After being disappointed by St. Helena, we set off for the longer of the two passages, heading to Recife, Brazil, on the coast of South America. I’ve been excited to visit South America for years—it’s super high on my bucket list—so I was excited when we planned to spend the last few months of the school year and my AP exam in May in Brazil.
The passage was about two weeks long and actually flew by without any hiccups. I did a ton of schoolwork, however, mostly centered around the AP Psychology course I’ve been taking this year. I plan to take the exam in May and wanted to finish the course with plenty of time to review and feel secure in my knowledge—though I have a feeling I’m not going to do super well. So, over the passage to Brazil, I buckled down on the course, not focusing on my other classes (which is paying off now), and instead finishing it before we pulled into Recife. Since then, I’ve refocused on my other classes and caught up in time to begin meeting with my teachers again.
We’ve been docked in Recife now for about a week and we’ve cleared into the country, explored some of the city’s history, and gotten familiar with the layout of the marina. For me, I’ve been focusing on school, but we all took a break yesterday for my dad’s birthday to explore all the cool stuff he wanted to know about Recife.
This past week, we’ve been marking Recife on our checklist of a new place that I mentioned in my St. Helena post. So far, we’ve run into some basic problems: the water is dirty, there are rats at the marina (a really big “no, no” for us!), and the climate is so different from Southern Africa, we’ve been sweating nonstop. Even as I sit here after the sun’s set, I am still sweating illogically! After that, some other frustrations we’ve had is with the language barrier here. Recife is a large city in Brazil, but not as big as Rio, so it’s not exactly centered around catering to English-speaking foreigners. All the same, we’ve been super surprised by the lack of any English and had to quickly up our game in Portuguese. Also, of course, it’s Portuguese—of course! They just had to be the only Portuguese-speaking country in South America! Argh!
Other than that, we had a ton of fun exploring everything about the city, and the history is super novel and interesting to us. If we can get past the basic problems, I can see us loving it here for the next six weeks!