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.
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