Dude! Where's my car?!

Danger danger danger! There should be a law against more than two caipirinhas in one evening! Last night, finally arriving home from Canada Night after an, AHEM, intentional late evening constitutional to help digest and NOT a lost wandering through the shadowy streets, I was incredibly tired but still had to pack for Olinda. I went out every evening in Curitiba and stayed out far too late and drank far too much to maintain my health. I have been feeling really "well" so far here but something turned on me last night. First the intense heart burn and minor nausea started as I was packing. I popped a gravol and went to bed. In the middle of the night, I woke up twice with what felt like food poisoning (but didn't ultimately manifest as any typical food poisoning outputs) AND these violent chills. I actually was able to fall back to sleep through the chills but was worried something more sinister lay underneath of these strange symptoms and I would miss my flight to Olinda and be found incapacitated by my airbnb host upon check out time and be cast out onto the streets with hemorrhagic dengue fever. (All of this worry, of course, without having seen one single mosquito yet here).

But I woke up with my alarm and "got 'er done". I arrived at the airport feeling nothing but very fatigued, a little weak with a touch of "sea-sickness" and highly painful heart burn all day. However, feeling pretty terrible in transit, coupled with some nuisances (e.g. some sort of sports team travelling from Curitiba to Brasilia that apparently had never been on an airplane before and had less than savoury airplane etiquette and seats that do not recline on the two and a half hour flight from Brasilia to Recife but rather were at a slight acute angle as far as I can tell AND arriving at the airport in Recife with no airport shuttle there to pick me up as planned....***where in the hell is MY CAR!!!**) made the trip rather torturous and I had to try and leave my body, basically. I believe my friend Lisa was right when she said, at Canada Night the night before, "there's a three drink limit on caipirinhas". I think that is actually a physiological, biochemical, medical "thing".

I grabbed a taxi, like a pleeb, from the Recife airport to Olinda due to the lack of a personal driver that was supposed to meet me. Olinda, I think, translates as "the beautiful". And beautiful it is:

Igreja do Sao Pedro Apostolo, Olinda

Rua Prudentes de Morais, outside of the Pousada Quatros Cantos

Olinda was originally founded by the Portuguese in the 1500s, a center of the sugar cane industry, and was named a world heritage site in 1982. As we drove through the city, my spirits began to lift, the 30 degree weather and the sunshine wrapped me in a warm tropical blanket and I checked into this lovely Pousada in a giant old colonial house that takes up an entire block in the center of Olinda:

Entering the courtyard of the Pousada Quatros Cantos, my home for the next three days

The door to my room at Quatros Cantos

A courtyard view from my room

My clean and simple room

I was exhausted and still having intense heartburn when I arrived but when they offered me a cold welcome drink with guava and cachaca, I couldn't refuse. After I drank it, my acid reflux seemed to vanish leading me to believe that it wasn't the cachaca after all but all of the lime that goes into the caipirihas! So note to self...switch to caipafrutas, the version of caipirinhas that just has other nice fruit in it rather than lime.

I unpacked, set up camp, and went in search of water and food and further sedated myself with a bowl of freshly in-house made tagliatelle bolognese at a little trattoria recommended by Herr Frommer, the great explorer. I drifted off to sleep to the gentle soothing sounds of frevo (a regional type of brass/big band latin American music that roughly translates as "fever") and intermittent monsoon showers. Not bad. Not bad at all.