March 9, 2023

Day 55 of our 180 day world cruise. Hard to believe so much time has gone by already.

Today our tour was Maceio highlights. Well, there really weren’t too many highlights here. We spent most of our time on the bus driving through the city with our tour guide, Flavio. He never stopped talking and he held the microphone so close to his mouth that the words were pretty muffled and I stopped paying much attention.

When we arrived in port, we were docked next to this huge pile of salt. We heard from Flavio that it is imported from Chile for use in the chemical plants here. The main exports are sugar, spices and coconut.

We drove by some beautiful beaches. Much of the city is pretty poor but the residences near the beaches are lovely. Flavio did warn us not to walk around by ourselves. We hear this in every city in Brazil.

We stopped for a visit to Our Lady of Pleasure Church. It has undergone a massive renovation. We sat in the church for a while but again, could not hear most of the commentary.

One quite interesting thing we saw was this group of stands in a market. The train tracks run right through the market so they need to move all the merchandise and tents three times a day for the trains to come through!

They speak Portuguese here, like in all of Brazil, but here they do not teach any other languages in the schools so if anyone speaks another language, they must learn it on their own.

Our last stop was a handicraft market which had all touristy products, and nothing we wanted to buy. We did see a woman doing the weaving of the garments that are sold here.

Nice picture of the full moon and one Norm took of me on the balcony!

Tomorrow we are in Recife Brazil and have two more ports after that. I am pretty sure we will not return to Brazil, not our favorite for many reasons. including terrible Wi-Fi, 25% tax, crime, taking our temps both when getting off and getting back on the ship, making the crew wear masks the whole time the ship is in or near Brazil, shops and casino closed and dirty cities to name just a few things. In fact, the whole time in Brazil, WiFi has been erratic or not working at all. You can see how late this post is. I used cell service to get online for email but even that is very bad and there is no way to do the blog with just cell service. Antarctica was better for internet service, ironically!