For Tuesday I decided to explore the Atlantic north shore again, Lauro de Freitas. After breakfast I checked my email. A woman I had written to had received my postcard and replied to it. She said she was going to her parents' home in Aracaju to see the carnival there called Pre-Caju and invited me to spend the week-end there. I accepted. The day had started off well.
I boarded a bus that was headed to LF and stayed on it until the end of the line. That was in a beach town called Bucarinho. It appeared to be a well to do area. There was the typical uninterrupted sand of the Atlantic beaches, except the barracas were interrupted by back yards. There was no road beside the beach. Only a brick pedestrian walkway than ran between the beach and the homes. Every 3 or 4 houses there was an accessway to the street. Where the houses were modest, barracas were on the beach. Where the house were large and nice, there were no barracas. Many of these nice homes were indeed VERY nice. Their yards were large and well landscapes with many tress and shrubs. Several also had swimming pools. What impressed me was the lack of security. Out of the 2 dozen or so large nice houses I passed by, only 2 or 3 had fences that would keep out humans. The other had clearly decorative fences no more than 3 or 4 feet high that would only keep out animals such as dogs. It suggested to me that crime was not a serious problem here and that contrasted with the security gates and guards at every apartment building in the city. I could tell another reason why these homeowners might not want high fences. These people, and some were actually doing so, could lounge in their yards and take in the beach, the ocean, the sun, and the sky. With a high fence this spectacular view is lost.
I took some refreshment at a barraca. The owner was from Argentina and had been in Brazil for 20 years. He lived in his barraca with his wife and young child. I noticed that a back room served as the bedroom. In the barraca next door, a young woman washed clothes and hung them up to dry. The beach here was very nice. The sand was clean and soft, the breeze cool, and the ocean waves moderate. I hung out here until dusk.
When I returned to my hotel, the clerk handed me a stack of messages. Nine (9!!!) woman had called me during the day. Success!!! I called them back at the numbers they left. Most had not yet returned home from work but one had left her work number and agreed to meet me later that evening. Another lady, who lived in another city in Bahia, was home and we talked for 30 minutes or so. Her story was that she had already married a man several weeks earlier. He was an American, 52 years old, White, and lived in a midwest state. She was 24 years old, mulatta, and waiting for her spousal visa application to be approved. He had called her by phone, followed that up with some visits, and they then married. The courtship lasted 7 months. She called me because she wanted to hook me up with a 28 year old friend of hers. As she lived 7 hours away from Salvador, I said I preferred to write her after I returned to the US and meet her on another trip than try to meet her on this trip. She gave me her friend's name and vitals and instructed me to send my letter to her own address. She would forward it to her friend.
I met the first Latin Euro lady at my hotel and we walked to a nearby bar, which had live entertainment, to talk. In my opinion it started badly because her profile information was not just a little out of date but WAY out of date. Rather than being 25 and single she turned out to be 33 and MARRIED! She explained that she and her husband had been separated for the past 4 years, he now lived in Recife, and they just hadn't gotten divorced yet. She seemed quite insecure about her appearance, asking me several times if I thought she was pretty. From my point of view, things were going from bad to worse in that she had the very annoying (to me)habit of interrupting my answers to her questions. She would ask me a question, interrupt my answer thing another completely unrelated question, and then 15 minutes later ask me the very same question whose answer she had interrupted earlier! She was fairly pretty but I was very unimpressed with her personality and behavior. As we prepared to leave, after about 2 hours of conversation, she asked what I thought of her. Not wanting to hurt her feelings but also dreading giving her any indication of false encouragement, I replied that we were not compatible for marriage, nor was she available for marriage, but I'd like to be friends. I am not going to contact her again.
