I spent the weekend in Aracati, a small city about two hours away from Fortaleza. I'm finding myself with extremely limited time, so this is going to be another photo-heavy post with only minimal reflection.
This is the place where my group spent most of our downtime, in the Sede, the central part of Aracati. It was, as our director Bill said, very very humble, but it was also pretty fun. We ate a lot and got bitten by mosquitoes a lot. The breakfasts were amazing, the bathrooms were less so, but they had toilet paper most of the time, which I've learned is exciting.
There were a lot of cats hanging around.
Our plans were a little slap-dash. One of the coolest things we did was visit a public school, which I'll tell you about later since I don't have any photos of it. We also visited this museum, which I can't for the life of me get to rotate. It was interesting, but it was hot and slow, so, you know.
The back of the museum was gorgeous, I thought.
We also got to visit the farmer's market that took place Saturday morning. These guys were shelling beans - I even confirmed this with my rudimentary Portuguese.
A walk through the meat market - this photo pretty much represents the way I walked through it. Lots of pig's heads hanging on meat hooks and that kind of thing. Smelled awesome.
Each of these nets costs about three hundred reais, and takes a ridiculously long time to make.
Agua de coco, thank goodness.
A Brazilian stick bug, just for Mom!
A horse and cart. There are actually a fair number of these in Fortaleza, but Aracati had way more.
We took a bus to Canoa Quebrada, a small and very touristy town known for having gorgeous beaches. Since it was dark when we drove into Aracati, this was the first glimpse I'd had of the landscape around Fortaleza.
A church very close to the beach in Canoa Quebrada. The name of the town translates as "broken canoe." At this point we'd kind of had it with the constant plan-changes, and had been told we'd get to go to the beach and let down several times, so when we saw this...
... it was all over. We were supposed to go and do something else, I think, but we high-tailed it down to the beach below these dunes and jumped in the ocean. It was warm and it seemed unusually salty. First dip in the Atlantic! Totally great. We came back to this beach at night to celebrate two birthdays, and went to this awesome and ridiculous reggae bar, right on the beach, known as Freedom Bar, but I didn't bring my camera for that part. I'll see if I can steal some photos from my comrades here.
Ate logo!
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