Hey, we're back! The interruption was caused by our stay in Manaus, Brazil last week. We'll start catching up now, with posts to come over the next few days as time--and this slooooow internet connection--permit.

Manaus, Day 1:  We arrived in the city of Manaus, Brazil, early in the morning of the 31st of January. One immediate discovery: Maeve had a mild fever, and was generally tired, cranky, out of sorts. A trip to the infirmary (oh, how I long to call it sick bay!) confirmed this, but discounted ear or throat issues, which was encouraging. And she responded well to some tylenol, cheering up under its influence. Still, it seemed best to scale back our plans for the day, and to go out in shifts into the city, with Vicki and Aidan making the first sortie and John and Aidan going out to explore in the afternoon.

Manaus is a big city--over two million people. But it is also a remote place as big cities go, located deep in the rainforest, and about as far up the Amazon as you can take a large ship. Which is sort of the point of locating a city here; Manaus was developed from a small trading post in the late nineteenth century to be a deepwater port from which rubber--at that time found only in Brazil, where the rubber tree is a native species--could be exported. The demand for rubber in the industrialized countries (among other things, to make the belts that powered all that heavy machinery) created a rubber boom that made Manaus rich at the end of the nineteenth century. And then there was a rubber crash as those same industrialized countries developed other sources of rubber by spiriting out rubber seeds and establishing plantations in their own colonies. Manaus became a backwater for decades until the late 1960s, when the government of Brazil established it as a free-trade zone, giving multinational corporations incentive to set up factories here. And so they have: consumer electronics, vehicles, appliances--all of them are made in plants that ring central Manaus, and have made the city a busy and, in its central parts, crowded place.

Our ship docked very near to downtown, so excursions into the heart of the city were easy, either a walk or a short cab ride away. On this first morning, Vic and Aidan were joined by Heather Paxson, a wonderful anthropologist on the faculty, and her six-year-old son Rufus. They visited the city's main tourist attraction, the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house built in 1896 at the height of the rubber boom. It's really quite lovely, though restraint is not one of the words you'd ever think of to characterize it.

The Teatro Amazonas

The Governor's Box in the theater

Aidan was perhaps most impressed by the model of the theater in Lego form, a gift from the Lego Corporation.

The Teatro Amazonas in LEGO form

Maeve: I met the captain! He has red glasses! He asked me how old I was, and said that he was very pleased to meet me.

John: While Vic and Aidan made their initial foray into Manaus, Maeve and I stayed on board what was rapidly becoming a ghost ship as students and faculty headed off to various adventures. While walking the halls, we did indeed run into the captain, a tall, elegant Croatian man named Roman, who does indeed wear red-rimmed glasses. He could not have been nicer to or more charming with Maeve. I'm all the more impressed at his friendliness when I heard later that he and the staff captain had basically been taking turns manually steering the ship through the Amazon over the last three days and nights of travel; the river is sufficiently tricky to navigate that it requires a greater level of attention than is typical on the open seas. We don't see the captain that often--I guess he's busy--but  when we do see him, he inspires confidence, and, after this encounter, some affection as well.

Harlequin even made it to the Amazon, apparently

Aidan with some very dangerous-looking weapons in the Amazon museum

In the afternoon, Vic stayed with Maeve, and Aidan and I headed back into town. Our main goal was a small museum of artifacts from indigenous people, which we both enjoyed--lots interesting things, and artifacts of a kind of that Aidan had been reading about in his school work on the rainforest. We stopped for ice cream, visited a supermarket, and got back to the ship for dinner.