Shortly after checking in on Saturday, John tried
to access his email account and found that he could not get it. He asked the
front desk for assistance and they printed out a page with his user name, his
room number, and his password, the latter supposedly being his full name. John was surprised
to find that somehow he had been registered as Jetson Dehlendorf, which was the reason for the failed logins.The Brazilian
name shaman was playing with him again after naming him Cordoba Vitur in Leticia last week.
We decided to check out our boat “La
Cidade do Santarem” to the town of the same name on Wednesday, so we headed for the port. One
might call the goings on at the port controlled chaos. There were at least 12
boats the size and the style of the Itaberaba tied up to a “T” shaped dock,
some loading some unloading. Here the stevedore rules. There is no other way to
load and unload these riverboats. Cases and cases of Coca Cola, beer, soap,
fruits, vegetables, and you name it were being carried back and forth on the heads or
shoulders of the stevadores.
We inquired of our boat, but no one
had seen it and no one knew anything about it. This was a bit disconcerting
since we are leaving Wednesday.
From the port we returned to town and
had a sandwich and then took a tour of the Teatro Amazonas. It is a beautiful opera
house built with imported materials in 1896 during the height of the rubber boom, and recently restored to
its former glory.
After that we watched the warm up for
the Brazil vs. Cameroon in the park in front of the Teatro, then returned to the
hotel to watch the game in the comfort of the air-conditioned restaurant.
At 11:30 pm we were awakened from
our malaria pill induced deep sleep by a ringing phone. Who was it? The front
desk demanding that David pay up on two Coca Cola Zeros that he had drunk during the
afternoon game. You would think that the hotel accountant would have something better
to do than harass clients in the middle of the night. David paid up the next morning after receiving an apology for the inappropriate timing of the call.
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| Teatro Amazonas. |
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| Teatro Amazonas. |
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| Lego version of Teatro Amazonas. |
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| Lego version of Teatro Amazonas. |
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| View from Teatro Amazonas. |
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| Teatro Amazonas. |
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| Dressing room at Teatro Amazonas. |
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| Customs house and port HQ building. |
I thought you might enjoy part of a story in the June 30 issue of Sports Illustrated, page 44, that relates to two of your posts:
ReplyDelete“The Arena Amazonia, a glittering $300 million stadium designed to resemble the straw baskets made by the indigenous tribes, seemed like a giant tribute to the film Fitzcarraldo by another strong-willed German, the director Werner Herzog.
Builders shipped the stadium’s raw materials from Portugal and floated them up the Amazon River, starting construction only after rerouting a tributary.
After four World Cup games it will stand as a lightening rod for Brazilian anger toward excessive public spending, ……”
(the reference to another strong-willed German was a tie-in to the magazine's main story about J. Klinsmann, the German coach of the US Team).