Only in Parajuru.....

Acorda Parajuru! Acorda Parajuru! (wake up, wake up Parajuru!)

I roll over and look at my research assistant and then at my watch. It's 4 AM. It's sunday morning, and my research assistant and I are in Parajuru, a beach town to the east of Fortaleza. We have had an unusual 24 hours, made only stranger by our early morning wake up call.

Let me start from the beginning, my research assistant and I caught an early morning bus to Parajuru to do research for the weekend. We didn't have a place to spend the night, or know anyone in Parajuru, but in Ceara, it's normal to turn up in a beach town for the weekend and find a place to stay once you are there. We weren't 100% sure where to get off the bus either, and so as we neared our destination, we struck up a conversation with a young guy who we had overheard tell the bus driver he was going to Parajuru. It turns out luck was on our side, and this school teacher from Parajuru turned out to be our hero for the day.

When we got to Parajuru, he helped us find a place to stay, took us to lunch, helped us do research, brought us dinner from his parents restaurant and took us out at night. All throughout the day he kept saying, "Only in Parajuru"......

So "Only in Parajuru...."

1) would we have to walk for 30 minutes in thick mud, getting extremely dirty, at the end of doing research (watch this video of my research assistant trying to cross this stream in the mangrove mud.....)

2) would we find 3 seahorses, including the first juvenile seahorse with filaments I've see in Ceara

3) would we find out that Parajuru has a night club and go and visit it.....

4) would we see the town blind man, standing outside the nightclub at 1 AM, snapping his fingers and dancing

5) would we have tapioca and grilled chicken brought to us for free, courtesy of the Professor's family restaurant

5) would we eat homemade ice cream at the house of the Professor

6) would I have a black cat sneeze consistently on my ankles while I ate dinner

7) would we see 12 baby kittens on the side of the road

8) would we walk 4 km after getting muddy doing research because the professor's cell phone died and we had no way to call a ride

9) would the muddy muddy mangrove areas be known as the lover's lane of Parajuru...that's right guys if you want to take your lady to a secret spot for a little smooch, nothing sets the atmosphere like mudy muddy mangroves.....

10) would my research assistant and I sit on the back of a moto taxi together to get to and from our research site....the second time covered in mud.....

11) be awakened at 4 AM by the equivalent of the town crier, yelling in Portuguese, Wake up Parajuru! Wake up!

12) would we meet so many people with names I can't pronounce.....like Azaiel...Drvonka (drah-vonka?), pedoroda (pay-door-o-da)....or at least I think those were the names....

13) see a german mother and her two young teenage daughters dancing with the same young gentlemen at the Parajuru club.....

14) would we play a game at a restaurant, with the rules written on the table, which led to the Professor singing at the top of his voice a song about how much he loved Jesus, me trying to dance like Michael Jackson, and my research assistant giving a 43 second stare to someone at another table. (yes the rules of the game were quite strange....kind of like truth or dare but not really....)

15) would we make plans to meet the professor, at the same time, on the same bus, next month, to visit Parajuru....