First day in João Pessoa. What a day. Bloody hell.

The day greeted us with a lot of sun and blue sky. The last time I felt heat like this was Las Vegas, and at least at night it gets a little cooler. First step of the day was breakfast at the hotel. After last night’s debacle, we were more hopeful because we were serving ourselves.

The variety on offer is large but it seems like it has been put together by someone who saw it in a YouTube tutorial. The scrambled eggs are powered (or at least I hope they are, otherwise they are doing something very weird). There is banana in hot water, and root vegetable. The breads are all under a heat lamp so they are a bit dry by the time you get them. There is a load of sweet items, none of which are very appealing for breakfast. The juices are unsweetened which was a hell of a shock when I took my first gulp of laranjê juice – sour as buggery. Also no cream cheese! I am without my new favourite for the moment.

After breakfast was our first job of getting a rental car. Despite all the stories of drama and woe on Reddit about international drivers getting rental cars in Brazil, my passport & licence were all happily accepted, as was my money. Thereafter follows a period of white blank anxiety as I drove through the streets, beset on both sides by motorbikes. Roads tend not to have carparks on the side, so if someone’s parked there, your lane is blocked. Then you have to suddenly go into the other lane to pass, after checking there isn’t a bike about to go under your wheels, and being left hand drive there is a lot more car to the right of you now so you have to account for that. Roundabouts go the other way, and you have to give way to your left, which is sometimes a surprise because not a lot of people indicate when they are supposed to. They will indicate randomly while they are driving and not actually do anything, sometimes they will even put their hazard lights on for no apparent reason. Then there are the holes, manhole covers, the odd rock, lanes that aren’t really painted anymore, entire roads that are now cycle only but Google doesn’t know that, one way streets that turn into two way without any warning or signs. Speed bumps that sometimes have signs that are posted right next to them, pedestrian crossings that nobody takes seriously, mostly because everyone is walking along the side of the road anyway. Oh and Luzimar’s phone started playing some sort of video with loud Portuguese music at one point, just to add to the excitement. I think she wanted something to watch to take her mind off my horrific driving. If she didn’t know any English swear words before, she does now.

To give the local drivers credit, they all seemed pretty damn accomodating my hesitant, panicked, generally crappy driving. Nobody beeped at me, or looked particularly pissed off. I did have a couple of motorbike riders give me filthy looks after they drove like fucking idiots and almost crashed into me.

I can’t really remember what we were looking for, other than a car park which we pounced on. It was outside a restaurant so in we went, mostly for me to sit down and calm my nerves. As it turns out it was a Churrascaria with the all you can eat salad bar and meats brought to your table. It was also on our list of places to try, even if the prospect of buffet meat twice in three days was daunting.

The salad bar was huge, and we didn’t try most of it mostly because we didn’t know what the hell most of it was. I almost took some garnish because it was the only thing I recognised at first.

After being full of meat and veg once again, our next job was to find a laundrette to do the washing from the last week. Being in a very hot place makes you go through shirts etc pretty damn quickly. There was one across the road, but it was locked. Some messaging to a number on the door established that the machines were under maintenance (no they weren’t, the doors are made of glass and we could see a clearly empty room), the person at the end of the chat was in a meeting so couldn’t call back, and then stopped replying to messages. I was tempted to enlighten another Brazilian on my finest curses. Louie discovered another place the next block over, so we started walking. It must have made a strange sight, two blokes and an elderly-ish woman walking along holding bags of dirty laundry on barely there footpaths in 35c sun. Fucking nuts. Of course the place only did laundry service, and would be able to return our clothes the middle of next week. Super. Back to the car we went, in the sun, carrying our laundry. I would like to point out that Louie and I were carrying all the bags, Luzimar was unburdened.

Back into the car, GPS set and off we went, me a bundle of nerves and anxiety, desperately looking for a car park outside the place we chose. No such luck and round the block we went, finally finding a park. There was a betting type shop next door, and as we walked past there was a security van collecting the money. These guys were not messing about, and I tried not to look at the guy standing beside the van with a big fuck-off shotgun.

Finally we were able to do our laundry, and there was a woman doing her laundry who was very helpful showing us how to set each machine going. We did a drinks run while they were going and discovered H2OH! is bloody nice, especially the limão one. Frutilly Morango is also pretty great, tastes just like the real thing!

Clothes clean, we headed to the hotel via a supermarket, which Google labelled as a Hypermarket. It wasn’t, it was smaller than our local Countdown. They did have a dizzying array of brand new things to buy, and I will have to return to get more later this week. The carpark was furnished with a few dogs, who seemed friendly enough and were enjoying the warm concrete. Not sure if they were strays, but one did have a harness on. They could have belonged to the couple who were trying to sell their crappy flowers made from flax in the car part. Nao obrigado didn’t work this time, but driving away while she made sad faces at Louie’s side window was pretty effective.

Finally, dinner time and we walked down the road in the almost 30c night to a place that was highly rated on Google Maps, and labelled themselves as a Gastropub. I think someone heard that word somewhere and decided it sounded good for their place, rather than being anything that resembled what the word meant. They didn’t have any of the vaguely interesting beers, only Amstel and Heineken, and the food was fucking terrible on all levels. First we have my dinner with the rice tit. This was supposed to be chicken stroganoff, but was some sort of badly microwaved congealed muck, and not very warm. Apparently the rice & chips is what they call vegetables. Then we have Louie’s chicken and salad, which I think was fine, if ordinary. Then we have Luzimar’s which is absolutely not what she ordered. Her order was a prawn dish, but this arrived; some over cooked fish and plain, unseasoned boil in the bag veges. When she sent it back as not what we ordered, they brought it back and said they didn’t have any prawns so they made this instead. This place failed on all accounts. Even when we wanted to pay the bill, the four staff were either too busy talking about the soccer game on TV or unloading bags of booze out the back of some guys car who pulled up the front.

As side note, below is how the cutlery generally comes in most places, I guess to make it easier to provide a set of cutlery as well as keeping them untouched. If you’re really lucky you get one of each tool.

To wrap the night off we took a leisurely stroll back to the hotel, still a few people out walking, running and cycling. It’s a really nice area, even if the roads suck, the traffic is horrible and the restaurants should be burned to the ground.