Supermarket

The other day, I went to a big supermarket. It was one of those where they mainly sell food, but also a bit of everything. I found a solar powered torch, which was fairly cheap, so I bought it. When I got home I noticed that the manual was in 11 different languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, German, Dutch, Bulgarian, Russian, Polish and Romanian. I was quite surprised when I noticed that there was no instructions in English. Not that I needed any manual, but I thought that all manuals would contain an English section. Then I noticed another surprising fact: there was no information in Portuguese! For an item sold in Brazil!

There is another funny thing you can buy in many of the supermarkets here:

One thing that is far from being funny is the queuing. If I would say that it is slow, I would give the cashiers a huge compliment. The queues don't move at all. It is very common that half of the customers in the shop are queuing! Last time I went to another big supermarket, I had to queue for 20 min. You might think that that is not too bad, but there were only three people in front of me! And they didn't have excessively many items.

This time I went to one of these queues that are supposed to be faster. There was only one queue to three separated cashiers, where you were only allowed to go if you were buying 20 or less items. Should be fast, right? I was the 12th person in the queue, for which there were three cashiers open, and it took 25 min! It's soo boring to just stand there when nothing is moving.

Trancoso, praia dos Coqueiros and Arrail d'Ajuda

One of the days I took a bus trip from Porto Seguro to Trancoso, praia dos Coqueiros and Arrail d'Ajuda.

Trancoso was supposed to be a small town with a nice historical centre.

OK, it was small, and it was nice, but historical? When I hear that a place should be historical, I imagine it to be much older than what Trancoso was. It was nice anyway, and there was a really nice beach - praia dos Coqueiros - close by as well.

A cold beer on the beach is not a bad idea..

 If the sun became too strong, you could go under a roof and sit at a table or rest in a hammock.

This guy saw me walking around taking a lot of pictures, so he asked me to look at him and maybe take a few pictures, so I did... "Unfortunately" the picture to the far right is the last one I took, so you will never know if he finished the jumps perfectly, or with a fall... 

If you would work too hard on the beach or feel too stressed, you could come here for a massage...

 ... or just lay down in one of these beds. They were quite far from the water though, maybe as much as 10 m...

These last two pictures are from Arrail d'Ajuda, which was another small town in the area. Here you could buy some "wishing bracelets" and hang them on the fence below, as some people had already done.

Sunrise in Porto Seguro

Brazil mainly has an east coast and no west coast. It is therefore possible to take nice pictures of the sunrise over the sea, but not of the sunset. Due to this I decided to get up at 4.30 am one of the days on my vacation! It was definitely worth it (see below for a small collection of the maaany pictures I took that morning)!

 I really like how the sea turned out in these pictures. It was still quite dark, but I used a long shutter time, which both made the image bright and sort of smeared out the water.

A happy me jumping out into the sea after taking a loot of pictures in the early morning.

Ilha do sol

One of the days in Porto Seguro I took a boat trip to a small island called Ilha do sol, which means the island of the sun. Our guide on this trip seemed to have a never ending energy as he was constantly dancing and jumping around. 

Our guide showing one of his moves.

The same guy showing how to climb a palm tree and collecting coconuts. He also cut a coconut in half only using his hands! 

This island basically contained three things: crabs, mud and tourists.

This was a typical sight on the island, a lot of crabs in the mud.

You could buy some kind of liquor with a touch of crab.

The pictures above and below were also typical sights on the island. Our wonderfully crazy guide taking a mud bath with a crab (above) and with tourists (below).

Coral reef

I went to a coral reef one of the days in Porto Seguro. It might not have been the biggest or most beautiful coral reef in the world, but it was still really nice. 

We went to the reef in the boat on the left.

There were a lot of sea urchins on the reef.

You could go snorkeling to better see the life in the sea.

 This is a picture through my diving mask. 

I found two sea shells the size of the one in the picture above and one a bit bigger.

Porto Seguro

I went to Porto Seguro a little while ago. Porto Seguro is a little city on the beach relatively close to here. It was here that the Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral was the first European to set foot on Brazilian soil just over 500 years ago.

It was really nice, but it didn't start very well. 

The flight was scheduled to depart late in the evening, twenty minutes to midnight. After checking in, I saw that the departure time on the boarding card I just received was one hour later than what it said on the monitors all over the airport.  

I didn't worry too much about it though, since there is basically always something wrong. Most often it's the gate number which changes a few minutes before the boarding starts. Obviously there is never any information anywhere either. 

There are often delays, but this time there was one flight, which was scheduled to depart 10 min after our, which all of a sudden was moved to depart one hour earlier. A while later, our flight completely disappeared from the monitors. 

The terminal was very small, but there was a help desk. However, a few minutes before our flight disappeared, the help desk was conveniently left unattended. Almost no one seemed to be worried at all though. 

After a while someone appeared in the help desk and a few people went to ask what was going on. We also went there and were reminded that there was a time change this evening, such that at the stroke of midnight the clocks were turned back to 11 pm. I did know that there was a time change that night, but I could never imagine that it was at that time and not in the middle of the night, when most people are asleep, as it is in Europe. 

Anyhow, due to this time change, the time would be 23:40 twice this evening. Therefore, the airline was not sure whether the flight should depart the first time the clock was 23:40 or the second time. Since they were not sure how they would do, they removed the flight from the monitors and they did that without giving any information whatsoever. 

Instead of actually solving the "problem", they did something that Brazilians do a bit too often: they waited and hoped that someone else would fix it or that it would fix itself. Thanks to the nature of this problem, that actually worked this time, since that meant that the flight did after all depart around the second time the clock showed 23:40. 

Normally I'm quite happy when we turn back the clocks one hour, since I get one more hour of sleep or one more hour to do something. However, this time I got to spend the extra hour confused in a small, cold and boring airport, so I was less happy than normally. 

In the end I did arrive in Porto Seguro and had a wonderful time, so I'm not complaining too much.

One of the main streets of Porto Seguro.

 This animal is a kind of starfish, which was very common on the beach.

 There was a small shop where they sold adrenaline in the form of fruit.

This guy was playing on a different kind of instrument - a bunch of keys. There is a close-up below.

There was a boat that transported cars and people across a big river. The pictures just above and below are taken from this boat. The funny thing about this boat was that it seemed to have been built by attaching a small boat to a large raft. There were no engines on the raft and it could change direction by changing the angle it was pushing the raft, see the pictures.

There were a lot of people walking around selling stuff on the beach. You might be able to guess what the guy above tried to sell.

This sign above was on the main road to and from Porto Seguro. It means: "Born in Porto Seguro. My name is Brazil".