I set foot in Brazil and never wanted to leave.
We landed in Rio on a September evening, under a sky almost too orange to be real. The city hit me before I'd even left the airport: honking horns, coconut water vendors, and that warm air that sticks to your skin the second you step outside. I'd booked a small hotel in Santa Teresa, the hilltop neighborhood, and my room looked straight out over orange tiled roofs tumbling down toward the bay. Yuuki jumped onto the windowsill and didn't budge for an hour.
The next day, I decided to take the local bus to Ipanema. Bad idea. I ended up going the wrong way, toward the port, under a blazing sun, with Yuuki in his bag giving me the side-eye. I finally asked for directions from a lady selling acarajé on a street corner. She answered in a voice that was almost a song, with that Brazilian Portuguese that rolls and bounces, and slipped a warm fritter into my hand before I left. Black-eyed pea fritters fried in oil, stuffed with dried shrimp and vatapá, a spicy paste made from bread and peanuts. That spicy flavor was absolutely perfect!
Salvador completely blew me away. The facades of the Pelourinho changed color with the daylight, from lemon yellow to powder pink, and the musicians sitting at the bottom of the stairs played candomblé rhythms without a care in the world. That night, I understood that Brazil is truly one of a kind.
Brazil
Brazil from above
That morning, Christ the Redeemer was lost in the clouds. No panorama, no postcard view. We couldn't even make out his arms anymore, just a pale silhouette floating above us. Yuuki settled on the railing and stared into the void like someone who understood everything. I think he was meditating, or maybe watching for a bird, I never found out. The silence up there was so rare in Rio that it gave me goosebumps. As for me, I just soaked up the moment without taking a single photo.
Going with the flow
Our canoe glided slowly as the jungle closed in on both sides. No engine noise, no cell signal, just the calls of birds we couldn't see and the soft splash of the paddle. Yuuki sat at the front, ears up, on the lookout for something I couldn't hear. Then he spotted a lizard swimming across the river, decided it was a crocodile, and nearly capsized the whole canoe. Our guide laughed so hard he almost dropped his paddle. Yuuki pretended nothing had happened.
Every thread has a story
The lacemakers of Fortaleza work in the shade, their fingers flying over wooden bobbins. The patterns come from memory, passed down from mother to daughter for generations. I held up a finished piece at arm's length: hours of work in just a few inches of thread, so fine the light passed right through it. Yuuki wanted to get his paw on it. I stopped him just in time. I left with a small lace flower tucked in my notebook, my favorite souvenir of the whole trip.
必做清单 ♡
