Hot as Blue Blazes in Recife, Brazil, November 28, 2023

France was chilly, Barcelona was pleasant and today in Recife (ruh-see-fee) was hot! First we rode a small bus to the passenger terminal, then a big bus to the city of Recife, then a minivan up a hill to a church and and street market in Olinda, the neighboring city, then a minivan back to the big bus, then a big bus back to the passenger terminal, then a small bus back to the ship.

My patience might be wearing a little thin with the bus thing. It takes so much time for everyone to get on and off. And then we have to walk slowly on rough cobblestone sidewalks, through churches, etc. as a group. Of course, a lot this slowness is due to it being an older crowd on these ships, so I keep telling myself that some day I will have a cane and try my darnedest to stay out in front of everyone even though I know it would be polite to let others go ahead because I am walking so, so slowly. And if they try to get ahead of me, I will give them a stern, icy look that says, “Are you trying to run me over?”

So, where was I? According to Leo, our tour director for the day, Recife is named for the long reef recife running parallel to the shoreline which encloses its harbour. The reef is not a coral reef, but an ancient stone beach. Our first stop on today’s tour was The Golden Chapel in Recife, where a choral group of teenagers were singing. Leo seemed completely surprised that they were there, but the letters they were holding up in front of them spelled Jupiter Viking, the name of our ship, but backwards from Viking Jupiter.

Strangely, the official language in Brazil is Portuguese, not Spanish. The Portuguese first colonized Recife and Olinda in about 1535 and it remained a colony until 1822. However, the Portuguese had a few problems over the years. Recife was raided by French pirates in 1561 and by the English in 1595. In 1630 or so it was captured by the Dutch, who held it for 24 years. Olinda sits on a hill, and the Dutch liked that spot, so they burned most of the city to the ground and started over. Leo gave us a lot more history, but I had reached overload at that point, probably due to the heat and the slow walkers.

Most stupid comment of the day: Almost all of the buildings in both Recife and Olinda had a black mold on them because Recife has a tropical monsoon climate. Anyway, Leo told us that the last church we saw today in Olinda, Holy Savior of the World, was burned by the Dutch in 1635, and completely rebuilt. So someone on one of the tours asked, “Is the black stuff on the church due to the fire?” Seriously?

Our final stop was a street market where we had fresh, cold coconut water or milk. It was muito bom.