Sat 14 Jan 2006
We arrived in Seattle on Wednesday after a relatively ungrueling flight home. Good to see friends again, good to speak to people who understand my words, good to sleep in my own bed. Today is Saturday, so we’ve been home three nights–three nights of blissful comfort, three mornings of popping awake at 6:30 or 7:00 am thanks to my internal clock being drastically off. Three days of being pretty sleepy, and three more days of rain (apparently, if it rains tomorrow, Seattle breaks some kind of record for consecutive rainy days. Stepping from summer straight into winter was a little bit of a shock, and I keep wearing tank tops under my jacket.) Our last few days in Brazil were lovely; I got to see my Aunt Bridget, Uncle Steve, and cousins Roseanna and Mandy, who showed us a good time at their lovely home, took us out to pizza, and supplied us with enough books in English to last on the plane ride home, since we’d consumed all we brought with us.
There are all sorts of things that I didn’t get around to recording in the blog, and I want to write a few of them down just so I remember them later. Stop reading now if lists bore you; I know they bore me; this is for archiving purposes and in no particular order.
The rain that fell on the crowd after midnight on new year’s, all the thousands of people in white streaming up off the beach and back into the city. It fell like a blessing, like holy water anointing the ground of the new year. Gentle, warm rain. And when we went up to the rooftop terrace of our hotel before going back the room, the happy, drunken laughter of the party of Russians in their white clothes, waving bottles of champagne, and all of them standing in the pool, laughing so hard they could barely drink. When we emerged on the rooftop, one man waved to us to join them, but I was too shy and Sean disinclined. We cheered the new year with them and went back to our room to drink our own champagne. The hilariousness of seeing two of them in sopping wet clothes join the dry and worried-looking people in the small elevator.
The girl from Seattle that we met at the hotel Simon in Itatiaia, who was there with her dad and who pantomimed the banana toucans for us and showed us how to get to the trailhead.
The church in Parati that we stumbled across at night that we could not find the next day to take pictures of.
The restaurant on Ilhabela where we waited for two hours on Christmas eve to get our terrible meals, and the family with two little girls, the father of whom went into hysterical screaming at the waiters when he and his kids had been waiting for an hour and a half. We couldn’t understand what he said, but it seemed to be very emotional, and finally his wife persuaded him to leave the restaurant with her and the confused kids. There was an uncomfortable silence over the dining room when we left, and I was very frustrated to not be able to say something sympathetic to the obviously beleaguered staff.
Bodysurfing near Parati, catching a wave accidentally and just flying into the shore–
All the fish that were clustered near the bridge over the lake at the sculpture park–the water creepily full of them, hanging out nearthe surface–did I write about this already?–you couldn’t see the bottom for the fish, and the water on the other side of the bridge was deserted.
Hunting all over the botanical gardens in Sao Paulo forthe advertised “cave” that was finally correctly translated on a sign as a “grotto” and we realized we’d walked past it a dozen times
Did I already write about how straight and deadly toucans look when they fly?
The afternoon we spent after a hike in Itatiaia–we showered the mud off, then alternated for a while between the sauna and the pool of natural water at the hotel. Eventually they brought us drinks, and Sean went off to play volleyball with some other guests while I went back to the room. When he returned, we ordered our second round of drinks, and I found out that with no food, two caipirinhas are deadly. I was totally drunk going in to dinner and embarrassed about it, and giggled outside for a long time before I gathered enough composure to enter and eat.
The couple sharing our table at the Bossa Nova bar; the man knew all the words and sang them, to the minor embarrassment of his girlfriend
The difficulty of walking on the cobblestoned streets of the ‘historic district’in Parati, where our hotel was
Did I write about the museum of Naive Art in Rio? I liked it…
the turtles eating lettuce at the botanical garden
There’s tons more. I’ll add to this list as I think of things. Be well, intrepid readers-to-the-end! I am home and re-ensconced. Life is good.