December 12 - Parintins, Brazil

 Parintins is an island town of about 75,000 people.  We anchored around 10:30 and since we had no tour planned, we took it easy this morning.  Trivia was better today - I think Peter took pity on us.

After lunch, we took the tender in.  One of the things to do is take a pedicab ride around, which sounded good to us.  Right off the boat, a man offered us a "tour".  His was not powered by leg power on a bicycle, but rather by motorbike.  That turned out to be OK since it was cooler that way.  

The biggest thing that Parantins has going for it is an annual festival to rival Carnival in Rio.  It's a two day affair that centers around a sort of musical play that I couldn't understand, but involves lots of huge colorful props and a bull.  The play goes on for hours and there is some competition between 2 teams - red and blue are their colors.  They put on mini shows lasting about an hour throughout the year and that was the only tour offered.  We saw the stadium (whick holds 30,000 people) and if they had to sit in the open sun, I'm glad we didn't go.  There were airconditioned boxes, so maybe that's where the tour went.  

Our general impression of Parintins was positive.  The streets seemed pretty clean and not much graffiti, but rather street artwork was everywhere.  Our tour only lasted about 20 minutes, but that was actually enough for us.  This was a very hot and humid stop and our cooling neck bands got warm within minutes.  Afterwards we walked a little bit around the souvenir stalls near the port, but decided to just return to the cool ship.  

We tied up to this boat and walked through.  Guess docking space was at a premium.

Some of the stalls available for the passengers

In our "pedicab" which was more like motorcab.

And off we go

These dogs barked enthusiasstically at us.  The little hair ties sort of took the edge off of their "ferocity"

This was the sort of graffiti we saw around

These are some of the characters in the festival which are on disply outside the stadium

This represents the two teams involved in the competition

The stadium looked modern and clean

Looking closely, you'll see that the ad for Coca Cola shows both the logo in red and blue - they don't want to be seen as taking "sides" in the competition!

There are 2 young children on the motorbike with mom and dad.

Playing pool outdoors was a new one to me.

On the way back to the tender

The afternoon was very quiet.  I found myself up at the Horizons bar where they have tea every afternoon.  They set up every table and it was reasonably well attended when I left after about 20 minutes.

We all had dinner in the Tuscan Grill again and the food was very good.  Of the three times we've been there, only the first time was a bit of a disappointment with the tough filet.  Tonight I had the branzino fish and Michael had the osso bucco.

No invitation from Peter yet, but at the start of trivia he looked over at our group and I thought he quietly said something about Friday night.