We came back from this short trip with me sick. She had to go to work. So I spent a few days recuperating in the apartment and didn't go out at all. I mostly worked on the stuff I brought with me. We ate in, watched TV or a DVD, and talked. It rained daily so going to the beach was not a great thing to do. In fact, it rained so much in Sao Paulo that highways were closed and agricultural products were stranded on farms or in trucks, and some warehouses were flooded. The news talked about the necessity of destroying TONS of friuts and vegetables that were rotting on trucks or were contaminated by dirty flood waters.
As I recovered I spent more time using the gym and lost some weight. Unfortunately, I also recovered my apetite and we started eating at restaurants more. I gained most of it back. We started planning a second short trip to another city, Natal. A friend of hers wanted to come along. I agreed since that friend had allowed my noiva to tag along on a trip with her former namorado.
(Gossip Update: This friend is the same one that I had written about in March who had a German guy visiting her. She was not attracted to him because he was overweight and not as cleanly as she would like. After he returned to Germany, he had invited her to visit him and offered to pay for all her expenses UP TO the equivalent of around 1,700 euros. She wanted some extra money, around 350 euros, to buy new clothes. He apparently balked at this extra money and refused to give it to her. This made her angry and she called him cheap. That made him angry and he called her a money-shark. They are now broken up.
This friend had a another German visiting her recently. He was 60 years old but kept himself in good shape and looked 40. They seemed to not impress each other very much because he went to other cities to meet women. She didn't like that and when he returned he didn't spend much time with her.)
However, due to a family problem, she had to withdraw. We changed our own plans since it would be just us two now. That change included me not withdrawing more money because I didn't want so much money neither lying around an empty apartment nor tagging along buses and hotel rooms. That made our cash-on-hand situation tight. I made up a budget of how much we could spend each day. She was comfortable with it at first. After the first day, she suggested we spend more money per day and leave a day early. We had planned on 3 days but after 1 day I was content to stay only 2 days and agreed to her suggestion. I was very pleased with how she handled herself during this cash crunch.
Natal is a mostly industrial city in the northeast of Brazil. Its own beaches are rocky but the beaches of nearby towns are very nice. One of them, whose name escapes me, is known for huge sand dunes. We spent a morning there and walked through some of the dunes. There are buggy tours through them. There is a business that offers camel rides around a sand dune. One of the dunes slopes into the ocean. Someone made things similar to snowboards that people can sit on, ride down the dune, onto the beach and into the ocean. It is a very nice place to go to for a few days with a friend.
The hotel we stayed in in Natal is owned by 2 Spanish brothers. They had little positive to say about living in Spain. They described the cost of living in Spain and Europe in general in the same terms we describe the cost of living in the US. One said they 2 jobs were needed to live decently in Europe and you ended up living to work instead of working to live. They love living in Brazil and return to Spain only to visit.
