What would you do?

We've realized there have, and will be, many times on this trip when we are torn between what we WANT to do, and what we feel like we SHOULD do. For example:

As you know, the camera theft incident ruined our first attempt to get into the Sambadrome to witness the world-famous Carnival parade. So we opted to plan on coming back the next day, with the ability to photograph the event.

Well, the theft incident also managed to turn the night into quite an impromptu party, and keep us up till sunrise.

The next day was spent waiting, filling out forms, waiting, faxing forms, waiting, and waiting some more in a tourist police station. It was also spent incredibly, painfully, disgustingly hungover. By the time all business was attended to, it was time to hit the streets and head towards the Sambadrome again if we were to find ourselves tickets. Ugh. SOOO not what we felt like doing. We wished and prayed that there may be one more night of the parade. Nope, this was the last. We watched some of it on TV and debated the merits of the better view we had from our bed anyway. We wondered how many people went to Rio for Carnival and DIDN'T see the parade.

We finally decided we had to get our asses in gear, grudgingly got dressed and walked to the metro station. Closed. A police officer directed us to another station that may be open. CLOSED. Turns out the metro was no longer running for some ungodly reason. We walked to the nearest bus stop and asked several locals if any busses went to the Sambadrome. Because we pronounce it slightly differently than they do, nobody know what the hell we were talking about. We finally learned that there was no such bus. We waved our arms in the air at passing cabs, along with 20 other people on the same block. Come on guys, at what point is it acceptable for us to give up?

We did figure out that we could take a bus downtown, then try to grab a cab from there. At this point, Reece and I started discussing how badly we really wanted to go. Both of us would much rather be in bed than fighting a crowd of thousands of beligerent partiers. But we felt intensely obligated to go, knowing this was our last opportunity. It became a question of, "Do we want to go to GO, or to be able to say that we went?" It was a question neither of us could really quite answer, but I was leaning towards the latter. I started wondering, how bad is it to miss the parade? Is it like going to San Francisco and not seeing Fisherman's Wharf, or is it like going to Cairo and not seeing the Pyramids??

In the end, we decided to call it quits. We went home and put on pajamas. We took care of the upcoming hostel bookings we needed to make. We watched live coverage on TV, and caught up on some much needed sleep. And I have to say, we were really glad that we did. Who knows, maybe a year from now I'll look back and regret it. But the following night at least, everything seemed to work itself out...