circle around to the other hotels and then come back and get us. My contingency planning mind kicked into gear trying to think about what we'd do that day instead of going on our trip. Well, there were some beaches in town we could check out. We could hang out at the hotel pool. We could....sleep :o\ .... Luckily, up pulled our bus about 20 minutes late. They hadn't been by, Csilla, in her haste to get us slow eaters downstairs (well, there was at least one slow eater ;o), misidentified the driver I guess...So we spent Friday by a giant pool and didn't go into the ocean for the first time in days. This was another resort-style place, which isn't my favorite. It really felt more distant from the
local Brazil that we had gotten used to over the past two days. It wasn't all bad, of course, because they had some activities in the pool for everyone to participate in, like cardio classes in the pool. It was more just for everyone to go and get some exercise and have some cool music and act silly for a while. We did things like some 
partner dancing, some group stuff with everyone else in the pool (which was pretty much everyone there). And drank rum and cokes.I had an interesting conversation with Daniel about Brazil's history from my observations of the country after a week of being there. One thing that really stuck out is that they have many different regions of the country, each one being very unique. Of course, we have different regions in the US and each is unique in it's own way, but the heritage of the people in the different areas of Brazil are different. So it was interesting to hear about how they have such-and-such dancing in this part of Brazil but not this other part, and how the people in the south are more light skinned and beautiful and the people in the north are much
darker with more of an African influence. We got to discussing slavery in Brazil versus the US and how Brazil had accepted a lot of the culture of the slaves into their country's culture, things like dance (including capoeira), food (fejoida), and even some of the language. It seems like in America racism is much more prevalent (even if we don't realize it) then it is down there, although Daniel said that there is still some people that are racist down in Brazil. But, even more interesting was Daniel's observation on the attitudes of the English settlers in America versus the Portuguese settlers in Brazil. Both countries were discovered and colonized in the same era, yet America has surged ahead of Brazil in terms of standards of living and wealth. He thinks that it's because when people immigrated to America, they were leaving because of persecution and they wanted to start over in a new land. The Portuguese, on the other hand, came to Brazil looking to get really rich and to return to Portugal with all of their wealth. Because of this, their long term plans and development were hindered. Of course this affects a country's culture and their attitudes towards work and life. I like these kinds of history/social/culture discussions with the natives, it opens your eyes quite a bit!On the way home that day, the bus stopped at a mega-marketplace that was about five stories high and sold everything from cashews to soccer jerseys to carved trinkets. We spent some time wandering the floors and giving Daniel hell because he was going to have to spend the next two days wandering these places with his wife because he'd promised her he'd take her shopping. The look on his face when he was telling us this was classic, like he's already surrendered to the fact that this will become the norm for the future. And it probably will be, judging by Kelly's ability to disappear and reappear every few minutes with a new table cloth or something like that. But he's a gentleman, we all know he's more than happy to spend time making her happy :o) ! We eventually bought like 10 kilos of cashews for export to Sao Paulo, New York, and California, since this was one of the products that this area was famous for. I bought just 1/2 kilo because I was pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to eat them due to my braces. But I figured what the heck, for 4 bucks I might as well try. Turns out that these cashews are very, very
sweet, I haven't tasted any like these before. Very yummy...So it was our last night in town and we wanted to go out in style. We went to the downtown area that we'd visited that was packed with people our age on Monday night to have dinner and see what's going on. We found that the area was packed with a lot of girls, but most of them were working for the restaurants, luring the tourists into their places to eat. There were a lot of places to settle into for a few hours with outdoor seating and a nice festive atmosphere. We chose an Italian place that we'd seen earlier in the week that looked like they had fresh food and the owner was a jovial Italian guy who spoke English, Italian, Portuguese, and even knew a few words in Slovak for Roland and Csilla. He was very friendly and took good care of his customers.
Stefan was in love with this place because it had Italian stuff all over the place, including pictures and jerseys and items like that. I swear, the way he was talking about how good the food looked and how amazing this place was, you'd have thought he hadn't eaten Italian food in years :o). It was a pretty good place, though. We had a little wine with our meal and did lots of people watching and talked to our neighbors, who were two Swedish guys who were studying in Boston and came down for Thanksgiving break. They were basically the first people that we'd met all week in Fortaleza that spoke English, so it was nice talking to them and finding out where the hot spots down in this part of town were on nights like this.
After dinner, the couples went back to the hotel and Stefan and I decided to go check out what was going on around town on our last night there. We walked down towards where some clubs were to check them out and thought they looked a little too touristy for our tastes - we were looking for the locals. Girls working for the clubs were standing outside and tried to get friendly with us to try to get us in the clubs, but we just kept walking. We ended up finding a pier that went out into the ocean, but the only people hanging out there were locals alright - local high school and junior highers!
So, back to town we headed. We went down a different street and noticed a bar/club type of place at the end of the block so we checked it out. There were beautiful women everywhere! That was more like it! We decided to stop for a drink there and ordered up some mojitos and take a look around. We couldn't believe how many girls there were. And how few guys there were. And how the guys were all older guys :-? . And it was also strange how all the girls were looking at us and smiling. And how they would touch our arms when we walked by. Stefan, who has been to Asia many times, immediately concluded exactly what this place was - a place to pick up prostitutes. We just sat back to see what was going on and it was totally obvious. It was pretty entertaining and I learned something about prostitutes. Normally, when I think of them, I think of skanky, crackhead, nasty ladies like the ones that I see on COPS or in NYC. But these girls were definitely different. They were very clean, well kept girls who looked like your average girls out on the town having fun, dancing with each other, talking, laughing, etc. They were very normal girls as far as we could tell.
The federal police came in after about fifteen minutes there and started checking girls' IDs. Daniel had told us that we should carry our passports everywhere because there were a lot of illegal immigrants in the area and we could be arrested if we didn't have IDs showing our tourist visas. Of course, I forgot mine that night. Oops. In any case, the police seemed to be checking to make sure the girls were old enough to be in a bar (18), but we didn't want to risk anything, so we decided to bug out and leave. It was quite an interesting experience though....
We went back to where the clubs were just to have one more drink and we found one that had no cover charge and had just a one-drink minimum, so we went in. After ordering a beer, we went to check out the dance floor and see what was up there and we found that it was exactly the same thing, only with a bigger dance floor and more emphasis on the dancing than the bar scene. But the same thing, the girls seemed to just be having fun. Stefan and I sat around for a bit sipping our beers and admiring the scene and then decided to walk around. Stefan was enamored with one girl, so I suggested that we go out to the dancefloor since we could at least find girls to dance with us (unlike in the U.S.!) . So he danced with the girl he was obsessed with and I found a girl to dance with as well. They played some pretty fun, awesome electronic type music just like the clubs in Europe, along with some American style hip-hop music. We both had fun there and agreed we'd have some stories for everyone the next day!
Justinho, We went out with a blast!
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