Top 20 of Joao Pessoa

Some of you know and some of you don't know that it's been a tough last month for me here in Joao Pessoa. And now that I'm leaving tonight, I thought I would focus on the things that I enjoyed most while I was here.

1) Field excursions looking for seahorses with Gabi and the girls from the lab

2) Running by the beach at night

3) Morning breakfast at Pao de Praia with fresh squeezed orange juice, pao (bread) com ovo (egg) and coffee (without sugar!! they put sugar in almost all coffee here so it's great to find it comes with no sugar!)

4) Finding the fruit market after 2 months of looking for it

5) Getting my first piece of mail (It was my CPF card or Brazilian Social Security number card)

6) The special bike lane in the road that runs along the beach. Great for biking with a view and also safe!

7) Discovering Acai na Tigela (Acai sorbet served with granola, dried berries, sliced bananas, seemingly cookie crumbs but probably something else, and honey)

8) Finally going diving in Brazil, seeing 3 giant sleeping turtles at night and discovering I love my new BCD (scuba vest).

9) Walking on the beach from Tambaú to Bessa (6 K) with Muri

10) Learning that there is free wireless internet at the mall while wondering why there is free wireless internet at the beach (yes that's right, in a certain area at the beach, if you bring your laptop, which I personally think is asking someone to steal it, you can get free wireless internet. although it won't work at any of the retaurants or beach bars with tables, so good luck keeping the sand out of it)

11) Recognizing someone on the bus and realizing Joao Pessoa is indeed a small city

12) Giving my first powerpoint presentation on my research in Portuguese!

13) Singing the Beatles and Mama Mia songs in the car late at night with the Professor!

14) Finding out I can watch GLEE, here in Brazil, yes this one's a bit pathetic, but GLEE rocks!

15) Talking politics and teaching/learning portuguese and english words with my roommates

16) Going to the movies and surprised by the fact that the movie was in English!

17) Buying an inflatable kayak for research purposes

18) Finally getting a Brazilian cell phone

19) New beach clothes- sarongs and dresses of course!

20) Being able to swim in the ocean, even though Joao Pessoa is a city with over 1 million people. I'm always leary that the beaches in downtown Fortaleza are dirty and polluted but in JP they are always nice and never give off that feeling!

An American Dinner

As a special treat for the four students in the lab who had helped me the most, I invited them over to the apartment for dinner. To which everyone’s response was a resounding yes, followed by the exclamation of “I am so excited to eat American food!” So I spent a week wracking my brain trying to determine the appropriate menu for an American Dinner. What do you think of when you think of American Food? My first immediate thought goes to hamburgers, coleslaw and watermelon. The fixings for a summertime backyard get together. But after weeks of eating meat, meat, meat here in Brazil, I’m not too crazy to eat more meat, so the thinking continues. I start to think about food I am craving for from back home. First thought: Thai food. They have Chinese and Japanesse restaurants here, but Thai food is non-existant. There’s no way that I would be able to find the ingredients aside from coconut milk to make a curry here. Ok Thai food is out. Then I start to dream of pasta salad, pesto and delicious scampi dishes I’ve eaten with a certain high school sweetheart, but then I think wait, those are Italian foods. Not American foods. So I wrack my brain and think about cooking fish, or making fish tacos, or meatloaf and mashed potatoes but most of these ideas get rejected because a) I don’t want to eat them or b) I’m unsure of how they’d go over as American Food from my Brazilian friends. After a week of hemming and hawing I decide on the following menu:

Appetizer: Cold Cucumber and Fresh Mint Salad, drizzled with olive oil and a pinch of salt

Main Course: Meat and Vegetarian Lasagne served with homemade oven-roasted garlic bread

Dessert (Sobremesa): Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies with Vanilla Ice Cream

Beverages: The nicest bottle of red wine I can afford, Chilled Tap Water and America’s Favorite Soft Drink- Coca-Cola

After having finally decided on the menu, I ponder the logistics of trying to make this dinner here in Brazil. First, I need to look up the names of ingredients I will need in Portuguese, I mean do you know how to say basil in Portuguese?...................................... (The answer is manjeriçao). Other things to consider, I have had problems finding vegetables at the grocery store, how can I ensure I have vegetables for a vegetable lasagne? Do they even have lasagne noodles at the grocery store? Answer: unknown.

The day before the dinner I head to the grocery store to try to make sure I have the majority of ingredients on hand. I’m planning on spending the next morning and part of the afternoon at the lab and then leaving early afternoon to come home and make the dinner, hopefully leaving plenty of time to look nice and set the table.

First things first: I peruse the vegetable section and pick up my cucumbers (deceivingly called pepinos in Portuguese, although obviously they are in no way a pepper). I have the olive oil and salt, but I decide I’ll get the fresh mint the next day. Ok appetizer done. I get some garlic cloves to roast for the garlic bread. I’ll pick up the bread so it can be fresh the next day and we’ve got butter at home. Garlic bread done. Check.

Ok big time. The lasagne. Now I only have a general idea of how to make lasagne in my head. I’ve made it a few times with my mom; I made it on the sailboat working in the Caribbean with mostly canned vegetables, and I’ve had it in restaurants a few times. So in my mind, the meat lasange has meat, cheese, sauce and noodles. The veggie one has basically the same thing but with veggies, hopefully spinach and no meat. Despite those crazy british friends who have told me lasagne has no cheese, I think lasagne generally has ricotta, mozzarella and parmesian. So these are the general types of things I’m looking for.

First I come to the pasta aisle. Yes I find lasagne noodles. Whew, a step in the right direction. Now they have the expensive Italian lasange noodles from Barrillo or some Italian equivalent name for $15 a box or the Portuguese version for $3 a box. And since we know I’m on a student stipend, it’s not a big surprise, which one I go with. I then move onto the sauce. I debate whether to get canned tomatoes and add my own spices (have I looked up the translations for the spices I’d need?) or whether to go with canned tomato sauce. Well a look at the spice section and my list of translated items I need, assures me I would be better to go with a pasta sauce. So I return to the pasta sauces where there are many small boxes of pasta sauce (think these boxes are so small I’m thinking, are they tomato paste?) or the one small but larger jar of Italian name sounding pasta sauce for the bargain price of $17 dollars. So I decide to risk it and I get four small boxes of pasta sauce, these must have to be dilouted right? I feel confidant that these four boxes will enable me to make my lasagnas, I mean the last thing someone wants is a dry lasagne.

Ok I move onto the cheese section. Now when I think of ricotta cheese, I think ricotta has a slightly thicker consistency than cottage cheese. It comes in a container, but it spreads easily on a lasagne. But what they have here are blocks in the cheese section labeled ricotta but nowhere on this package does it say cheese anywhere. And this block of ricotta is hard, and not soft. So I sit there and think, can there be another type of ricotta? One that is not a cheese? If so, why would it be in the cheese section? Does ricotta really come in blocks? Do we just process it differently in the United States? Then I think well wouldn’t it be worse if I didn’t buy the cheese marked ricotta and I’d be the stupid foreigner that was staring right at the ricotta cheese labeled ricotta but didn’t realize what it was. I decide that this vision is worse than buying the ricotta and having it turn out to be something else. So I gulp and take a huge financial commitment to buy two blocks of ricotta (now these ricotta blocks are about $12 each, which is quite expensive for cheese here). And I move onto trying to find mozzarella.

Now the mozzarella is a similar story. So there are these blocks of cheese that look like mozzarella and they say buffalo on them. And everyone’s heard of buffalo mozzarella. But in no way does the package say mozzarella, it just says buffalo cheese. So if it looks like mozzarella, says buffalo and buffalo mozzarella exists, is it really mozzarella? And if this block of cheese is $18 is this also a mistake I am willing to make? Then I try to remember some genealogy of cheeses. From what I vaguely know, you can make cheese out of anything that produces milk- sheep’s cheese, goat cheese, cow cheese. So rationally you could make cheese from a buffalo. Then I wonder if they have buffalos here in Brazil. Now for my ocean-based mind, this is a land-based question to which I have no answer, except that they like to eat all sorts of meat here in Brazil. So I think they probably have buffalos in Brazil. (Fact: They do have buffalo’s in Brazil, I just Googled it and there is a Brazilian Association of Buffalo Growers) And if they probably have buffalos in Brazil, then theoretically you could maybe make cheese out of buffalo milk, right? Is this really where mozzarella comes from? Is mozzarella really a cheese we get from buffalos? Am I this nieve about where my cheese comes from? Clearly the answer is yes. Sadly, I think about all these things in the grocery store, then decide to risk it and buy the buffalo cheese block for $18 dollars. Thankfully it turned out to be the right thing. I find the parmesian, which is labeled parmesian and which I have bought before, no problems.

Now onto the dessert. The only thing I am missing is more chocolate chips, brown sugar , possibly some more butter and the ice cream. I find the chocolate chips or the substitute- little white and milk chocolate balls. I find two sticks of butter, no vanilla ice cream and I get distracted by something (oh yes remembering I had to buy meat for the lasaagne) and forget to look for brown sugar.

The Day of the Dinner

My roomie had said she would take me to the fruit market to get veggies for the dinner. We head off there around 1:30. We do some shopping for other items and then find the haven of the fruit market. It took me 2 months but now I finally know where I can go to buy cheap fruits and vegetables. Although I was under strict instructions not to talk at the fruit market, because the vendors would know I was a gringo and up the price. (As if it’s not obvious enough with my Caucasian skin and blonde hair.) So I silently watched and nodded as my roomie bargained with one vender for fresh basil, zucchini, spinach, carrots, broccoli and mint.

I pick up some fresh bread on the way home and by the time I’m in the kitchen trying to decide where to start it’s about 3:30. First I decide to roast the garlic in the oven for the garlic bread while I start to chop the veggies for the veggie lasagne. All this is going fairly well planned until we get to the lasange noodles. I forgot to mention that when I got home from the grocery store the day before I looked at the noodle box to see if I had to boil the lasagne noodles before I baked them in the oven or whether they would be ok just in the oven. And a good thing I checked because the directions on the box said make the lasagna, pour a box of milk on top of your lasagne and put in the fridge over night for the noodles to soak up the milk and have a soft texture. Now this seemed very strange to me. But I decided to put half the box of noodles in a bowl with milk over night just in case. It might be ok right? WRONG. Now the next day, the day of the dinner, I go to start making my first lasagne, and the noodles are all stuck together and mooshy in this bowl of milk that has been in the fridge. Ugh, these noodles just look disgusting. So I decide to boil the rest of the box of lasagne noodles to use in the first lasagne. Although this means I’ll have to run to the store for a second box of lasagne noodles. No problem. I boil the noodles and when the garlic comes out of the oven, I run to the store and pick up a second box of lasagne noodles, and vanilla ice cream, which I hadn’t been able to find because Baunilla wasn’t written on the carton, it was Crema. Sigh, how was I to know crema was vanilla, when it’s sitting next to the corn flavored ice cream and mangaba fruit sorbet?

Ok so back to the house with a new box of noodles. As those are boiling away I make my first lasange. Noodles, meat, cheese…..ok so the big block of ricotta cheese is really ricotta cheese. Except that it’s hard and in block form. So I’m not really sure how to appropriately spread (well spreading is definitely out of the question and there’s no cheese grater in the apartment, so slice is a more accurate word) this cheese. I decide for thin little half moons, and this with some buffalo (yes it was mozzarella and since there was no grater, I sliced in half moons) cheese went on the lasagne in some of the layers. I hit a slight problem when it came to the sauce. Now the four boxes of sauce I had bought, well it turns out you don’t diloute them. You use as is; it is not a box of tomato paste. So I decide to use all four boxes on the meat lasagne knowing that it requires another commitment of running back to the grocery store. But the last thing anyone wants is a dry lasange…..so after the first lasagne is done and wrapped in aluminum foil ready for the oven I head back to the store.

Now at this time it’s dark outside and I live three blocks from the grocery store, which is in the opposite direction of the well-lit and highly trafficked area of the beach, where I run every night. Now I try to avoid doing activities after dark in Brazil to minimize my chance of having some sort of scary encounter. But in light of the fact that I NEED sauce, there is a second lasagne that needs my help, and I always feel slightly frustrated of the fact that I am always wary of potentially scary encounters in Brazil (I mean really it’s a three block walk to the grocery store from my house, and I never do it after dark, even if I’m out of food, to avoid potential scary occurrences, and there is part of me that thinks this is slightly ridiculous) I put on my running shoes and literally sprint the three blocks to the grocery store. Running as fast as I can:

a) because people are coming in an hour and my lasagnas are not in the oven and

b) because I don’t want a scary encounter.

I get four more boxes of sauce, realize I have forgotten brown sugar as well and spend 10 painstaking minutes explaining to the store clerk that indeed regular sugar is different from brown sugar, of which they have none in the entire store and I wind up with no brown sugar for my cookies. I buy my four more boxes of sauce, sprint back to the apartment, and arrive back to my hot, sweltering kitchen, very sweaty and in a rush to get the second lasagne done. As if something else can’t go wrong, the second lasange pan is smaller than the first one and after I put a layer of veggies, the cheese, and the sauce in the pan, it is full. A lasaagne is not a lasagne without layers, so I sigh and try and squish things down to add another layer. I succeed but my veggie lasagne is bulging over the sides, threatening to spill with the slightest touch.

The lasagnas go in the oven, I turn the oven on, then comes the problem of setting the temperature. When I had made the banana bread, my roomie had set the oven temp for me, and when I roasted the garlic it was easy because it was on the lowest setting possible. But for the lasagne, I only had the Fahrenheit temperature, and no internet at home to know the conversion to Celsius. However, that wouldn’t have really helped because all the numbers on the oven dial were rubbed off, so I really had no idea what temperature I was setting the oven to. So how long are these lasaagnes supposed to be in the oven if I don’t know the temperature? I had no idea. So I finish making the garlic bread and the cucumber and mint salad. It’s now 7:15, my first guest has arrived and the batter for the cookies is not done. And I am still in sweaty running clothes, looking and smelling like no chef ever should in the kitchen.

I try to quickly whip up my cookie batter, except that I am once again frustrated by the lack of measuring cups, and with my specific and proper amount of butter (2 sticks), it is tougher to know how to measure ¾ cup of sugar and 2 and ½ cup of flour by a larger drinking size glass measurement of a cup. And let’s again remember that there is no brown sugar. Now any betty crocker’s out there that automatically know a subsitute for brown sugar on short notice, in a poorly stocked kitchen, well I could have used your help. I kept wracking my brain thinking yogurt- no we have strawberry flavored yogurt, that’s gross, and I had no idea how to say molasses at the grocery store to make my own brown sugar. So I just used double the amount of regular sugar and called it a day, although I was nervous that somehow this would affect the taste, texture or baking potential of the cookies, although not much that can be done at this point.

Ok to wrap up this long-winded cooking blog entry, let’s cut to the chase, everything turned out well. The lasagne’s were great, garlic bread delicious and cookies and ice cream a big hit. Everyone loved the cooking and my roomie suggested I live with her forever and open an American restaurant here in Joao Pessoa. Take home messages from this blog entry: No one likes a dry lasagne, and who knew that throwing a dinner party in Brazil could be so difficult?!

Banana Bread Obrigada

This week’s crazy story involved cooking. Since I am leaving Joao Pessoa soon and moving onto Fortaleza to start research (finally!), I wanted to do something nice for the professor and everyone in her lab, who have helped me out so much while I’ve been here.

To thank the Professor and the Lab, I invited everyone to a coffee break, promising everyone coffee and homemade banana bread, or so I thought. Just a little back ground on this story, so you can fully appreciate what is to come next. First, the professor and I have had some difficulties lately, due to the fact that I still don’t have a permit to do my research in Ceará. Needless to say it’s been a frustrating process especially as the time to start my project is drawing near. So I was hoping that this coffee and banana bread effort on my part would help smooth over some ruffled feathers on both parts. Ok, the second behind the scenes information you need to know is about my living situation. So I live with one of the undergrads from the lab and her cousin. And occasionally the undergrad's parents. After two months of living in this apartment I’m still confused as to when, why and if the parents sometimes live in the apartment. Mostly it’s just been the dad that stays at the apartment for an occasional night, always unannounced it seems and usually just for one night. However, the father and mother turned up on a Sunday night this week, and stayed for a few days.

The first night the parents were in town, the daughter cooked dinner for us all. To make a contribution I decided to test out my recipe of banana bread, to see if it would go over well and to see if I should indeed make it for the Lab. I was able to find most of the ingredients for the banana bread in the grocery store- one ginormous bag of flour, check. Eggs- check. Bananas-check. Sugar-check. Vanilla (baunilla in Portuguese)- check. Baking soda (bicarbonato de sodio)-check. The only thing I had trouble finding was chocolate chips, cause everyone loves a little chocolate banana combo. I searched and hunted through the entire grocery store and was only able to find little round white and milk chocolate balls in a little package mixed together. Not quite chocolate chips, but good enough. Now I have all my ingredients, I go back to the apartment and while my roomie cook’s dinner, I work on my banana bread. The first hurdle is that there are no official measuring utensils. No teaspoons, no tablespoons, no measuring cups, nothing. Now I can’t speak for everyone’s cooking experiences, but the way I learned from my mom and from other’s is that you follow a recipe and generally abide by the measured amounts. So with nothing more than a plastic cup generally used for drinking to try to determine measurements, I warily set off mixing my ingredients for the banana bread. My roomie turns on the oven, I find a nice looking round baking dish and an hour later voilah, my first baking attempt in Brazil is complete. It looks good, it smells good, and thankfully according to everyone at the dinner table, including myself, it tastes pretty good too.

Ok now, kind of back to the story at hand. So I manage to talk to the professor and we agree on the day and time for the coffee break. I send out an email to everyone in the lab ~ 14 + people, inviting them to coffee and homemade banana bread. I go home, make the banana bread again and leave it over night to cool, on the counter, next to the plate with two slices of my previous banana bread. The apartment goes to sleep. The next morning, I wake up, go downstairs and find that my roomie’s parents have eaten half of my newly made banana bread and cut large wedge-like chunks through the remaining bit. Shock. Horror. Anger. Frustration. My peace offering to the professor! My demonstration of gratitude for the Lab! My new banana bread! And here’s the kicker- the two pieces of banana bread left from the other night, are still there, where they had been the night before! Although instead of looking like they are still edible, the parents have put used napkins and bread crusts on this plate, and on top of the untouched banana bread, rendering them unusable for the Lab. Not only is it bad enough that half of my new cake is gone, the way the rest of the banana bread is cut makes it near-impossible to cut smaller pieces than the six wedge-shaped ones left. Now let’s recall that I invited over 14 people to this little coffee break. It’s the morning of, I don’t have enough banana bread and I don’t have time to run to the grocery store to get more bananas to make a new bread! What will the professor think? She’ll think I’m rude inviting all these people and then not having enough banana bread. Disaster, Impending Doom! Full-fledged panic sets in for about 5 minutes.

Ok now we’ll fast forward to the end of this story, which is happy. I manage to cut what was left of the banana bread into 6 more slices making the total slices 12. Thankfully not all 14+ people turned up to the coffee break. Everyone enjoyed the banana bread, the coffee and it all ended well. Several people joked they wanted to marry me because the banana bread was that good. The professor appreciated my gesture, it smoothed things over and everything is good. Whew, what a relief. Baking part 1 in Brazil a success!

Guaramiranga

Yes I'll ad mit it. I spent a long easter weekend camping, (eek!) in the mountains (eek!), three hours away from the closest beach. And here's the strange thing, I actually liked it! The weather was cold (and yes I believe that in the 60's is cold, especially given how hot it's been-90's- since I got here). Yes I wore my beanie, but other than that I was unprepared for the cold weather, which led me to buy this super sexy coat out of the back of a brazilian truck for 10 reais.

This easter weekend trip was a Fulbright get-a-way. A time for the four of us Fulbrighters based out of Fortaleza to spend a weekend hanging out, speaking a bit of english (finally!) and swapping crazy stories of living in Brazil. So let's introduce the characters for this crazy weekend in the mountains.

Here is Mike, (brazilians pronounce it Mik-ey, which is how I hear it in my head when I mention his name). Mike is a Fulbright MTV-scholar, which means he gets to write a blog for MTV about his Fulbright work. Check it out here.

So Mike is studying Forro music in Ceará, his research is entitled, Climate, Culture and Cancao, Drought and Forro music in Ceara Brazil.

Basically he gets to interview musicians and listen to music for his Fulbright. Not too bad eh?

Next we have Ross. (or as Brazilians sometimes call him, Hoss, because the R is kind of pronounced as an "H" in portuguese here). In this photo we have Hoss imitating his favorite animal as a child.....ok here's a hint...it is a sea creature.....here's another hint....it's a four letter word rhyming with teal....yes SEAL. you guessed it. Ross is studying Agro-energy Development and Social Inclusion in Northeastern Brazil.

Yes this sounds fairly complex to me too, but I think it has to do with planting crops for bio-fuels. Forgive me Ross if I've botched this up and this in no-way related to what you are doing.

The third Fulbrighter in our weekend get-away to the mountains is Colin. He teaches English at a community/technical college in Fortaleza. This weekend was also Colin's 23rd birthday. Colin's favorite childhood animal was a lemur, although he refused to pose as a lemur for his photo.

And we've got me. yours truly, author of the blog. see mom, I'm alive and well in my adventures in Brazil.

Guaramiranga is about 3 hours away from the coast into the interior of the state of Ceará. Despite my horror at being so far away from the coast, there were tons of fun things about Guaramiranga. One of which was the silly decorations and people dressed up as rabbits walking around for Easter.

So we traveled up the mountains by car, Mike has a car, and three hours later we arrived in a cooler climate. While we were there for two days we hiked and played around in the numerous waterfalls the region is known for.

This photo below is of the Dangerous Waterfall, the biggest and largest (?) in this area.

Here's a photo of the boys doing their favorite childhood animal. Colin-the lemur. Mike-the sloth and Ross- the seal! I was busy being the seahorse and taking the photo in the background.

Fast fact: Portuguese word for waterfall = cachoeira (cashew-era)

One strange an interesting thing that we saw throughout the weekend were these life-like scarecrows or dolls that had writing all over their faces. We saw them sitting on the side of roads, hanging out of windows, and underneath windshield wipers on moving cars. We finally asked what these things were, and it turns out that they represent Judas. Everybody creates their own, hangs it in visible places and then on the saturday between Good Friday and Easter people get together and burn them. I think as punishment because Judas betrayed Jesus. What an intense Easter tradition.

Never-the-less we went out for a nice dinner on Colin's birthday, at this cute little restaurant on the side of a cobblestone street. We had a delicious bottle of wine and a free taster of cachaça at the end of the meal. Another super special treat for Colin's birthday was the pasta festival! Although we didn't see much pasta on the menus or on the streets free to eat. So this aspect of the festival remains sort of a mystery to us. And just in case you thought we didn't organize any music for Colin, the festival sponsored an electric violin concert! Yeah! So we spent some quality time rocking out to song's like Final Countdown and Abba's Dancing Queen on electric violin. Yes that's right, if you click on those links, those songs are played on an electric violin. wow. If that's not the best birthday present, then I don't know what is?!

A brief voyage into Recife and SHARKS!

So right before I headed to Porto de Galinhas, I had a brief day stop in Recife to meet up with my friend. Recife is known for its diving but mostly for its sharks! Everyone I've talked to in Brazil when I ask them about sharks says, "Oh, Recife, that's where all the sharks are located." Naturally I headed to the beach soon after I arrived to see if I could see the sharks myself. So right away on the beaches there are huge signs saying- Danger, sharks are present here. You are at a greater risk of shark attack by entering these waters.

How absolutely crazy is that? They have multiple signs in multiple different languages. Surfing isn't permitted because of all the sharks. I think to myself, what makes all the sharks come to Recife? And is this really true? Or is this heresy? Do shark populations really inhabit these waters in higher numbers?

Perhaps this is why the boats are named after a religious tone here? No, the truth of the matter is that there is a fairly large river that empties our near Recife. Upstream from the river there are lots of farms. Back in the day, and it's unclear to me how far back we are talking (5,10,20,100 years?) the cattle farmers upstream used to kill the cattle and dump the dead carcasses and blood into the river. These lovely items would travel downstream and empty out into the ocean, thus calling the sharks to this local for a scrumptious feast.

This behavior became ingrained in the sharks and even though the farmers have changed what they do with the bodies, rumor has it there is still an unusually large population of sharks in Recife. So I decided to have a chat with some of the lifeguards to see check on the inside scoop. I found out that there were 4 shark attacks last year on the main beach, Boa Viagem in Recife. No one died from these attacks (whew!). The lifeuards had seen a shark swimming around withim 100 meters of the beach just this morning. And we also found out that if there was a shark attack right here right now, the lifeguards would do nothing. Wait until it was all over and then proceed. I'm not sure if that is somehow reassuring.....i.e. who really wants to get in the water during a shark attack, even if your job is to save someone.....or whether that's scary. I mean it's their job....their lifeguards! One more shark fact from Recife, there are three types of sharks (according to the lifeguards) that inherit the area, the lemon shark, nurse shark and bull shark. However, performing a google scholar search on sharks in Recife turned up quite a larger number of shark species including the smalltail shark, blue shark, sharpnose shark and blacknose shark. I hunted around for a while but I couldn't find a scientific article stating whether shark populations were actually higher here than in other parts of Brazil or whether the occurrence of attacks is higher because perhaps this is an area where sharks and humans overlap with their habitat use.

A recent article, entitled "A Shark Attack Outbreak off Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil: 1992-2006", published in 2008 in the Bulletin of Marine Science, states that there were 47 incidents during this time with 17 fatalities. Most victims were male surfers with the peak time for attacks in July. One interesting tidbit was that no attacks were recorded on Wednesdays. (I know when I'm planning my next snorkel trip to Recife!) The article goes on to say that the buildling of a port, just south of this area and it's environmental degradation may have displaced the sharks from their native habitat into other areas with a larger human presence. BBC does a pretty good job explaining shark attacks in Recife.

Another interesting environmental problem they had in Recife's main beach was erosion! Yes Jennie Dean your master's project has implications for what Brazilians could be doing down here in Recife!

So as you can see by this picture, at high tide, the waves come right up to the sea wall. What used to be a prime area of large beach expanse has eroded away to no sand at high tides. Shoreline erosion, which occurs on both exposed and sheltered coasts, occurs primarily through the action of currents and waves, but sea level (tidal) change can also play a role. It seems as though everywhere I look from North Carolina, to Nantucket, to even Recife, Brazil, entire coastlines are slip sliding away into the sea through erosion. We as humans often build jetties, sea walls, groins, sand bags or other elaborate devices to stop erosion from affecting our coastal areas. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't.

I briefly attempted to dig a little into coastal erosion policy in Brazil and was met with a few too many high level papers and websites in Portuguese for this to be a quick study to write about in this blog. I'm going to have to do a little bit of research and get back to you on it....but seeing those sandbags in Recife made me wonder how Brazilian's are trying to deal with their coastal erosion problem, the successes and failures they've had with these policies and whether there is anything to be learned by Brazil or by the US from what the other has done to combat these problems.

If anyone knows a few good papers on this please pass them along my way. Learning about the sharks in Recife and seeing the signs for myself was pretty cool. I wish I had had enough guts to go for a swim (don't worry Mom, I wasn't THAT crazy.....).............perhaps next time : )

Porto De Galinhas: Part 2

So my second day in Porto De Galinhas, we decide to go out to the tide pools at low tide and see what there is to see. I snorkel my way out there, and despite my best efforts yesterday in the pool, my friend goes out by jangada boat with no interest in snorkeling out to the reef. The reef was not the best I've seen but I did manage to find a few nice hard corals like the one above.
I also saw this eel, munching on something under a rock. Cool find!

Another nice coral species.......

And of course in the tide pools there were lots of my favorite fish, the seargeant major, aka Abudefduf saxatilis or backwards Silitaxis fudfeduba! Everyone on the jangada got handfuls of fish food to get these babies to eat out of your hand.

Here's my friend, doing his marine biologist pose, in front of the jangadas. What a professional!

The visibility wasn't all that great for taking photographs under the water, but I snorkeled around for about 2 hours trying to find the most interesting things the reef had to offer. I found this guy, Diodon hystrix or the Porcupinefish hiding under a ledge.

After snorkeling out to the reef, we went exploring to find the seahorse building in town. We found it, along with a room full of aquarium's next door.

We saw soo many seahorses in the tanks! Here is a tankful of babies.

Here's a pretty looking yellow fellow.....

Also a nice vermelho (red) one in another tank. So I asked Ierece about this place when I got back and I also talked to the researchers there. It turns out that they do not have funding from the government and they mostly focus on environmental education. However Ierece also told me that it was this lab that trained the fishermen to do the seahorse eco-tourism, which they think are having a negative impact on the environment and seahorse populations in this estuary. I guess this group of researchers also has a history of collecting seahorses for their aquarium tanks without a permit from the environment department. Seems like I've come across my first instance of politics within the seahorse realm down here in Brazil. And all unknown by me!

Regardless of the politics, I still had an amazing weekend, filled with seahorses (surprisingly!), funny looking chickens, jangada boats and brazilian company!