After about 18 hours spent on a bus I arrived in Maceio, which is a city surrounded by beautiful beaches between Salvador and Recife (where I am heading next). I think that I will stop taking buses for such long periods, although it was interesting in a way because there were no tourists apart from me on the bus from Salvador to here, only locals. Contraception is very obviously not something they care for in Brazil...there are so many poor women running around with three, four, five children and no men to accompany them. That part is not suprising either: I have met quite a few guys who would state at some point during out conversation that they have children but are separated from the mothers. Obviously, the mothers often have no income and cannot provide for their kids. Traijano, the owner of the pousada I stayed at in Lençois talked a lot about how this is one of the biggest problems in Brazil, which is why him and his wife adopted two neglected children, even though they already had their own two. Traijano believes in doing something about social problems instead of only complaining - which is admirable. They do try to convince young people to use condoms in many ways: for example I saw an educational play put on by teenagers in Lencois, where this was the main topic. They acted out a number of scenes, trying to entice kids in various ways to use contraceptionon (one scene´s message was that if you do not have kids when you are 16, then you can marry a rich man). I only understood this because my middle-aged Brazilian friends from Sao Paolo, Lindenberg (first name!), and his wife, translated for me. I do not think that I would have necessarily gotten the message from just watching the 16-18 year olds, because they were mostly just shaking their pretty butts in a very sexy manner to cool music and there was a lot of close physical contact between the girls and the boys...very commendable in any case.

I think I will explore the beaches now. There do not seem to be any foreign tourists here, I guess it is not on the main route. Good for my Portuguese! I have managed to perfect my mishmash of Spanish and Portuguese to such a degree that now people tend to think that I am Argentinian or Spanish. On the downside, this means that aftert my initial, confidently uttered sentences they assume that I can understand them when they talk to me at normal speed and when I look at them showing no sign of comprehension then they think that I am slightly retarded. I am determined to get there though!