some reason, they really do get into the Christmas spirit here, in the middle of October. It’s beyond me why they think this is okay! No wonder people in Rio laugh at the provincials up in João Pessoa when they do stuff like this.

Despite it being around 30c we started walking looking for a place to eat. After about 2km we finally found somewhere, but since it was 3pm, and the place was a buffet we didn’t really fancy eating anything that had been sitting out for hours. The did do a menu, but it was all damn rice, fries and farofa so we asked if they could do a salad instead of rice with my chicken. It took two waiters and a fair bit of head shaking and teeth sucking before we gave up and just did the buffet. Being Brazil, it wasn’t easy. There were a number of different ways of calculating what you eat and what to charge you, and the default way was for a lady behind the meat counter to dish up three types of meat. Not being able to understand a word of the instructions I just bowled up, plated the least dry bits I could see and moved on. By the time Louie arrived she had caught up and there was much discussion in Portuguese about how I was able to choose two more types of meat, and I wasn’t getting all I paid for. My pleas of “ma’am I just want to sit down and eat my lunch” we falling on deaf / non-understand ears. After a courageous amount of explaining by Louie, she finally relented and let me go without plying me with more meats.

At last, I had my chicken and salad. I ended up having two plates worth of salad, and some other bits & pieces, and the poor meat lady was horrified that I was happy to pay the princely sum of $24 NZ (including drinks) for this.

Afterwards we had completely given up the idea of walking any further, since it was over an hour walk to the hotel so good old Uber came to the rescue. Below is from the outside of the restaurant, with a decent frontage, a tatty road and an odd mix of families, holiday makers and people selling things. There’s always a contrast with everything here.

Later in the evening we decided to head back into the central beach area to see the Christmas lights, assured that it would be quiet being a Sunday night. Nope.

Apparently this was the evening that the results of the local elections were announced, and the punters were going apeshit. There was insanely loud music, fireworks, police, a different type of police and thousands of people just milling about, celebrating and having fun. Tourists, celebrating locals, families, street vendors – the place was just heaving. There was some sort of insane concert thing going on in front of the big tree, but behind the photo below was also crazy loud speakers somewhere adding to the racket.

To escape the noise and insanity we headed to a small food court type place that only had five outlets and an air gun shooting range. No idea how this came about, but here we are. There was also a guy singing and playing the guitar, but because nobody’s ears were bleeding, he decided that an amp turned up full was needed.

The burger took an insane amount of time to arrive, and to pass the time we pretended to talk to each other because we damn well couldn’t hear each other.

After this, we finally got to wander through lights, but had to turn away from the tree before we got too close, due to the absolute wall of noise coming from the platform where they were celebrating the newly elected somebody.

As a last treat, we got to see the crazy dancing bus people (they are famous here, on YouTube somewhere, I don’t get it). Hooray.

Tomorrow we are off to Búzios, just Louie and I again for some much needed relaxation. I also realised that because we are on holiday we missed out on Labour Day, so I assume we get an extra day’s holiday when we get back home. That’s how it works doesn’t it?