Joe and Lou's Travel Blog

We woke up to rain so all hopped into the car to go back to Barra de Tijuca in Rio. There John´s father was having a birthday lunch so we met all of John´s family and had another delicious meal. I´ve never kissed so many cheeks in my life. It is traditional here to kiss people on both cheeks when you meet and there were a lot of family members to meet! We tried some sweet wine from Portugal (John´s parents are Portugese and split their time between Rio and Lisbon). The house was a mansion and had a nice pool and bbq area out the back. Bruno´s old house was next door and is for sale so he showed us around. It had a pond for fish, aviary, pool and bbq area (Bruno said this was very good for parties with his friends!).

In 2007 Bruno and his family will move into a penthouse of a new development that his step dad´s company is building. We checked out the two show apartments and they were very impressive. Very modern design with your everything you could ever want catered for including a touch screen that you can use to control the lighting, air con etc.

Barra Shopping was our next stop. This is the largest shopping mall in South America! We only wandered around a small section and I got some new sunnies (my other ones are broken...honest!)

Servia (Luiz´s mum) was waiting for us at Bruno´s apartment and after saying our goodbyes she drove us to Jose´s country house. It was such a pleasure for us to visit this house as it has been a labour of love for Jose for 20 years. He has build it and developed the land around it in stages over that period first building a tennis court, then a pool, then a bbq area and finally the house. It will be fully complete in maybe a week or two. Jose took great pride in showing us photos of the progress over the years and fair enough too.