WAWAWEEWA!!!!

good lord, i'm having too much fun here. After boa viagem, i went to maria farinha. gorgeous, gorgeous beach. that night i went into the old city to party. the bus dropped me of alone in a relatively bad neighborhood. bad like i was offered crack by some kid waving viles at me from across the street. I asked a cab driver if he knew about a bar i'd heard about and he told me that he didn't and would i like to go find it iwth him? uh...red lights flashing in my head, i quickly realized he was just a reasonably well kept homeles guy hanging out by a cab and quickly crossed the street. luckily, i met a super cool couple after i finally found the bar: irish guy married to a brazilian. suffice it to say we drank alot and got happy as larry.

the next day i decided on a whim to go find a beach i knew nothing about besides what a guide-to-beaches told me --sought out for diving-- and what Pedro (cool kid who worked at the hostel) knew. i left at around 11, which was a mistake because i was on the bus for three hours. i had to hoof it from the bus stop to the beach, touching sand at a neighboring beach about after about 30min. finally, exactly 4 hours after i got there, i rented a mask and went snorkeling. i was not dissapointed. in the space of an hour, i saw about 25 different kinds of fish ( il ost track around 21 or 22), crabs, snails, hermit crabs, sea urchins, shrimp, tons of diferent kinds of plants and alga and corals, a sea anemonae barnackle kinda thing that receded when i touched it (i almost wrote my name in the stuff).....lotta cool life. after wards i goofed around in tidal pools and ahd a victory snack on the naighboring beach Gaibu, where i took a picture of a kid doing a weelie on the sand. he thought i was crazy. well, i couldn't havce been any crazier than the kid on the bus (by bus i mean van with 20 people in it) who insisted on taking pictures of and filming me with his knew camera phone. i'm the subject of the first film he ever made! how cool is that!

that night was wild. i was supposed to meet pedro at the hostel then hit this party up in front of catedral da Sé, but he'd left as soon as he got work (7) and i didn't find him at the party. what i did find when i got to the HUGE party (8) was two cool spanish girls who i knew from the hostel. we drank and watched capoeira, then randomly met a local poor surf intructor named tiago. he taught us how to dance coco, a really simple looking stomp kinda dance that's surprisingly hard to get the hang of. the girls went to bed so they could wake up early, and tiago and i went on to the beach bars as the party migrated. there we drank, met his friend rodrigo who introduced us to two italians he'd met. after hanging out with them for awhile we continued on to find a chess board at the bar (how cool is that?).

interlude: northern brazilians are really forward, at least in terms of sexuality. i thought it was wierd that tiago kept trying to get girls attention by touching their hair, but then 2 girls passing by in the crowd casually caressed my face and told me they thoguht i was handsome (actually, they said some dirtier shit than that. still, too bad they were ugly).

now back to the bar. waiting for a chess game to open up, i saw a cute girl in the crowd. a few minutes later, her friend came up to me to tell me she thought i was cute and would i like to meet her. we only got to hang out cause she had to leave about 30min later, but how's this for forward: over the phone tonight she offered to take a bus at 10:30 (from boa viagem, where you're not even supposed to walk the streets at night) to come by, despite having stuff to do the next day. moreover, she casually suggested ditching work and school for a few days so we could rent a room at a nearby beach for a few nights. WILD.

here's how in shock i am: i have actually been entertaining thoughts that maybe, just maybe, she wants to mug me. i mean....DAMN!! another pernambucanan i talked to assured me that she's actually displaying fairly normal behavior for the area. still, my head is SPINNING.