On the last trip I meanly insisted Kim bought herself a local bikini. It's width was about the same as my outstreched palm it looked like it would fit an eight year old.
This time we shopped for one in Recife's poshest mall, packed like allthe others with bikini and sportswear shops.
Men's trunks are far more modest; Speedos with thick waist bands. The guidebooks tells you not to buy anything until you ascertain the local fashion, and as we approached Rio we saw more and more bermuda shorts being sold. The guides had been very clear about avoiding these if you were not to be an obvious gringo. (Winter skin tones should have been the other clue though we saw many Brazilians who were paler than we were.)
But Ipanema Beach had stuck with the Speedos and there were fewer dental floss bikinis.
The other eating delight is the fixed price churrascaria. For 40-50 Reais you eat all you want from a massive and pristine salad bar before being faced with waves of waiters weilding skewers of grilled meat.
morning) but eventually decided to pay up. The prices had come down a little from what was emailed 3 weeks before and our trawls through the local papers would simply reveal things like that the final 4% of tickets had been released and were on sale in various obscure parts of the city.
with few problems we pushed to the front and spent the evening on the front tier of the concrete steps. There was a fair peppering of foreigners – people from Mexico and from Bahrain – and great friendliness. The locals were constantly asking where you'd come from and trying out bits of different languages, sharing food and binoculars. It emptied out towards the early hours, though I can't see how the suggestion in the guide books of arriving at midnight and buying up tickets from departing crowds would have worked because half the ticket was kept by the machines at the entrance.
There's a certain formula to each school's parade. The drum section (bateria) lines up with the singers by the start of the parade section and launch into the theme samba which is sung repeatedly for the entire parade. The song is published before the parades (and available on CDs afterwards) and the lyrics are printed in the carnival guides with the choruses highlighted for the crowds to join in. The song follows the theme of the parade and the catchiness (and singability) varies a lot!
a famous actress) dressed in minimal costumes or wearing quantities of long feathers, samba-ing elegantly in high heels. They might precede the bateria and flirt with the mestre da bateria, the band leader. The band is made up of drummers and other percussionist, several burly men singing into microphones and a set of ukelele players. One of the rainha da bateria managed to lose most of her bikini bottoms in front of our part of the audience but she gamely carried on.
There´s a bloco of giant monsters: the `Ambassadors from hell´ accompanyed by an old man in a chair – roped firmly to the back of a pick-up – who waves regally at the crowds. Another group has the requisite girls and feathers, and minimal costumes. It´s enthusiastic but a bit amateurish compared to what we saw in Olinda where the drummers were finely honed, the singers pitch perfect and the dancers truly spectacular. There generally seems to be a lot less live music here and less variety in what´s being performed.
ne of the big carnival attractions here is the annual Bloco da Lama, the mud parade.
It´s a grid of flag-stoned streets with a small port and a set of old churches.
Also, quite a few foreigners; we saw very few in the North.
and then a four hour transfer down the coast to a small fishing village called Picinguaba. 
strangely-shaped mountains covered in swirls of cloud. The uplands look across bays of islands and long beaches. Much of it is very beautiful and reminds me of pictures of green-covered coastal mountains of Hawaii or the South Pacific.
The last big event we saw after leaving Olinda was a ceremony of memorial to the slaves who died in the Brazilian liberation. It usually runs as one of the highlights of the Recife Carnival but they were running it at a crossroads outside our hotel.