Rio de Janeiro
A Cidade Marvilhosa - The Marvelous City offers its visitors and inhabitants nearly everything like endless dreamlike beaches; lush, dense and remote jungle with wild animals, stunning trees and beautific flowers; sharp and rocky pinnacles; numberless interesting museums and galleries; huge football stadiums and famous teams; bustling exiting nightlife; and large shopping malls. It is a worldwide unique and spectacular synthesis between ocean, mountains, rain forest and human settlements including a lot of skyscrapers.
We felt not being in a metropolis with more than 7 million people because it has many different centers and quarters with large green oasis in between, even a National Park - Tijuca. Its size is really gigantic, for instance: The beeline is more than 40km from the pristine beaches of Guaratiba to the center of the city.
But the host of the Olympic Games 2016 and final game of the Soccer World Championship 2014 has also some drawbacks like poverty, social inequalities, high crime rate, endless traffic jams and still massive pollution.
It was a sunny day when we traversed the more the 10km long bridge over the bay Baia de Guanabara between Rio de Janeiro and its little sister town Niteroi. The views from the bridge were fantastic. A huge vessel looked very familiar.