My anti hangover preparations (mega dose of vitamin C and lots of water before bed) keep off the worst of the pain in the morning, but some pain relief and porridge are still needed to fix the rest.
It is unbelievably hot (the temperature reaches 39 degrees inside the boat today) but there are jobs to be done. I put the laundry together and Mike takes it along with the empty gas bottle over to the marina reception. We have no shore power here although it is available our cable isn’t long enough to reach the shore and we have the wrong plug end. Mike trudges in the stifling heat to the nearest electrical shop only to find that it is closed. Carnival does weird things to opening hours and it is apparently a holiday tomorrow. This means that he wouldn’t get the stuff until Wednesday and as we are leaving on Thursday, it seems pointless getting the required stuff. In the meantime, we move slowly in our little sweat box!
I tidy around in the morning and take note of what we need to buy for the next passage, making a small list and knowing that I’ll ignore it anyway as usual and get more than I need no matter how hard I try not to.
Mid afternoon Mike and I go to the supermarket with Anna and Basia. There’s actually a Carrefour here in Recife and the food choices are good. The salad section is disappointing though (apart from to Mike who dances with glee that he won’t have green stuff forced down his throat every day). As usual, the language barrier is a problem. We can’t find sugar and we ask someone using the Spanish word for it. He looks at us as if we are mad and rattles of something in Portuguese which of course we don’t understand. I then have the bright idea of finding some packaging with sugar written on it – sure enough, it is the word we used and when we show it to someone else, they take us straight to it. It is so frustrating. All we did was pronounce it incorrectly - it should have been identifiable but as usual they make no attempt to understand.
Driving back through Recife, Mike and I have a good look around. Although I am know there are some favelas here (we saw some coming in on the boat), Recife looks far more affluent than Salvador. The city is littered with attractive, modern, high-rise apartment blocks and there are attractive looking shops around. The roads look well maintained and are clean and clear of rubbish. It just feels safer than Salvador although for all I know, we are driving through the Kensington equivalent of Recife.
In the evening after dinner, we go for drinks on Basia with some of the other crews. They are lovely hosts although Anna excels herself never sitting down but making sure your glass is filled all the time. This, of course, means that I have no real idea how much I am drinking and find out later that I have drunk a whole bottle of Prosecco (Johanne will be proud of me). The evening is slightly marred by the tale of four crew members who were attacked as they walked back to the marina in the evening after a meal. A man followed them for a while and when they were just yards away from the marina and its security guards, he pushed between them and grabbed a shoulder bag (which only contained a wrap). The woman was bruised where she had tried to hold on to her bag and her husband got cuts and bruises from falling over in an attempt to save her. It could have been so much worse but just reinforces the fact that there is poverty here in Brazil and people get desperate. It reminds us not to be complacent.
It’s nearly midnight when we get back to the boat and take our anti hangover preparations again. I admonish myself as that’s two nights in a row. Still, with a long passage looming, my system knows it will get a complete detox soon!
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