Belem

Travel has been pretty chaotic since last week's air disaster in Sao Paolo. By the end of the trip, we will have logged 18-20 flights in a mere 35 days, and the thought of 8 remaining flights is taking its toll on the group. Spirits are down, people are falling ill, and I'm left with one pack of Emergen-C. This morning I felt as if I hit The Wall, mile 20 in what has become an Amazing Race marathon. Fortunately, m and ms, my stateside elixer, are widely available throughout both rural and urban Brazil. I've loaded my carry on with enough little crinkly yellow packs to carry me through a night at the airport.

Belem - an elegant Amazonian city with a landscape shaped by the boom and bust of the rubber industry -has been good to us. We've been put up at the Crowne Plaza for two nights. The hotel is within walking distance to the wharf, offers a tasty breakfast buffet, and features a triangular shaped rooftop swimming pool, workout room, and sauna. It was there that I swam and steamed last night after a full day touring Belem, though I failed to capture an image of the strange sign that reads: no swimming. Seriously. Diving, on the other hand, seems to be permitted.

As this trip progresses, the plan for a curriculum project has morphed and shifted. I am fascinated less by the environmental issues I'd planned to research, and more by the geography of everyday life and landscape. We have been peppered with an astonishing amount of stimuli and my brain has somehow retreated in response. In its place, a new sensibility has taken root. I've begun to see new places for the patterns they possess rather than their details and dates. Perhaps I'm channeling my inner mathemetician, or maybe just sleep deprived. Some in the group think the problem is related to the manioc cake we ate at the Candomble ceremony in Salvador.

We're off to the airport in a few hours and then a three leg journey to Recife. I've been angling to eat a fillet of piranha as part of my goal to consume only the flesh of mean spirited animals traveling in packs. Just yesterday at the market I was told that a small fish would set you back only $2-3USD. If only Casey was here.