The first five days of our trip around the world! (Oporto and Rio de Janeiro)

Finally after so long our trip around the world has started! It was a big challenge to fit everything we need for a full year travelling into a backpack, but we managed to put everything with a weight under 8kg each! Ari is very good at packing and now that she learned a new technique to pack everything divided in small bags (thanks Sharon for the advice), she ended up preparing the backpacks for both of us. That's perfect because I'm terrible at packing.

So on Monday night Ari's parents drove us to the airport to get our first flight to Oporto. We arrived late in there so we just went straight to sleep at the hotel.

Next day we went for a free tour around the city centre (with the company Porto Walkers) where we visited São Bento station, Ponte Luís I (the bridge connecting Oporto to Vila Nova de Gaia) and Igreja de Santa Clara.

We were amazed by the churches that are completely covered with gold leaf and the fact that they used egg yolk to glue it. For lunch we tried the famous Francesinha in Café Santiago and pastel de nata for desert. Later on, we crossed the bridge to Vila Nova de Gaia to enjoy the sunset with an amazing view over Oporto.

After that, we collected our bags from the hotel and head to the airport. We had to get a short flight (in an incredibly small airplane) to Lisbon were we connected to our next destination: Rio de Janeiro!

The flight to Rio was one of the longest we ever did (almost 10 hours) but we were lucky because there was no one sitting next to us, so we could use the entire row!!! 4 seats all for us. Ari also convinced the cabin crew that it was our honeymoon, so they offered champagne and a toiletries set that it's usually just for business class. We could sleep well despite the babies crying in the front row.

We finally arrived at Rio airport on Wednesday around 8 in the morning. The taxi to the city centre was incredibly slow as the traffic was horrible, it took more than 2 hours to get to our accommodation. The 3 nights that we stayed in Rio we stayed with Ricky in his house close to Santa Teresa neighbourhood. His house and the surrounding area was lovely and we made good friends with him, his friend Ida and his cat Ludovica. In Rio, for safety reasons, most of the buildings have a gate locked in front and a really screaming alarm if you spend more that 10 seconds with the door open. Also in front of some shops and banks they have those gates too.

Once we left the backpacks at Ricky's, we went to visit Centro and Santa Teresa neighbourhoods. We visited the Catedral, Arcos de Lapa, Museo de Amanha, Real Gabinete Português de Leitura and escadaira Selaron.

The most annoying thing of the day was trying to get a sim card with a data pack. As we left our passports at Ricky's, we had to ask him for his CPF (Brazilian ID number) and bought a card from the phone company Claro. The shop assistant sold us a sim card and we understood that just paying 10 reais we could have unlimited calls and 2GB of data for a week, but later on we found out that we had to pay online an extra 10 reais. Even then data didn't work until the next morning.

On Thursday it was bank holidays (“feriado” as Brazilians say) but we decided to go up to Corcovado despite the fact that it could be crowded as the forecast was rain for the next two days. The statue itself is nothing special but the views from there are amazing. Even the pictures below can't describe how beautiful it was.

When we were heading down we met Guillermo and Betanea, a couple from Uruguay and Brazil. We met again in Parque Lage, so we shared an Uber to Copacabana beach were we had lunch together and walk along the beach during the afternoon, ending up at the last tip of Ipanema beach in Leblon.

On Friday we walked up to Parque das Ruinas, a former residence of intellectual bohemian Brazilian personalities that has been refurbished into an art gallery open to the public. The views from the top of the house were also amazing. After that we passed by the World War II memorial (where we were alone with a bunch of soldiers patrolling the place) and got a bus to meet our friends Guillermo and Betanea in Praia Vermelha. We rent bikes (with bike Itaú app) and cycled around Morro da Urca and Copacabana beach. After that we got an Uber back to Ricky's and we went out for dinner with him and Ida.