Saturday, August 25th

Today we attempted to get a hold of several people back in Santarém, but didn't have a ton of luck. We ended up not being very productive but having some fun instead! First of all, we got up at 2:30 in the morning and got our bus around 3:30am (okay, so not very fun). The bus was a little late. By the time we arrived in Santarém it was around 6 am. This is just the way the schedule is all the time, which must suck for people like Arimar who seem to take the bus multiple times per week. We went out for breakfast at a random little place across town where our taxi driver took us. (We have our own personal taxi driver now - he gave Angela his number when she took a taxi to go meet the Magnolio from PSA the other night, (with whom she had an appointment but never showed or called to apologize). Pretty much anytime we call he comes and gets us in just a few minutes. It is nice if you don't happen to be on a busy street where you can hail a cab. By the way, taxis are pretty cheap here compared to the US. I would avoid taking one for longer distances, but in town it is not a bad way to go if you are in a hurry or don't know how to get where you are going.

Even though we were really tired after breakfast, we couldn't go back to our hotel because check in wasn't until noon. So we did some shopping for a couple hours. When it was finally noon we went back to our hotel for a nice nap.

In the evening we went to a restaurant out by the water where I had a couple of traditional Brazilian things. One was a really strong drink made from sugar cane, and for food we had some sort of fish thing.

 

We decided after dinner that since it was Saturday night after all, we wanted to go out and see some Samba dancing. So we called our trusty taxi guy to take us to a place our waiter recommended. The taxi guy said sure, but it may not be very busy because there is a big concert tonight that a lot of people are going to. We said we would give it a try and if it didn't look fun, hey, maybe we would go to the concert. When we got to the Samba place it was closed, so we said we wanted to go to the concert. I was picturing something in town that would perhaps be crowded but not all that large. Wow, I was really wrong. We drove about 30 minutes out of town, but then it took a lot longer because cars were all lined up at the entrance to some large event space. It felt sort of like the Gorge at George.¹² (i.e. all this concert traffic out in the middle of nowhere). Okay, so there weren't as many people as there would be for Dave Mathews Band at the Gorge, but there were TONS of people! We got there around 10:30 or so and saw the opening band, which did some Calypso dancing and a variety of more modern pop types of songs. Angela pointed out that there were a lot of couples that seemed to be at the concert by themselves, without being in a group, which she thought was different.

I didn't really notice that, but what really stood out to me was that everyone (particularly the women) were really dressed up! I felt like a total bum. I explained to her that in the US for a rock type concert, particularly an outdoor one, people would not be wearing nice cocktail dresses! Shorts and T-shirts or even bikini tops would be perfectly acceptable. The other weird thing about the concert, which we found out upon arrival, was that the main stage act (who was some Brazilian folk type artist) wasn't going to come on until around 2 am! Oh dear, I am not going to make it that long, I realized. So we enjoyed the openers as well as just the cultural experience of it all, and then left around 1am.


_{12. A lovely outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Columbia River in central Washington State.}