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...