Travel tips in Rio de Janeiro

Ride a bonde (tram) throught the streets of Santa Teresa.
If you go sit down it cost 0.60 reais but if you go a bit outside of the bonde and stand up is free......and dangerous so you decide. Nice experience because you will cross the "Arcos de Lapa"

The price of the taxi to Santa Teresa from the airport should be around 45 reais.

The feijoada completa is a dish that constitues an entire meal, which often begins with a caipirinha. A properly one is made up of black beans cooked with a great variety of meat, including dried tongue and pork offcuts, seasoned with salt, garlic, onion and oil. Accompanied with white rice, fried farofa (flour) and pieces of orange. Cariocas usually eats feijoada on saturdays and in Santa Teresa you will find nice restaurants with this dish in their menus.

Rio is party all the time but in Carnaval is crazy, expensive and dangerous. To enjoy this city I would recommend you to go 10 days before Carnaval because you will feel the Carnaval atmosphere but with cheap prices and not so crowded. You will see the final rehearsals of all the samba schools and you could see this from the Sambodromo for free. The prices of everything change to the double during the Carnaval

Copacabana beach is the place to be for New Year's eve. Go to the beach and enjoy the 15min fireworks. Then jump 7 waves as tradition says.

Queues for the train to Corcovado are big. If you want to take the little train to get up to the top of the mountain so that you can admire the Corcovado national park, do it. But try to get the tickets online http://www.corcovado.com.br. Unless you wanna queue over an hour under the sun at over 30C and then wait another 2 hours to get the train. Otherwise you can go by taxi to an upper area of the mountain and the queue up over there. Whatever you do, do it very ealry in the morning.

Even if you are the tannest person in the world, you have to be careful with Brazil's sun. If you're thinking of hiring a parasol on the beach of Ipanema in a sunny and busy day, you'd better get there either very early or very late.
Or go to Lojas Americanas and buy one, as we did when we couldn't find any on the beach :)

Indian Museum, you can meet the different tribes, know its history and customs, wonderful craft... to buy handicrafts produced by them.