4/20/08 10:10 AM in Santarem

My tank really hit zero last night. For the first time on the trip, I got tired – just 7 hours of sleep over two nights and a little break in our schedule did it. No meetings, meals, shows, tours, just an arrival in Santarem and chill time. We walked along the pier in Santarem where the breeze comes in and women in short skirts flirt with guys playing music – it was relaxing. And at 10 PM, I was out. I don’t celebrate sleep much, but that was a good one.

Other notes:

• Best meal so far, just beating out the first Rotary meeting or first dinner, was last night at Casa Nostra (I think, or maybe Nossa Casa), a fish restaurant. Marta is the owner. I had pirarucu that was outstanding. The catfish (suribim) was also beyond excellent. Bolinhas de aviao (sp?) were tremendous. Farofa de camarao. Best restaurant in town, they said. I believe it.

• Geroldo (sp?), his daughter Carol, wife Celia, and son Larry (sp?) joined us. Only Carol had sufficient English skills, so I got to speak a lot of Portuguese, which I liked.

• Ron Bertignoli and his wife Vera are our hosts here at Fundacao Esperanca. They have three kids, all living in the US. That’s tough, Ron said.

• We don’t look like good travelers because we brought so much luggage to accommodate Kicks for Kids, Mike’s personal charity to bring soccer balls to kids. In this case, the also brought roupa (clothes) and mosquito nets, so Mary brought extra suitcases and Mike had HUGE duffel bags. They barely fit into Ron’s truck that he picked us up with and he commented on it. The bags cost extra money because we were only allowed 25 kg TOTAL between all bags, plus another 5 kg in carry-on. That’s just Brazil now, but you gotta wonder about the future in the US.

• Our orientation here was useful. We got schedules in English and, more importantly for us all, those schedules had built-in rest time. Now I need to study it a little.

• There was a basketball court at the pier! And people were playing. Not very well, but these were older teenagers playing.

• Two guys were walking on the outside edge of the railing of the pier building different ends of a net. At the end, Garoldo asked to see the shrimp they were getting. These were 2 cm long transparent thin creatures with barely visible legs – aviao (sp?) that we ate for dinner.

• A lot of people came up to Ronaldo (I’ve taken to calling him by his Brazilian name and it confuses the team, which I’ll try to avoid doing) or Garoldo and greet them warmly.