Christmas in August

So on Tuesday (August 11th) we flew out of São Paulo to Recife, the capital of Pernambuco (a state in Northeast Brazil). We spent the night there in a hostel before leaving early the next morning for Natal. Since it was my first experience with a hostel I didn't really know what to expect, and at first Jeff and I both hated it. Then we started to get to know the people running it and the other guests and we started to really like it. It didn't help that they had plumbing problems and had no running water at the hostel that night. They filled up some big buckets of water, so we took showers by dumping water on ourselves with an empty half-gallon ice cream container. Surprisingly effective.

Wednesday we took an early bus to Natal, the capital of Rio Grande do Norte. As you might have guessed from the title of this blog post, Natal means "Christmas" in Portuguese. We stayed with the Orikaza family, a half-Japanese family that Jeff knew from his mission. Their daughter, Mayumi, had a car and served as our unofficial tour guide. That afternoon we went souvenir shopping in the center. We bought some really cool soccer jerseys, and I bought a hammock. The guy started off asking for 60 reais and I wound up buying it for 30. Now I just need to figure out how to hang it in the backyard....

Thursday we met up with Elder Nascimento, one of my missionary companions. By way of explanation, on the mission he was known as Elder E. Nascimento. The "E" stood for Elder, which literally is his first name. His parents weren't even members of the church, they just saw some missionaries one time and thought Elder would make a good name. He got baptized when he was a teenager and went on to personally baptize the rest of his family.

Anyways, that morning we went to Ponta Negra beach, which is one of the most famous in Natal (since I'm tired of explaining that all the beaches we went to are really famous in Brazil, from here on out you can just assume they are - that includes Miami Beach too). When we first got there it was raining, but since winter in Natal is at least as hot as summer in Utah, that was not a problem. After a while the weather cleared up enough for us to realize that we'd gotten sunburned through the clouds. That was the last time I took my shirt off without first putting on a layer of SPF 50 sunblock. (The odd result of this trip is that I'm really not that tan. Apart from a little color I got at the beach this past week I'm disturbingly white for having spent two months in a tropical country.)

That afternoon we went to see an old fort and walked pretty much all over the coast of Natal. To Get to the fort we walked along a really cool beach with some reefs that broke the waves and created some tide pools and stuff along the shoreline. While in the fort we discovered that 16th century Portuguese and Dutch soldiers wore really gay-looking uniforms,
that the English translation of "banheiro masculino" is "won's bathroom," and that the "secret passage" now leads to what smelled like a septic tank.




Friday was one of the highlights of the trip: the sand dunes at Genipabu beach. They had a lot of things to do there: you could ride dune buggys, a sandboard, or even camels. (We got into an argument with Elder and Mayumi since they both said that they weren't camels since they only had one hump and that the proper word was "dromedaries." Yeah. Sure. Whatever.) I went with the sandboard because it was cheaper and sounded really fun. It's a lot harder than snow or wakeboarding because the sand gives pretty much no traction so you can hardly cut at all. Maybe if I got some more practice.

After the dunes we hung out at the beach for a while. Once the vendors figured out that we were tourists they started bringing us lots of cheap seafood. It was great. We bought some shrimp kabobs and a whole lobster. The lobster was only 5 reais (about 3 $US). It makes me sad to think that I can't get them for nearly that cheap here, especially since the shrimp and lobster were really good.

That afternoon we spent lying around in hammocks drinking from coconuts, eating the coconut meat until we were stuffed, and then using the rest of the coconut meat to make candy. Yes, coconuts are amazing, and yes, I would like one right now, thank you.

The next day we left Natal early in the morning for João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba and the home of Diego Santana, one of my other mission companions. We'll leave that for the next blog post.

More soon,

-Kev