Recife, Brazil
Hi Folks: Welcome to Recife [Reef] in Brasil.... A city of about 1,200,000 people. There is a saying that we have about certain attractions that we encounter when touring: ABC, Another Big City, Another Big Church, etc. We could be almost anywhere in the world in some locations of Recife: Vancouver, Mexico, Arizona, Europe, etc. The exception is the pockets of extreme poverty we encounter. Shacks, thrown up in ghetto-like sections, often on a river or inlet. However if you get out of the city a bit things look different. Like any place in the world there is a difference between city and country folks. Unfortunately we never got out much here, just enough to lose the downtown feel.We got off the ship and took the shuttle to downtown, a 25 minute ride. A main street is right across the beach from the drop-off spot. 90 degrees F. Lovely long, long beach protected by, of course, the reef. One photo shows the beach at Recife at 9.30 AM on Wednesday morning.
Tens of thousands of people sitting on the sand, looking out to sea. Who works in this city? We came to the conclusion that there is high unemployment, so go to the beach, it's free! We also had lengthy discussions on the culture of people who spend so much time at the beach, etc. It wasn't until dinner time we became aware of the real reason: The kids are out of school in January!
Gas is the same price as at home, everything else seems about 1/2 the price. Four of us got a cab for three hours for $50 US. We drove to an old colonial town on the outskirts of Recife, Olinda, founded 1535, and had a tour of the town. Again the streets were practically filled with people strolling and generally hanging out. It must be easy to put together a Carnival here. Much music, dancing and colour, some foreign tourists but it seemed to be mainly Brazilians that were strolling. The other photo shows some of the old buildings, freshly painted in pastels.
Next we had to get some groceries, our driver took us to the Mother of all Malls. It makes any in our area look like a five and dime. Another crowd of well dressed and somewhat plumpish people in there as well. It turned out the grocery store was Hiper [bompreco], Wal-Mart Brasil.
There are some extremely good looking people here. A mix of Portuguese, blacks, and Indian. The Portuguese language is very difficult to understand, or read. Our friend Jim, who we went with, decided that Homen was women and Mulheres was the men's toilets. Wrong, we discovered this in the cab later! No time to use the handy-dandy translator at the time.
See you in Rio!
Don't forget to Vote!
posted by Doug and Fellette @ 12:23 PM
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