A Trip with a Bizarre Experience

We started the day in Maragogi, where we had to catch a bus at noon to Recife. This gave us some time to hit the beach first, where Honny sprawled out in a hammock while I laid on the sand soaking up the sun, sipping on sucos, fresh juice. The bus arrived on time, so at noon we found ourselves on yet another bumpy bus ride heading north to Recife. There was no air conditioning, so we had to stick our heads out the windows to cool off :) By 3 PM, we arrived in Recife, the first city founded in Brazil. The bus station is about 15 km outside the city, so we grabbed a taxi that fortunately knew exactly where our hostel was located. The hostel came highly recommended in the Rough Guide to Brazil, with great reviews, so we were expecting something really special. Unfortunately, it turned out that none of the staff spoke even a little English, which lowered our rating of the place a bit. However, we decided to stay since we wanted to be close to the action—markets and nightlife. We quickly struck up a conversation with some other guests. A Brazilian named something like "Vinge Sus" and a German named Gaby both spoke English, which was a relief. "Vinge Sus" knew of a place where there was supposed to be a party that night, so he invited us and Gaby along. We were to meet at the hostel at 9 PM, where his friend would come by to pick us up. We went out to find a good spot for dinner before heading back to meet them. We ended up at a pizza restaurant, where we managed to order the best pizza—20 reais for a massive pizza :) Back at the hostel, Vinge Sus' friend arrived at 9:30, which is basically 9 Brazilian time :) We drove to a square downtown where a party was in full swing. People were going wild to a samba band. There, we met up with more of their friends, who all fortunately spoke English "mais ou menos" (more or less). We also went to another spot where there was a street party. People prefer to party outside since the nights are really warm. On the way home, we took a taxi by ourselves because we didn’t want to ride back with the others. There’s a very relaxed attitude towards drinking and driving here. In the taxi on the way back, we were stopped by the police at a roadblock. At first, it was quite amusing. We thought the police were doing a good job of enhancing safety. They checked the taxi driver’s papers and the trunk. Suddenly, the focus shifted to us. They wanted to see our identification, so we pulled out our driver’s licenses. That wasn’t enough; they wanted to see our passports. No one spoke English, and we were bombarded with long explanations in Portuguese. Even though we said we didn’t understand Portuguese, they just kept going with their lengthy explanations. We tried to explain that it’s not smart to carry your passport around in case you get mugged. But that didn’t help. We realized they wanted money to let us go! What kind of police just lets people go—imagine if we were illegal immigrants... Honny managed to explain that our money was at the hostel, and suddenly we weren’t so interesting anymore. Of course, we had money on us, but we didn’t want to just hand over 80 reais per person. Our first encounter with corrupt police :)