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It’s now about 11:30PM on my first full day in Manaus, Brazil, though I expect this will be posted much later than that due to less than optimal connectivity. This delay seems rather appropriate, as I’m quickly discovering that timeliness and schedules are not a priority in the local culture.

In spite of the fact that I had taken a bit of a nap yesterday afternoon, I slept like a rock on my inflatable mattress. I awoke to the rumbling of nearby thunder, and the sounds of heavy rain on the tile roof. Every few minutes, when the wind picked up, there would come a loud thumping sound overhead, as the wind lifted and rattled the roof tiles, the dropped them back down.

Not long after I awoke and showered, my sister’s fiancé Yan dropped off breakfast, in the form of sandwiches comprised of egg, sausage, tucumã (a mildly sweet fibrous fruit), and cheese, accompanied by coffee & cupuaçu juice. Marnie explained to me that a cupuaçu was a hairy, egg-like fruit. The juice was a cloudy white color, and delicious.

A cupuaçu in my hand!

Halfway through our meal the power went out. My sister Marnie seemed unsurprised, cracked the window (for light) and moved the dog beds away from the window to stop them from getting soaked – we finished the meal by candlelight. The power was out for several hours, and all cell phone service went away as well. Apparently a large power station several miles outside the city had failed, and that failure had shut down powere to the whole city.

Marnie asked if I would like to join her as she walked the dogs. After so much time spent stationary, I decided that was a fantastic idea. We took them down the street, moving at a slow pace to accommodate their lethargic gaits, and made a right turn down a hill. We walked past a water treatment plan, shortly after which the road abruptly ended, and a steep hill led downward to a very shallow waterway. On the hillside were some ramshackle houses on platforms, and a boat in process of being built.

A boat under construction

To the west you could see it met up with the a huge body of slow-moving dark water, the Rio Negro. Marnie informed me that the river was currently at its low point. Towards the end of the rainy season, which was just starting, the canal would be completely full – and that the houses were in fact houseboats.

House boat? Or just house?

We returned to the apartment, passing a giant engine block that had apparently been sitting by the street for years (perhaps scrap has no value here), little housefront shops, and a small child with an incredible mane of hair.

The power came back on early in afternoon, but at that point it had already thrown a monkey wrench in the wedding preparations – since all businesses were closed, the suits were still at the cleaners, the rings had not been picked up, and Marnie’s nails were yet to be done. Yan had the car to attempt to accomplish some of the wedding-related tasks, and so we were stuck at the apartment until he returned. Marnie made a delicious lunch of fried sausage, onions & peppers, along with farofa and some leftover fish stew.

At 4:00 Yan returned, mildy frantic from his attempts to get everything in line. Many businesses had remained closed, and so some final items would have to wait until tomorrow – the day of the wedding – to be finished. He drove us to the nail salon where Marnie received a manicure & pedicure, which ended up taking several hours.

The rehearsal was scheduled to happen at 7:00, so Yan picked me up from the nail salon then, leaving Marnie & my mother there, and we drove to the big blue Catholic church where the ceremony would be held. In a perfect example of the kind of Brazilian scheduling I was beginning to become accustomed to, not only were there no members of the wedding party present, there was a mass taking place, which appeared to be about half over. We returned to the salon with news that there was no hurry.

We returned to the church around 8:00, at which point the wedding party was beginning to arrive. At this point we discovered another wonderful example of Brazilian scheduling – the church band was rehearsing at the same time! Regardless, the rehearsal went smoothly. Marnie & Yan had run into trouble trying to get a photographer lined up for the wedding, so I had volunteered – in part because it would give me the opportunity to play with Marnie’s Canon 60D, the same camera much of my “Start To Begin” music video was shot with. I was able, from the rehearsal, to get enough of a sense of the flow of the ceremony that I felt prepared for the next day.

By the end of the rehearsal we were all starving, and realized we were in need of groceries for tomorrow morning’s breakfast, as we had cleaned out Marnie’s fridge to make our lunch. We made a 20 minute drive to the other side of the city, where the only late-night grocery store was located, and grabbed a delicious dinner of fried meats before shopping. When ordering, the waitress told us that it might not be enough food, as it was intended for 3 people and there were 5 of us present. When the food arrived, we were bemused by the massive mound of comestibles – for it to be consumed by 3 people, they would have to be world-class eaters. Needless to say, there were leftovers.

After dinner, we stopped by the grocery store. We tried to make it a quick visit, so we could get to bed early – after all, it’s a big day tomorrow! Though we found everything we needed quickly, our attempts at speed were thwarted when we arrived at the checkout line. The woman in front of us had a shopping cart filled with about 70 bottles of shampoo, each of which had to be rung up separately. When that process was finally complete, she tried three different credit cards, each of which was rejected, and finally resorted to paying cash. We waited for at least fifteen minutes before this process finally ended. Marnie informed me that this is how things always go at Brazilian grocery stores.

As soon as I finish writing this I’ll be going to sleep – Marnie’s hair & makeup stylists are supposed to arrive at 8:00 tomorrow morning, and will be working on here in the exact spot where my bed is situated. Given my experiences today, I’m going to make a bet that it will be closer to 8:45, but just in case they miraculously arrive on time, I want to be sure I’ve had enough sleep.

From Educandos, Manaus, Brazil… Boa Noite!

I have arrived in Brazil!

My journey here was only mildly arduous. The flight from Charlotte to Miami was mercifully short, as my seat neighbor was not the most pleasant company. I’ve never seen someone answer their cell phone, loudly, 30 seconds after the plane took off – the entire plane was staring at him as he shouted to his mother (in Spanish) that he couldn’t hear her very well. Fortunately he lost service before the flight crew had to intervene. I’m quite sure he didn’t speak a word of english, was constantly elbowing me, trying to curl himself up into most awkward, personal bubble-violating sleeping positions, sniffling, coughing and snorting. I was thrilled to exit the plane.

I quickly discovered that “Party in the city where the heat is on” is false advertising, and I shudder to think how high the Miami airport’s monthly air conditioning bill must be – they were keeping the temperature at about 55 degrees. I had the foresight to have worn shorts & a t-shirt for my travels, anticipating steamy weather in Brazil, and with a 5-hour layover in Miami I was soon shivering, and seeking any way to keep warm. I arrived at the airport at midnight, so it was like a ghost town, apart from janitorial staff and security.

The Miami Airport at 1:00 AM.

First I tried walking  from terminal to terminal, but the TSA agents started eying me suspiciously, so I returned to my gate, and kept my temperature up by doing pushups and situps for a while. The cleaning ladies looked confused, but didn’t bother me. I was then fortunate to discover a pile of 7 airline blankets. I wrapped myself with 5 of them, and folded the rest into a makeshift pillow.

I succeeding in sleeping a total of 45 minutes before I awoke with a very stiff neck to the sounds of voices – It was about 4:00 in the morning, and the airport was beginning to come back to life. I could smell coffee brewing at the Starbucks 100 feet down the terminal, but was disappointed to discover the didn’t open until 5:00, and boarding for my flight began at 4:40.

The flight to Manaus was uneventful – boarding went smoothly, and the plane was only about half full, so I had two seats to myself. I watched from the window until I saw the craggy southern mountains of Cuba drop abruptly into to the sea, and then slept for a few more hours. When I awake, we were flying over the jungle, and I could see a huge river snaking across the landscape below. The plane began to descend, and as we neared the ground I started to wonder if we were landing on a dirt landing strip, but seconds before we touched down pavement appeared below us. We hit the ground hard, and you could feel the plane shudder as the pilot applied a heavy hand to the brakes. “Bem-vindos a Manaus!” said the captain’s voice over the intercom.

The flight had arrived right on time, and I made it through customs quickly – they barely even looked at my papers, stamped them and sent me on my way. I figured this was probably not a common occurrence, and so I was prepared to wait a bit for my ride. I stepped outside the airport and was hit with a wave of light, heat and humidity. I sat down on a bench and waited, watching cars with heavily tinted window pass by. Given the brightness of the sun in spite of an overcast sky, I wasn’t surprised.

45 minutes later I heard a familiar voice call my name, and saw my sister Marnie running towards me. She, my parents, and her Brazilian fiancé Yan greeted me, very distressed to hear how long I’d had to wait. I assured them it hadn’t been a problem. We loaded my luggage in the trunk, crammed into Yan’s Fiat, and were soon weaving through the insanity that is Manaus traffic. Yan handled it deftly, with ease of one who’s been driving under these conditions his whole life, weaving through the narrow streets, dodging oncoming cars on the wrong side of the road, and instinctively braking right before being cut off by multiple motorcycle taxis. Marnie informed me that the fact they were all wearing helmets was a new thing, due to a recent governmental crackdown. Until recently, it had been commonplace to see riders carrying their helmets over their arms. A frequently told joke was, “A man died today in a tragic motorcycle accident. Miraculously, his left elbow as unharmed.”

We ate lunch – the big meal of the day for Brazilians – at an open-air restaurant. We ate a traditional meal of baked fish (Tambaqui and Marinxã, served head & all), farofa (a toasted manioc flour mixture), vinagrete (a vinegar-based pepper & onion salad), and caipirinhas (the national cocktail of brazil, made with sugar cane rum called Caçhaca, sugar, and lime).

Marnie with a Tambaqui (from several years ago)

Afterwards we headed to Marnie & Yan’s apartment, in the neighborhood of Educandos. On the drive there, I started to get a sense of how large the city is. It didn’t look like much from the air, but apparently Manaus has a population of two million. It’s located in the northern part of Brazil, in the Amazonas region, where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões meet to form the Amazon, their dark and light streams running side by side for four miles before the colors blend. Educandos is located on the eastern side of town, on the north bank of the Rio Negro. We pulled up in front of a two-story green building on a narrow street, through an iron gate to a narrow alley, and across cracked, slippery tile to the apartment.

We were greeted at the door by Marnie’s dogs, Laslo (a chihuahua) & Captain Jack (some sort of chihuahua mix who is decidedly NOT named after a certain character from a certain series of movies). The apartment is a small, two-story affair, with a tile-floor kitchen/living room with a bathroom in the corner downstairs, and a bedroom/office upstairs. As I’d slept all of about 3 uncomfortable hours, I unpacked my mattress, inflated it, and lay down for a nap.

I woke up a few hours later, mostly refreshed and still very full from lunch. We spent the evening relaxing, chatting, making plans for what needed to be accomplished tomorrow, drinking Brahma beer.

Time to sleep… There’s lots to be done tomorrow!