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Published: November 8th 2006
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The main reason we were spending nine days in Pernambuco was to spend some quality time with the family. This weekend was to be the best opportunity to spend this time with said family. Aidan rented a van from some poor unfortunate fucker who didn't know what he was letting himself in for, and we went around picking up the various people who were coming along. Originally supposed to come were Monica, Pedro, Matheus, Alannah, Michael, Nandinha, and of course Aidan, but Nandinha had been sick for the last few days and was still fairly under the weather so they weren't going to be coming. Telma, Aidan's current bird, came along instead.
We packed into the little minibus and headed off for the interior, planning to end up in a town called Caruaru, about 130km from the coast and Rêcife. On the way, we stopped off at a couple of places. The town of Gravatá is often known as the Brazilian Switzerland, because of similar climate and the amount of Swiss-style chalets in the town. It is a popular place for rich people from Rêcife and Boa Viagem to come when the oppressive heat of the coastal lowlands becomes too
The town I loved so well
... whose name I can't remember much to handle. I bought a ball to kick around with Matheus, only for it to be blown all over the shop by the gusting winds. I was still unsure about how well my knee had recovered so I didn't really throw everything I had into the tackle if you know what I mean. We had some crazy chicken concoction in this little shop and Pedro proceeded to play football inside with Matheus - at least the wind couldn't get us there.
The roads leading into the middle of the state were highways, with two lanes either side, but there were some shocking examples of disrepair that would make Cavan look like a tarmac paradise; I can only imagine how hard the roads are to drive on at night.
Along the roads of Pernambuco's scrubby interior we saw a lot of makeshift camps, many using nothing but black bags to shield them from the elements. Aidan explained that these people were protestors who were looking to be given back the land which had been stolen by the government that they believed was rightly theirs. A lot of the towns had the typical Brazilian hillsides with dense townships crammed
"Quanto está?"
Our minibus driver catching a cheeky look at the match (Brazil vs Kuwait) onto them, their streets steeper than a Grafton St lease. Monica and Pedro maintained that they weren't favelas but let's just say you wouldn't bring a lady back there if you wanted to impress her.
We stopped at another place that was based around the art of some dude called Borges. The town was dusty but the art was great. There are a good few pictures from this place, have a look! The gift shop had ridiculously cheap crafts to buy, but unfortunately there was only so much space in my bag and anything fragile that I might have bought probably would have been crushed, so I passed on most of it.
We had been told by Aidan that Caruaru had more of this kind of thing but it seemed apparent as we went through it that the Saturday market was well over at this stage (ca. 3pm). We ended up in a pretty dingey indoor market outside the town with rows and rows of shops selling the same tacky shit over and over again, and with toilets that looked like the cover of a Metallica album. I bought a Corinthians soccer jersey to annoy my Brazilian friends
back home (who are all rabid Sao Paulo fans) and caught the end of Brazil vs Kuwait on the TV. The girls were not impressed by this fairly blatant manipulation by Aidan who just wanted to go to a shitty shopping centre with his bird Telma. I didn't really mind as I was getting to see some of Pernambuco's interior and a bit more of the Brazil that you don't see on postcards and travel brochures, but I can appreciate why they were annoyed.
After Caruaru we decided to take a detour through a hilly town that had yet more arts and crafts, this time much closer to the people who made them. This time they weren't so cheap, and I don't think anything was bought, but at least we got to hang around a dodgy area for a while and could call ourselves hard. Our minibus driver was getting anxious to get home and as darkness fell (in just 20 minutes - amazing) we made our way down through the back roads which were little better than dust trails. Bizarrely there were speed ramps every couple of kilometres, which led to a lot of whooping and OPA-ing; presumably
they were there to discourage any budding Ayrton Sennas or Felipe Massas, but in all honesty anyone speeding on that road would probably meet a grisly fate in the end anyway; the average episode of
Smallville has fewer holes in it.
Beautiful baby Alannah made a lot of us smile on this day, her endless enthusiasm and zest for life keeping us going and providing plenty of laughs. She rarely cried and was always affectionate, and overcame her natural shyness very quickly, playing games with everyone and running her own little comedy act at times.
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