Day 11

Day 11 - Hanging Around Fortaleza

The day after Christmas we decided to go looking around the tourism center here in Fortaleza where Ana lives. It's apparently an old prison that was turned into a kind of strip mall / info center. We walked around the various independent vendors which all seemed to be selling pretty much exactly the same hand crafts. Nothing really struck my fancy, but I did see an old woman making lace by hand in the center of the tourism center. It was an absolutely amazing sight, her hands whipping different ball-ended sticks with thread attached around needles stuck into a large pin cushion looking thing. Out the other end was running a thin strip of fabric, but it looked to be slow going even at the quick pace she was whipping the threads around.

We walked into the information center and I was asked, as a tourist, to fill out a survey about my visit. I don't mind surveys generally, but I much prefer being handed a sheet to fill out and drop in a slot or something, and this was a verbal survey which I can barely stand. I feel like people are more apt to answer a survey honestly if there's a feeling of anonymity to it. At any rate, I answered all the questions and we paid a few bucks for maps of Fortaleza and Ceara and were directed upstairs to a sort of museum. There were a number of carvings and paintings done by local artists, including a carving of a woman doing the lace making and an example of the equipment. Ana also told me the story of Lampião, a bandit that terrorized parts of the Northeast part of the country in the 20's and 30's and is now treated as a folk hero.

After we got done at the museum, we headed to the market, which apparent is where they dump bus loads of tourists to convince them to leave their money here when they go home. It was about five stories of stall after stall after stall, pretty much the same as at the tourism center. They also all featured almost exactly the same wooden hand crafts, hammocks, shirts, dresses, bikinis, etc, so I'm not sure why there were hundreds of them. I'm absolutely awful at lookinig around trying to find what I want, or shop for gifts for other people. I can really only stand shopping if I know what I'm looking for already. In the same area as the tourism center and the market is a pier, and we stopped there for a while and looked out over the water. There were a few sunken ships jutting up out of the water from when this area used to be a port, which struck me as odd, but maybe they're not worth dredging up.

When we were done there we head to get some ice cream at Ana's favorite ice cream place (after Coldstone, of course) where they have 50 different flavors of ice cream, most of which are fruit. They have the name in english next to the fruit, and 4 apparently completely different words in portuguese somehow all map to "strawberry." My guess is that they're nothing that we'd be familiar with anyway so they just went with the default. I had a double with pineapple and cashew ice cream and it was pretty damn good. A little ways down the street was the start of the "boardwalk" area, and a statue of an indian maiden and one of the Portuguese settlers which apparently has a similar story to Pocahontis and John Smith from US lore. Then we walked around the "boardwalk" area of the city, glancing at the souvenir carts while I tried to make up my mind what to get to bring back home.

Day 10 - Christmas

Day 10 - Christmas



Christmas was rather anticlimactic after going out and having the family dinner on Christmas Eve. We hung out until about 1pm and then went to see The Golden Compass which, I'm surprised to say is actually pretty good. It was pretty much panned by the critics, and after reading the reviews which refer to it mostly as a Harry Potter or Narnia rip off, I honestly wasn't expecting too much. Imagine my surprise when it turns out that although the story is a little rushed the characters are actually pretty good and it left off with a cliff hanger that actually has me wondering what happens in next installment. I don't think the movie was either great or awful, it was simply a mediocre execution of a very interesting concept. Maybe I'll check out the books when I have a chance to start reading again.



The one thing that I really noticed about Christmas here, while we were out at the mall, is that it seems to be a much more low key holiday than in the States. They don't have Santa Clauses and Reindeers gracing every store, you hardly ever hear Christmas music of any sort here, and you can actually turn on the tv and watch for a half hour without seeing commercials insisting that you buy every random thing anyone on your list could possibly want for Christmas. In fact, the exchange of gifts seems to be limited to small tokens between close family members rather than an all-out orgy of gift giving to anyone you run across on Christmas. I felt a lot more weird not giving out any gifts than not getting any and no one is more surprised than I am. I'm doing Christmas with my family after I get back to Massachusetts, so hopefully I'll get to recapture a little bit of what I missed out on during the holiday season.

Day 9

Day 9 - Christmas Eve Cookies 'n More

For Christmas Eve, we had decided to make some desserts to bring to the family get together at Ana's aunt's house, and picked up the ingredients the day before. Ana made the cheesecake entirely by herself before helping me with the cookies. As I mentioned before, they don't really have chocolate chip cookies in Brazil. They closest thing to real cookies that I have seen is some Oreo knock-offs. I found a recipe for chocolate chunk cookies online somewhere and just started running with it without reading too far into it. Once I had mixed the dry ingredients in one bowl and gotten to other bowl with the sugar, egg, and butter in it, I realized that the recipe didn't have any refined sugar in it, just brown sugar. Now, I've never made cookies with just brown sugar, so it's possible that they would have turned out fine, but I felt the need to put refined sugar in because I was more "sure of the result." I looked around at a bunch of recipes online and saw that the ratio of sugar to brown sugar was all over the board. While this meant that I was pretty much free to do whatever amount I wanted, it also wasn't real helpful for making a decision. I finally decided to swap 1 cup of brown sugar for refined sugar and just deal with the results.

We had made a double batch of cookies, and the oven here is fairly small, so baking all of the cookies took over an hour of swapping cookies, putting them on racks to cool, dropping more dough onto cookie sheets, rinse, repeat. I may not have mentioned it yet, but it's rediculuously hot here, and running around in the kitchen with the oven going is even less fun than it is at home. But it was all worth it after that first bite, the cookies were pretty damn good. We tried to feed one to Ana's niece (who is 6) and after barely getting the cookie in her mouth she decided that she didn't like it. Now, I'm pretty sure that a six year old not liking chocolate chip cookies is a crime against childhood, but Ana assured me that she doesn't like anything and I shouldn't take it personally. No problem, I assure her, that just leaves more cookies for me.

After we were done with the cookies, we headed out to Ana's aunt's house where the rest of her family was gathered. It honestly wasn't too much different from most of the holiday family get togethers that I've been to. There was turkey and beer and lots of people sitting around talking and laughing. There were even kids playing playstation in the other room. If there had been stuffing, cranberry sauce, and a Christmas tree (and the temperature outside had been 25 F instead of 25 C) I could have believed I was back at home. I'm just happy that the cookies seemed like a big hit, and people made a point to tell me how much they liked them.

Day 8

Day 8 - Stingray is for Eating?

We headed out to the beach today and met up with some more of Ana's relatives for lunch. Aunt, uncle, cousin, brother, sister, niece, and their assorted boyfriends and girlfriends. Which brings me to another point about Brazil. Family seems to be very important here. Extended family units are often found living together, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sister commonly live only a few miles from one another. They don't seem to subscribe to the "move out on your own and then you only see you family on holidays" theory that seems so common in the USA. At any rate, it has been a bit intimidating meeting so much of Ana's family in such a short time and trying to make a thousand different good first impressions when I don't speak more than a few words of Portuguese.

After we were done drinking some beer and hanging out at the beach restaurant, we headed to another restaurant to really eat lunch. Ana had been keen on me trying stingray or muqueca de arraia, since I had expressed my desire to try new things while I am here. I had no idea what stingray would even look like, and was a bit surprised with what showed up. It looked like thin, stringy shreds of white fish like meat. It was served in a yellow sauce with some vegetables and, of course, manioc flour on the side. I tried it and it wasn't half bad, probably not something I'd order on a regular basis, but certainly an interesting experiment.

That night we went out to another bar and had some pizza and a couple beers. Ana also purchased, for 5 reais, a pair of earrings from some guy that apparently were made from discarded aluminum cans. I never would have been able to tell if he hadn't told us. After we were done, we headed to the grocery store because we had decided that I would make cookies and she would make cheesecake for the family Christmas Eve get together tomorrow. It was hard to find the ingredients for both of our dishes, as they aren't commonly made in Brazil. There were no chocolate chips for the cookies, so we had decided to go with chocolate chunks from a chopped up chocolate bar and we aslo had a hard time finding brown sugar and cream cheese (they have cream cheese in Brazil, but it's an entirely different consistency, so we needed American style cream cheese). We eventually found everything we needed, more or less, and got in the shortest line in the store and waited, and waited ,and waited, watching as people who hadn't even been in the store yet when we got into line get into other lines and leave before we could get checked out. However, we did get to witness a few guys purchasing an entire shopping cart full of whisky.

Day 7

Day 7 - Meat Extravaganza

After eating little besides fish the past few days while we were traveling the beaches, Ana decided that I would like to eat some real meat for a change. For lunch, we went to a Brazilian barbecue place, otherwise known as a churrascaria (pronounced: chew-has-kah-ree-ah). Essentially, this is a big meat buffet where servers bring around cuts of meat on skewers like giant shish-ka-bobs, offering to cut sections off for you. You have a token that is green on one side and red on the other, and you can flip it to green if you want people to offer you more meat, or red if you're good with your current selection for the moment. I had many many meats including but not limited to pork, chicken, four different cuts of beef, chicken hearts, boar, bacon, salami, and two kinds of sausage. I highly recommend going to one of these if you ever have the chance. There are a couple of them in the Boston area, but I think Green Field has closed. That's a shame because I went there once and it was really good.

Ana reminds me that I need to go to the doctor when I get back to have my cholesterol checked. Right now might not be the best time for it, as I might set the kind of record you don't want your name in the Guinness Book for. After eating we sat and digested for a while and talked, because restaurants here don't try to kick you out after you're done with your meal. They will quite happily continue to come by and offer you more coffee, water, dessert, or whatever. It's actually quite a welcome change from what I'm used to, where they drop the check on your table at the first sign that you're not going to order anything else so that they can ignore you.

At night, we went to a little bar and listened to some raegae music and drank some beer. We were in sight a giant Christmas tree made out of hammocks that we had earlier taken some pictures of. We had a really nice talk about Christmas and our respective families, and it was great to finally relax after feeling like we were in a constant state of motion for the last few days.

Day 6

Day 6 - The Roads Home

After breakfast in the morning, we set out across the beach, taking a walk to a more secluded area. The walk also contained a trek over some rocks encrusted with shells and barnacles. I managed to slip and cut my toe on one of these shells, and instantly I'm thinking toxins, bacteria, infection. I'm thinking about trips to some rural emergency room to have my toe amputated. I'm thinking this is an episode of House, MD waiting to happen and I don't see Hugh Laurie anywhere waiting to cure my mysterious cut. This paranoid fantasy stayed with me for the rest of the day, and even into the next day as the cut started to hurt again. At any rate, I satisfied myself by washing it off in one of the tide pools and we moved on. There wasn't much to see when we got to the other beach, so we headed back and sat in one of the small inlets formed by the rising tide on the highest parts of the beach. The water was warm and the surroundings were beautiful. People were already kite boarding and windsurfing. We watched for a while and deepened the sunburn on my shoulders and ears for a while before heading back to the hotel.

We packed up and left at around noon, heading to an ecological area that had a big rock with a hole through it, that apparently is used on post cards. The walk was pretty long, and we passed by a couple of cage-like structures that reminded me of lobster traps from back home. I asked Sergio if they used these for fishing lobster. He replied that they use them for fish, lobster, crabs, or whatever else they can get to swim in and not swim out.



I never quite understood what the area's significance was, or why it was an ecological preserve, but the rock with the hole under it was pretty big and fairly impressive with the waves crashing under it.



We ate lunch at a place Sergio seemed to know. Of course, Sergio seemed to know just about everyone we met on the trip. The lunch was fish again, with salad and fried manioc pieces, and it was delicious. When we were done, we headed out again, this time traveling mostly by what roads there are. The roads in this part of the country are, for the most part, dirt roads or rough cobblestones. It wasn't much smoother than the ride in over the dunes. Ana says that there are really no interstates or large highways between cities in Brazil, and this trip really instilled that message in me. For the most part, even the paved roads were thin two lane affairs that you might see in any suburban neighborhood in Massachusetts. They often ended abruptly, turning into cobblestone paths or dirt roads for miles at a time, only to come back just as suddenly. It makes me wonder how commercial goods get transported through Brazil, especially since I saw no big 18 wheelers, even on the paved roads near Fortaleza. The roads are only sizable within a few miles of the outskirts of the city, though it generally doesn't matter because there are very few people driving on them outside of the city. Inside the city is another story, with every road packed with traffic that makes my morning commute to Watertown look like a Sunday ride through the country. The rule seems to be, "honk early, honk often" and there are numerous bikes and scooters that weave wildly through the cars.

We stopped at a roadside cafe, one of many that dotted the inhabited areas along the roads back home and got some coffee and more tapioca pancakes. The food was surprisingly good, and I liked the coffee, even without milk or sugar. Ana tells me this is because I have no taste buds, and that I can't tell bad coffee. She says this is evidenced by the fact that I even liked the "crappy" Brazilian coffee that she got me when we were back in the States. I now have some of the "good" Brazilian coffee to bring back with me when I go home.

At any rate, we got home fairly late and fell asleep almost instantly.

Day 5

Day 5 - This sunset brought to you by MasterCard

We got up somewhat late again and after breakfast we drove along the beach to another inlet that required a ferry to cross. This time I was a bit less apprehensive and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. This time they were using poles instead of outboard motors, so I suspect the inlet was a bit shallower. After we got to the other side, Ana and I got in a boat to do a short tour and see some seahorses. The guy who was showing us around told Ana that he used to be a fisherman and, in the winter, would spend as many as 8 days at a time in the same small boat we were using to do our tour. All I know is that he was amazing at catching seahorses. He would reach over the edge of the boat in a flash and when he came back, he'd have one or two seahorses in his hands. We also saw some of the red crabs (not like the ones we ate) that we saw on our sunset cruise yesterday, and managed to snap a few pictures of them today.

When we got back, we jumped back in the Land Rover and headed to a small fresh water lake formed by rains to do some swimming and grab some lunch. They had hammocks hanging in the water, and lounge chairs over the water. The water was a bit colder than the ocean, but still probably about 75 degrees. We swam around for a bit, and then Ana insisted that I try laying in the hammock. She has this thing about me and hammocks, at least, she always gets this smirk on her face when she suggests that I lay in a hammock. Hammocks are a big thing here and every house, nearly every room, has hooks built into the walls for hanging hammocks on. This baffles me somewhat, but I guess that it makes for easy extra bedding if you have people that would sleep in hammocks. Personally, I'm afraid of falling on the floor when I move around in my sleep. So I got in the hammock and she made sure to take some pictures of me.

A while later, a guy came by with a tray with uncooked shrimp, lobster, and fish on it, and we picked the fish. I didn't actualy know they had lobsters here, but they looked a lot different from the ones that I'm used to. After about a half hour, we were called to lunch and the fish was presented. The fish had been cut in half and boned, and most likely laid out on a grill, skin side down. It was cooked with garlic, lime, and salt. It was a very simple meal, but the fish was delicious. I later learned that the name of this particular type of fish is pargo.

We swam for a little while longer and laid out in the sun for a while before leaving. I realized at some point, after it was far too late, that while I had put the sunscreen that Ana's mom picked up for me (with an SPF usually reserved for albinos and the irish) on my arms and legs, I had neglected to put any on my body. This resulted in a surprisingly minor sunburn on my shoulders and ears.

At around 3 or 3:30, we got back in the car and drove back towards the inlet. The ocean tide had come in a little bit and Sergio pointed out that the water was much closer to the path than it had been on the way out to the lake. We eventually came to a spot where the path had been completely covered by water, forming a shallow inlet about 25 or 30 yards across in our path. Sergio calmly assessed the situation and drove slowly straight into the water. About 30 seconds later, water was pouring in through the door and pooling at the floor at my feet. The floor of the Land Rover is about 2 feet high, so we were fording maybe 2 1/2 feet of water. Ana had the quick thinking to snap a shot of the water at her feet. We made it to the other side and opened our doors to let the water out. Sergio said that this was definitely a Hard Tour (the name of his company) and I responded that it was an adventure, to be sure.

We finally made it back and seeing Jericoacoara by daylight it shocked me how every place was proudly sporting the mastercard logo. Even the bottle sheathes that they use to keep bottles of beer cold were emblazoned with mastercard logos. It's funny, because I expect to see this sort of thing at home, I don't know why I would expect they wouldn't have the same phenomenon here, but I think that as I pointed out in yesterday's post, I'm fairly shocked to see any of what I think of as "trappings of the modern world" here in "the middle of nowhere."

Even taking a shower can be an exciting experience in Brazil. As I pointed out in day 1's post, the shower heads here are electric. As I was trying to clean the sand out of my sandals in the shower, I tried to use the spray head attached to the shower head with a long flexible rubber tube. The tube became disconnected at the shower head end and when I went to reconnect it, I got a nice mild electric shock from the solid stream of water leaking out through where the tube was. Normally the water in the shower is broken up into droplets with air between them, which won't carry an electric current, even if one should be present (which would require faulty wiring or a faulty shower head), as MythBusters demonstrated in their peeing on the third rail experiment, but this was a nice thick stream. At this point, Ana insists that I let you know that I've only been shocked by the "crappy shower at the hotel" and not the one at her house. We decided to simply turn off the breaker that fed current to the shower head since we had been taking cold showers anyway.

After taking a brief nap, we headed out to watch the sunset from atop the highest dune near the city, which I was told is the only place for a long distance that you can see the sun setting over the ocean. So we climbed the dune to find that the wind was whipping sand at us hard enough to be annoying if not downright painful. We toughed it out though, and soon werer joined by more and more people, some of them carrying what looked like snowboards. I assumed these were the sand boards that Ana had told me about, but of which I remained skeptical. Watching these people try to ride down the steep hill didn't make me much less skeptical, but they seemed to manage a few decent rides.



The sunset was beautiful over the ocean, but as luck would have it, my camera ran out of batteries just as the sun was starting to hit the horizon and there wasn't even time to play the flipping batteries around trick to try to get a few more pictures. I did flip the batteries around in time to snap a few pictures of people doing capoiera, a kind of Brazilian dance-fighting as we were walking back to get some dinner, but I mostly ended up capturing the crowd.



Dinner was a large crepe with qualho cheese, dried tomatoes, oregano, and bacon, and dessert wass another crepe with chocolate and chopped cashews. Yummy yummy. We stopped to grab a few souvenirs of our trip and after that we were pretty much worn out, so we went back to the hotel to watch some tv and take a nap.

Day 4

Day 4 - Jericoacoara

After going to bed early, we decided that the only proper course of action was to get up late to make up for it. We walked along the beach after a light breakfast, and pretty soon Ana decided that she wanted crab for lunch. She loves crab, and I can't emphasize that enough, LOVES crab. So, we walked along the beach, checking every restaurant we came to until we found one that had crab. Now, I'm not sure what the crabs are going to look like or taste like, because I've never had crab, except for crab sushi that we ate once, and Ana told me that the crab from her state was a bit different. I'm also not sure whether to expect it to be still in the shell or not. In the name of full disclosure, I'm going to admit something; I've never even eaten lobster in the shell. Even though I live in Massachusetts, with some of the best lobster in the world available at every restaurant and grocery store in a 20 mile radius, I've never eaten lobster in a shell. It just seems like cracking open a giant bug to me. So I'm a bit apprehensive already, and when the crabs show up, my worst fears are realized. Not only are they in the shell, but it looks as though they quite clearly have faces. I try not to let it show, but my apetite has just taken a decidedly southward turn. Ana calmly explains how to tear off the legs, smash the shell with a hammer and suck out the juicy insides. I try to copy what she's doing without thinking about it too much, and despite my initial anxiety, it's not bad at all... I'm quite enjoying this barbarous new activity until we get to the part where she explains how to scoop the green lump out of the head/body part, and at that point I find the line which I'm not willing to cross for the sake of trying new things, though I do eat some manioc flour out of the head/body which she has prepared (and claims is her favorite part).



We, and our bags, get back in the Land Rover after lunch and head towards Jericoacoara again. There's more palm trees, more deserted beaches, more wild donkeys, and more small fishing villages. As we're driving through these fishing villages, I notice something that at first seems out of place: Telephone poles. I guess I never really thought about it, but for some reason it strikes me as odd that even way out here they have electricity and phone service. Not to mention that just about every sizeable town that we drive through has at least a couple shops and cyber cafes offering hourly rates for internet service. It's simply an odd mix, for me, of what I think of as developing areas where people (not many, but some) still ride donkeys, build fences from interlaced sticks of wood, and the new world of technology where people are watching soap operas and buying stuff they don't need on eBay.

After an hour or two, we get to a large inlet, probably about 500 yards across and a couple miles long, and we stop for a while to take some more pictures and a brief swim. The shallow water is warm and feels great after sitting in the hot of the car, which causes me to sweat continuously, even with the wind blowing in my face. When we're done swimming, I'm informed that we're travelling over the inlet on one of the small wooden ferries. Now, these things don't look that sturdy to me, and I certainly wouldn't put my Protege on one of them, much less a Land Rover, but hey, Sergio is the experienced guide, and it isn't my Land Rover. The ferry is a flat wooden boat with a small outboard motor and a couple feet of clearance in front and back of the Land Rover, and maybe fourteen inches on the left and right. There's a sign clearly posted that says passengers are forbidden to ride in the car, I assume so that if the ferry does happen to go down you can swim to safety without having to extricate yourself from the vehicle. It does nothing to improve my confidence, but at least our trip across the inlet is uneventful.



A few hours more of riding through palm trees and small villages, and even a bit of road travel, has us in Jericoacoara, and instantly I'm surprised at how different it is from the travel video that I saw on Brazil which, I'm guessing is at least 10 years out of date. The video showed, essentially a village very much the same as the ones that we've been travelling through, and what's in front of my eyes is a full blown tourist trap. There are little shops everywhere, hotels and retaurants proudly proclaiming that they serve pizza and crepes. It's not all that bad, because in a way, it reminds me a lot more of the beaches that I'm used to back in the USA. We take a brief walk and get some pizza at a place that Sergio recommended, Quero Pizza, and head back to our room to go to bed early again.

Day 3

Day 3 - Getting there is half the fun

Today we started our journey to the beaches of Jericoacoara, a fishing village in north-eastern Brazil. The guy who drove us showed up at the door with a floppy fishing hat, sunglasses, and a huge grin. He speaks a little English, with a thick accent, and not long after we got in the car, he told me that he was going to teach me to swear in Portuguese. The car is a huge, white Land Rover with a custom snorkel attachment that I can only assume is for crossing shallow water. I've been told that where we're going, a lot of places don't have roads. It's interesting to be in a Land Rover since even SUVs, which are apparently growing in popularity in Brazil, are vastly outnumbered by tiny subcompacts by Chevy, Fiat, and VW.

Once we got out of Fortaleza, and onto the beach, I started snapping pictures immediately. The new camera (a Canon Powershot S5 IS) seems to handling taking pictures out of the moving car extremely well. Most of them, you can't even tell that we were moving while it was taken, much less racing over sand dunes at nearly 60 km/h. I'm instantly having a great time, with the wind in my face, the camera strap around my neck, and the palm trees racing by us. The site of miles and miles of beach that doesn't have a hotel, tourist trap shop, boardwalk arcade, or restaurant on it is a very strange site to me, again being from the east coast, where you can't walk along the beach for more than 20 feet without running into one, or all of these.

As we approach some of the small fishing villages, suddenly we begin to see copious amounts of litter all over the beach. Mostly plastic bags and bottles, but also other assorted pieces of trash. It's clear that the locals don't see this as much of a problem since, as I said, there's miles and miles of beach with no one and nothing on them. It serves to underscore, for me, the fact that tourism here is still in its infancy and that most of the people don't look at the beauty around them as a tappable natural resource.

We continue to drive through the villages, past large orchards of palm trees from which coconut are harvested. Its odd, for me, seeing palm trees growing in neat rows, spaced at even intervals the way you might see pine trees on a christmas tree farm, but in hindsight it makes total sense if you're growning them for agricultural purposes. I guess I just hardly ever think of palm trees as a "crop" plant like apples, instead more as tropical "eye candy". There are also a great number of wild donkeys and cows roaming the sand dunes. As I saw that, I thought to myself, "I assumed that cows would pretty much just die if let out of the pen" but here they have few natural predators besides, perhaps, the wild stray dogs that also roam the dunes.

In the early afternoon, we get to the hotel at which we are staying for the night and have a nice fish stew as a late lunch. We also take a brief nap before heading out on a boat ride to watch the sunset. As luck would have it, I don't bring my camera bag and Ana doesn't bring her purse or her camera, and the batteries in my camera die at the least opportune moment, five minutes the boat has left the dock, so we can't even race back to a local store to grab more. Flipping the batteries around so that the negative side up batteries are now negative side down and vice versa gives us a few pictures on the boat, and pulling the same trick again gives us a few more pictures of a beautiful sunset from the top of a nearby dune.

After we head back, we have a nice dinner of light fish in a white sauce with bananas and fell asleep pretty early. It's weird to me that the sun goes down so early here, since it feels like its summer all the time, and in the summer I'm used to the sun going down at about 8pm, but since we're so close to the equator, the days are all almot exactly 12 hours long, from about 5:15-5:30am to 5:15-5:30pm. Tomorrow, we continue our trip to Jericoacoara!

Day 2

My second day, in which I live every American's dreams of paradise.

After waking up in the morning around 10am, and having a small breakfast, Ana asked me if I would like to go to the beach. Normally, I'm not a big fan of the beach, being used to beaches in Massachusetts which are full of rocks, have water a few degrees above freezing year round, and despite all their problems, are generally full of people. So, I agreed, anxious to see what the beaches here in Fortaleza (which I've been told are some of the most beautiful in the world) are like. Imagine my surprise when we show up at the beach and it's every Corona commercial you've ever seen, laid out in front of my eyes. There are the palm fiber umbrellas, with the weathered looking wooden beach chairs under them. Off to the side is a small bar where you can get drinks, and walking the beach are men serving fresh coconuts. The sand is a beautiful white color and surprisingly not too hot on my feet.

Immediately after we sit down in our beach chairs under the umbrella, Ana calls over one of the men selling coconuts. He lops the top off of one of the coconuts and inserts a straw. "That's it?" I think to myself. "It's really just as easy as the cartoons?" Sure enough, Ana starts drinking from the straw and proclaims it yummy. Now, this is not the brown, hairy thing that I think of when someone says coconut. It's a bit larger and shiny and green on the outside. Ana tell me that this is what the coconuts look like first. Eventually they get dried out and the liquid absorbs into the meat, and that's what we think of as a coconut. She offers the straw, and I take a tentative sip. The liquid inside is known as coconut water, which I'm told is much different from coconute milk, which is made from the meat of the coconut, ground up and liquified. There's a slight taste of what I would normally think of as coconut flavor, but it's very mild. I'm not a huge fan of coconut flavor, but the liquid is cold and refreshing, I take another sip and another. All of a sudden, a thought occurs to me. What I'm doing now, laying on a chair, on a tropical beach, and sipping from a straw in a coconut with a beautiful girl by my side, is just about everyone's idea of paradise. Ask anyone you know, and I'm pretty sure they'll come up with this as the definition of paradise. It might even be in the dictionary.

Also today, I bought clothes, a lot of clothes. When I was packing for this trip, I realized that had precisely one pair of shorts that I could lay my hands on. I think I may have worn them two or three times last summer. However, after being in Fortaleza for a day, I'm realizing that with every pore on my body oozing sweat pretty much 24/7, a pair of light shorts might be a damn good idea. I'm realizing this mostly because Ana insists that its a good idea. So I buy a lot of clothes at the mall, and an expensive pair of sandals which Ana insists are important because I can wear them to more formal occassions. For a male from Massachusetts, this is an interesting concept and a strange distinction to make. To me, sandals are just sandals, there is no such thing as a dressy pair of sandals. However, I also can't remember seeing a pair of sandals quite as nice as the ones I'm purchasing in Massachusetts, so maybe there's something to it...

Day 1

To recap day 1: I showered with an electric shower head, ate pig skin (bristles included), and ate pizza with plastic gloves on.

It's true what they say, about the small things making all the difference...

After being on planes and in airports for the last 26 horas (hours), without changing my clothes, the first thing that I needed when I got to Brazil was a good, long shower. Upon getting into the shower, the first thing that I noticed was that there was only one knob to turn for water. It didn't confuse me, as Ana had explained that the houses don't normally have hot water (an odd concept to me in and of itself, but when you consider that it's between 75-85 every day, perhaps hot water isn't generally what they want). Upon turning on the shower, and looking up at the shower head, I immediately noticed that there's a grey plug in a power outlet mere inches away from the shower head. The shower head (as you can see in the pictures) is large and white, with a dial near the top of it and an orange button. The reason why the shower head is so large, is because it functions as an electric water heater. That's right, you heard me, electric shower head. I had been warned, but let me tell you, there's very little than can prepare you for seeing a plug in the shower. The dial has 4 settings, with pictures representing the seasons on it. My first thought is: Does "Summer" make the water hot or cold? Summer is hot, but in the summer you would want the water cold... After pondering this conundrum for a minute or two, I decide that the "Spring" setting is a bit too hot and I'm just going to try "Summer", just to find out. Summer is cold, a little too cold, but it feels good for a few minutes to cool down. After trying these two settings, it's clear that I'm not going to be able to find a temperature I'm comfortable with, so I just go with it, switching between the two settings as necessary.

After my shower, we eat some breakfast. The milk is Parmelat, which I'm not used to drinking, but which I've seen on the shelves of the grocery store, so though it stands out in my mind, it doesn't set off the "bizarre" sensors. The coffee is strong, compared to this, Starbucks' strongest blend seems like watered down Folger's, but with some milk and a generous helping of unbleached sugar, it's very good. The only thing that's really remarkable on the table is a set of white, grainy, vaguely pancake looking things, which Ana has previously described to me as "the real Tapoica". They're made with manioc (pronounced man-joh-kah) flour and, as I'm told before I try them, they can be eaten with small bits of chopped up beef inside. I'm sure I look a bit skeptical at this point, so Ana cuts up some of the beef and places it inside the manioc pancake.
"So I just eat it like this?" I say.
She says "Yeah, just pick it up." Motioning to me as thought she were eating a fajita.
"Ok." I reply. Sure that the skeptical look is deepening, I pick it up and take a bite. The beef is a bit dry, but delicious, and the light flavor and slightly gritty texture of the pancake provides a nice contrast to what I am used to. The pancake stretches a bit, something like a bit of gum, before tearing. My fears about the food have been allayed, at least for now.

Over breakfast, I met Ana's mother and aunt. Her aunt speaks some english, and apparently some french, as Ana has told her that I speak french (which I took in high school and haven't even tried to speak in about 7 years), she turns and addresses me in french, and try as I might, though I understand her french, I can't come up with a proper response in french, so I continue to reply in english with a smile and an idiotic nod. They seem very nice, and immediately put me more at ease about staying here.

At this point, I'm really starting to feel my jet lag, my head hurts and I'm extremely tried. So I fall asleep for... well it feels like about a week. When I awaken, I'm told that it's lunch time and that we're going to be having some feijoada (pronounced fey-jzho-ah-da) that Ana has made. It's a dish that consists of a thick stew of black beans, beef, sausage, and salt pork. It's served with a kind of unbleached rice and some greens. I have read (in my Portugeuse for Dummies book) that it's made with pig knuckles and knees, so I'm already a bit apprehensive. After a few bites it's clear that it's very tasty, if a bit salty. I'm happily munching away at feijoada, until I come across a piece that looks as though it still has the skin on. Looking closer, I can clearly still see a few white, bristley hairs poking out from under a layer of fat and skin. "Am I supposed to eat this?" I ask, trying to be nonchalant and failing miserably.
"Yeah..." Ana pauses, "but you don't have to if you don't want to."
"Oh, it's no problem, I was just wondering." I place it in my mouth and close my eyes, trying to concentrate on not feeling the bristles in my mouth and the fatty piece slides down the back of my throat. It's actually not that bad, and I probably never would have noticed that it was anything other than a piece of fatty pork, if I hadn't noticed the hairs. As long as I can just stop thinking about the hairs...

More sleeping... much more sleeping, then cut to much later, at dinner. We have gone to a pizza place for dinner and we're sitting at a table with her aunt and mother, as well as a couple of her aunt's friends from her college days. I am offered a piece of a kind of flatbread with cheese from a basket, but first, Ana take a plastic glove (thin, clear plastic, not rubber like a doctor's gloves) from a box on the table, which for some reason I hadn't noticed until this point, and hands it to me, explaining that here they eat pizza with gloves. "Here meaning this restaurant, or here meaning all of Brazil?" The thought crosses my mind, but I don't ask, I just put on my glove and take a piece out of the basket. It's a bit odd eating with a glove on, but the food is tasty. The pizza is flat and crispy, and it comes with a number of toppings that you generally wouldn't see on pizza in the states. One of the pizzas that we eat is ham with a mango chutney. It's, again, not a flavor that I'm used to, but it's very good. The beer is light, and very cold, and it tastes a bit like a Corona. I could definitely get used to this...