DISCOVER RIO DE JANEIRO DOWNTOWN RIO IS UNDERRATED! (TRAVEL BRAZIL)
good morning everyone so today we've come to a very busy area of rio de janeiro it's the city center you can probably hear all the noise behind us that's the tram passing by right now so in portuguese they call this area the centro, centro means center and this area is often overlooked by tourists because they're just coming to rio for the beaches and partying right but there are a lot of historic attractions here a lot of tourist attractions here so now we're at the intersection of two of the main busy streets here so you got avenida rio branco here and this is avenida presidente vargas huge street i think it's 12 lanes or something and this is where all the big businesses are all the office blocks. so today is a working day that's why it's so busy and this is an area we know very well right. yeah we used to work here for like i don't know how many years six years for me and how many years are you four or five years since i was 18. and yeah we usually work in a place over there in a big building over there
yeah just right around this corner yeah so that's where we met and that's where our story began yeah so we're going to be doing a lot of walking today there's attractions down there attractions down there and even behind us so yeah we got a lot of stuff to check out yeah let's start here so right next to where we started the video we have a really famous church here called igreja da candelaria and the building started in 1775 but then over two centuries they've added bits onto it i don't think we can enter there though it looks like it's boarded up but yeah we should be able to enter some other churches today so the part we're walking at now is pretty new it's a boardwalk along the guanabara bay so they built this during the olympics rio got a big facelift during the olympics especially the center so if you're somebody that visited rio before the olympics it's gonna be very different now to when you visited so this area here is actually a military navy base, is it like a navy school? yeah i think so they're navy buildings but i don't know what they're doing there yeah there's a museum there's a submarine that you can visit yeah you can kind of see the corner of the submarine there and then there's some kind of like pirate ship looking thing here yeah you can actually visit maybe we will do it one day i don't know yeah we got other plans today yeah there's also a helicopter you can visit yeah a few like military things to visit these are the navy guys here in white before we continue i am going to talk about today's sponsor surf shark we have been using the surfshark vpn on all our devices while traveling the world this past year surfshark allows us to have a private connection wherever we travel keeping our data and personal information safe from potential hackers surcharge gives you access to all netflix libraries different countries have access to different series and films so by using surchart you can access them all as you can set your device to any country in the world search also allows you to avoid travel restrictions when visiting internet restricted countries using search art you can access any website or app in any country besides these benefits with just one single account you can connect to unlimited devices which means you can use it on all your family's devices click on the link in the video description which has the discount code jumpingplaces to get 83 percent off and three months for free and that also includes a 30-day money-back guarantee so we're now going to walk through the main historic center so rio was actually the capital of brazil from 1763 until 1960. a lot of people still seem to think that it's the capital of brazil when we travel and we mention that we're from brazil yeah a lot of people say oh rio de janeiro capital but it's not it's being a place called brasilia a place that i think they made to be the capital it was nothing before no they made it like in the center of brazil to be the capital you have to be in the center because rio is a bit down south i guess yeah it is yeah so around here you have loads of the old buildings from that time even these here look at all these and this is at the exact spot where we would have our happy hour after work yeah like there are many bars here now it's more empty because it's not late or it's not the time to have happy hours but there are many bars here and we used to come especially to this one here so this this place is where me and carol had our first date yeah after work yeah yeah we had a drink here so i think i think it was this restaurant right yeah yeah this one yeah so we were sat around here somewhere but a really cool place for a happy hour because this gets really busy after work and yeah just super lively music and you get all the beautiful buildings this square here has quite a few sites to see so this is called praca XV which means the 15th square and right next to us is an old fountain so this is an old water fountain from the early 1700s it's a lot bigger than what i remember so yeah it's not active right now and it's kind of closed off to protect it it's pretty cool that they they kept it here got like modern buildings surrounding everywhere and then just this in the middle and this statue here is of the king of portugal called dom Joao the sixth who was the first king of portugal to arrive here so that statue is here because this is actually the point where the portuguese family arrived when they were escaping napoleon or france who was trying to capture them in portugal they arrived here in 1808 so that's like a memorial of the king at the time yeah so the portuguese royal family would have arrived around here somewhere i think this was like the the main port at the time still kind of used as a port it's where they have where they have the ferry terminal here and i think the ferries go to niteroi which is the city over there yeah but also some islands yeah there's a an island called paqueta which is an also also another place that we want to go and other places and like less famous you can also get the ferry from from here yeah and back there there's like a really cool um old looking palace do you know the name of that place yeah it's called isla fiscal and that place was actually the last place where the royal family had a party before they got kicked out yeah or overthrown so yeah that's a famous place you can actually visit and we also want to go there at some point yeah but i think the tour takes quite a while like two hours yeah so maybe we'll still do that on this trip but it looks amazing so this building here in front of us is called the paco imperial the imperial palace so as you can see it doesn't really look like a palace a royal palace and that is because it wasn't built to be a royal palace it was built in 1754 just to be the house of the colonial governors that were here at the time the royal family weren't even here then but then when they escaped napoleon in 1808 the king obviously had to live somewhere so this was the building that the first king lived in but then the second and third king which were pedro the first pedro the second they lived at that other place quinta da boavista a big palace with a big garden area looks like a royal palace yeah that really looks like it this one doesn't look, it's nice but it doesn't look like a palace yeah it just looks like a government kind of building and you know what that building is that looks amazing uh currently is the assembleia legislativa which is the place where they make the laws and before i think it was also a government building but i'm not sure what kind of government building it was but now it's the assembleia legislativa so right next to the square we have this beautiful church here called sao jose and this is the front of the assembleia that government building we were just talking about so yeah you can see it looks absolutely amazing here it doesn't even look brazilian at all it looks like it's from rome or something like italy yeah because of the pillars i think it's like the same style yeah yeah the huge pillars and even the designs are the sculptures of the people yeah it just looks italian or something to me greek italian so this big church that you can see behind me huge church is where my parents got married here in brazil in the seventies so yeah they got married in this church it's called Igreja nossa senhora do carmo kind of looks like it's two churches i don't know this part looks older and this part looks more modern but yeah it's kind of joined together so here you'll get a better view of the busy street avenida rio branco so here we have like the tram lines tram line's going that way as well yeah just super busy now it's lunch time so yeah everybody is out and about and this tram line is quite new as well yeah well it's been like i don't know four years maybe but it was built also in the same time that they were building things for the olympics and also the world cup i left rio before the olympics so i didn't really get to see all this when i lived here so it's completely different this was all cars when when i was living here so this is one of the most famous attractions which is this coffee house here called confetaria colombo and it's from 1894 considered to be one of the most beautiful coffee houses in the world well look how fancy this looks this place it's all shiny i think there's a second floor as well whoa look at that roof so there's some information about the place here and it says queen elizabeth has been here in 1968 and king albert of belgium royalty have dined here i can see why so i'm going to get this uh lemon tartlet that's 12 reais 90 and carol is gonna get the cheese pie empada de queijo 10.80 and she's also going to get a strawberry tartlet 13.90. carol also got this fresh orange juice for 11 reais 90. and i just went for the mineral water 7.70 and here's my lemon tart looks pretty cool how's yours i like the look of that one. yeah it looks better than yours. is this the fanciest coffee house we've ever eaten at? probably it's a bit expensive for brazil but that's because you are in a fancy place yeah the royal family ate here that's why yeah even the floor is cool look at that so this part here is a very popular local street market so you can get loads of like cheap clothes 10 reais for shorts, got the flip flops the chinelos got food as well, people selling different kinds of food and it goes all the way down here so all around the center if you look up you realize how beautiful the old buildings are they're literally everywhere. on the ground floor you can't really notice because you
just have the big shutters now they've kind of like opened up the the entire wall but yeah if you look up there looks really nice colorful as well hey carol so are all these clothes really cheap then? yeah they are mm-hmm yeah 10 reais for a t-shirt is that cheap? yeah it's like what four dollars or something yeah this is one hectic market so now we're in the center of the the big market found a quiet place finally to speak so what's the name of this market it's called camelodromo and as you can see that you can find everything here like from clothese to things to buy like for home everything. pirate video games yeah and some some things are pretending to be original from nike or adidas but they they're not original. and i remember when i lived here it would appear on the news that the police would come here and try to shut it down but they can't. they can't shut it down, like a few
days later they will open up again yeah so there's like pathways everywhere all different alleyways literally everything here and we should probably speak about the safe because this is probably the most unsafe part of rio i think just because it's so busy yeah yeah there are many like uh case of thieves here so it happened to me five years ago i was on the bus with my phone and then somebody from outside stole it and i couldn't do anything oh that was here in the center yeah it was here so this is not a safe area we wouldn't say its safe at all but we have some tactics to try to be more safe like i usually hide my phone inside my blouse or like my pants or something like that and i always keep my purse like this i've actually never been robbed in brazil even though i lived here for six years as a gringo. i still never got robbed but this is an area where you gotta pay attention a bit with electronics don't do what i'm doing walking around with a camera all the time. i'm obviously making a youtube video so i'm risking it but yeah i wouldn't walk around all the time like this got the beach towelswe need some of those actually so carol couldn't control herself yeah i needed a white blouse so yeah buying this one for10 reais 10 reais. yeah i'm buying because of the price got loads of options here so this building right here is a famous library we don't usually go to libraries when we travel to places it's called real gabinete de leitura portuguese and that is from the 1880s and apparently it's based on like a 16th century gothic portuguese architecture so we actually needed a proof of vaccination to enter this place so that's the first time luckily we had a picture of it the certificate on our phone look at this entrance here whoa have you ever been in here no looks crazy it's great here yeah i've never seen a library like this before oh wow yeah so this library has 350 000 volumes of portuguese literature which is the most outside of portugal and apparently there's loads of rare coffees single copies of portuguese books so you can see these ones here i'm not sure what the dates are but yeah you can see that they're super old yeah carol at first i couldn't imagine why a library would be a tourist attraction yeah no we can't understand why yeah now we can see why beautiful so some even more interesting buildings to show you so this isn't really a tourist attraction but that is the building of petrobras which is the national oil company in brazil looks super unusual so those parts that go inside are like a garden i've actually worked inside there for like three months not for petrobras for another company and then on this side you have the cathedral of rio probably one of the most unusual looking that i've ever seen yeah it's very different but i've never been inside people say it's nice to go inside but yeah it's just very different yeah i mean both of these things look like they're from star wars or something this pressure rice building and that one over there is from the 1960s they were trying to do like a modern style but yeah i've never seen a church like that before so this part here is also different from when i used to live here cars used to pass it this is part of avenida rio branco one of the busy streets but now they've made this like walking area cycling area as you can see these guys there so yeah it looks way better like this a lot nicer to walk around so this right here is probably the most impressive looking building out of all the ones that we've seen in the center and i think a lot of people consider it to be the the most beautiful so that was built in 1905 i think and how do you say the name in portuguese ? like an opera house yeah and as you can see here in this area uh the buildings look a bit like uh like french style and that's because the mayor at the time who was called pereira pasos he wanted to make rio look like paris it was the bella park and he wanted to make it look like an european city so that's why it looks like it yeah from what i read this was actually designed pretty much copying the opera house in paris so that's why it looks like that and i think this main road avenida rio branco was full of buildings that looked french a lot of them have been destroyed now for the big modern buildings some are still there as you can see and some are like museums or others are just like government places but yeah some are still up but others were just destroyed by the modern buildings yeah so all around this square these really impressive european looking buildings that one there like carol said we don't even know what they are but they they're probably like government buildings this one here as well look at that it's kind of funny because like we said we used to work here not really this area of the the center we were way on the other side so i've never really seen that much of this stuff i've passed it by bus and stuff but never really paid attention so coming here as a real tourist now you pay attention to a lot more the the details the different buildings and yeah i just didn't realize there were so many portuguese style buildings or european style buildings. there are way more than i thought so normally there would be like shows in the opera house there but because of covid there's nothing going on at the moment there's a few places around here that are closed because of cover just like many cities that we go to and now we're gonna head all the way to the other side of avenida and we don't want to walk there could probably take like 30-40 minutes so we're going to get on that tram which i've never been on i think it's called virelite yeah vlt vlt have you been on it yeah oh yeah okay yeah i haven't so it'll be interesting so we just have to buy a ticket first from this little ticket booth how much is it? oh that's for the card. so this tram wasn't really worth it if you're only gonna get on it once because you have to buy the card and the card was four reais yes four reais and the tickets to go to wherever you wanna go is 3.80 hey but the machine is not working properly so
i had four reais extra to recharge it and then it just took my money. yeah it ate the money but didn't give us any credit then the lady told me to call the call center to make a complaint which is just yeah we're not we're not gonna do that yeah useless and yeah that's it yeah so we came to this other station here that worked and now we got the cards so yeah a lot of wasted money but it's coming we should have just got an uber it's empty so this area here is going to be our last stop of the day it's called porto maravilha and it's another place that was created just for the olympics so this is actually one of the coolest spots now in the center of rio because you have this museum here museu do amanha, museum of tomorrow so before the olympics i remember i came to this spot and it was pretty much like a dump. it was an abandoned area there was some big highway bridge crossing here and there was just nothing here to see so yeah they did an awesome job because now it's a very popular tourist attraction so even on a working day look still quite a lot of people here unusual design isn't it yeah it looks like an alien thing or something, alien spaceship yeah there's nothing else like that in rio i don't think yeah look how cool this place looks the mothership, the alien spaceship and around you got some better views of nitiroi over there popular fishing spot there's local fishermen all over here and that's the huge bridge ponchido nittaroi there's actually another island right there i think that might be like a military thing as well not sure so we got some food from some of the food stalls over there in front of the museum i got this called tapioca and yeah i think it just says like onions tomato has oregano as well so kind of smells like a pizza doesn't it yeah i wish i could eat it but i i bought some pipoca which is popcorn so mine was eight reais and how much was the popcorn? five reais for the popcorn and five reais for the coke.okay pretty good prices so there's this area right next to the
museum that's called the olympic boulevard another area once again that was made during the olympics and we've come here to check out the street art because we came here a few years ago and there was some street art i think the main mural is down there i think there are some new pieces there i don't remember this one here all along the buildings i think all these buildings are abandoned don't know why every single one so this is the main famous mural here by an artist a street artist called Kobra brazilian one and yeah it was done just before the olympics here in brazil and at the time it was the biggest in the world i mean it goes all the way down there i'm gonna show you it all and yeah it has different uh people from indigenous tribes around the world so each person represents i think a different continent you can see there is an asian there african i think they have a aborigine from the australia area at the bottom yeah if you keep walking very long yeah and kyle was just saying it's not as vibrant now right because i guess though the weather yeah the years are fasting and the weather the rain and everything so maybe they will bank it again i don't know yeah it's kind of faded this was like super bright when we came last time so this is another spot that we used to do happy hours and it is a friday and works just finished so it's happy hour time right now pretty much check it out super lively i think we drank here together as well right yeah yeah it looks really cool so we're gonna be heading back to carroll's now it's almost 5 30 and that's when it gets dark in in this time in the winter and we got here at 11 so yeah we've been walking around for a long time loads of stuff to do we haven't even covered everything there's loads of other museums that you can go in cultural centers just different parts to go to so i think you could spend like two or three days to explore all the stuff that the center has to offer and we're just waiting for the uber so yeah carol just ordered an uber they have uber in rio i think a lot of places in brazil have uber the main cds yes yeah how much is that? 24 reaisfor a 30 minute drive and it's a rush hour so that's why it's more expensive okay not expensive yeah compared to other countries anyway so hopefully you enjoyed this video as usual a lot more videos coming from around here from rio so stay tuned for those subscribe like see more videos like this follow us on instagram for more recent updates and we'll see in the next one
2021-10-17 11:02
