Fortal

July 23 – 26 is Fortal, Ceara’s out of season Carnaval. We went to check it out on Thursday, the opening night. As you might expect, it was very crowded, very loud and very fun. The floats with performers basically moved in a big circle around an area where the audience was located, so everyone got to see every float twice. The music selection naturally included the ubiquitous samba and northeast-specific forro. The audience usually follows the floats, drinking and dancing the whole night. For R$220 to 500 (half that for USD), one could get a shirt and be allowed to follow the float directly on the street. A rope held by a bunch of people cordons them off. The part of the audience outside of that rope is called “pipoca” (popcorn), because they jump around the whole night. The rest of the audience stayed behind a fence, which amazingly held out. While standing on the fence offered a slightly better view of the show, it also offered the men a better view of us. We lasted about 30 seconds, before getting air kisses from 5 different directions and having people trying to grab at us from the other side.

Proudly representing the red, way-too-white-for-Brazil and blue
One of the Floats and its fans

After the floats were done circling, the bands took the center stage and the happily-buzzed audience danced the night away. The main show was Avioes – a forro band, which is not our favorite but still fun to dance to after a few beers. As with any Brazilian venue, the drunk men celebrated the beginning of Fortal by peeing on anything more-or-less stationary and propositioning the two gringas in the audience all kinds of things, which Sayonara found hysterical. One guy was so amazed at Joana’s hair color that he thought it would be fun to pull on it, while laughing and pointing. We got home around 4 AM and fell asleep to the morning songs of the roosters.

The next morning, we were up at 8.30 (painful) for the research group meeting, where it was decided to run the rephrased questions from the pilot by the faculty judges, which would mean another week of not doing interviews and actually having to work on the manuscript. Afterwards, as per usual, we headed to the beach for some non-fried food, caipirinhas and yet another attempt to lose the tan lines. As always, not without bus adventures, we got offered a job, right there on bus 32. A local language school wants to hire us to record some conversation tapes to go along with a beginner’s English language textbook. So don’t be surprised if someday you visit Fortaleza and everyone’s English sounds like ours (semi Russian or Portuguesey sounding, especially when they are mad).