Weekend Roundup

I feel like I am just back from a vacation -- the kind of vacation when on your first day back, in addition to feeling like you need a vacation to recover from your vacation, you revise your To Do list and have debriefing sessions with the rest of your staff/team to find out what happened while you were gone. In this case, I was amazed to find out that in fact not a whole lot had gone on since Friday afternoon when we left the office. Why so vacation-like? Well, in honour of a friend's visit from Canada, an ambitious Recife-and-Environs schedule was planned and expertly, if I may so say so myself, executed.

One of the highlights was an overnight trip to Porto de Galinhas, 70 km south of Recife. In addition to the beach and the chickens, we even managed to get out of bed early enough to make the trip to see the natural pools that are created in the nearby reefs. The reefs are a pretty amazing phenomena as hundreds of fish get trapped in the pools as the tide retreats making for a pretty neat experience. For some reason low tide has been extremely early both times that I have been to Porto -- but I can now attest that should low tide be at an ungodly hour in the morning it is still worth the effort. Plus, one of the many cafes will be quite happy to serve you a double expresso once you are back from the deep!

Here fishy fishy fishy ....