Start time for today: 6am. I went outside to pick my borrowed Jaguar shirt off the clothesline and got changed into my regular uniform. For today, we would be taking clients out to see dolphins on the river. Yup, as I think I mentioned before, this river has freshwater dolphins. Our team had spotted them out on the river before during the excursions, but this would be the first time that we would actually go to a location where they feed the dolphins and tourists go to swim with them. In a short amount of time, Marcelo showed up and the three of us headed out to the marina. The clients were, again, from the Eco Lodge in which we have picked up most of them during my stay. The group was from America (California and Kansas) and came here through a travelling club of some sort. Their leader was a young guy from Boston who now lives in California. He seemed pretty adventurous; of course to come to the jungle, you need that quality. Since they were english speakers, I was in my element to chat them up during the hour and a bit drive down the river. We had amazing weather for the trip out, which was a bonus! The dolphin place was a set of docks with a main area where tourists would get to jump in the water in the area where a person would feed the dolphins. Of course, I was on shift and not a tourist, but just seeing all this was a great experience on its own. The river dolphins were quite a bit different looking actually. Their skin had a pink tint to it, their eyes looked a little weird and they seemed a fair bit bigger than the salt water dolphins i've seen. They also had a big underwater pen where they kept some other sea creatures. Pirarucú was the name given to these fish - they were about a meter and a half long minimum and looked like a barracuda with the face of a catfish... Or in other words, they looked like sea monsters. From the open top of the pen, they lowered fish in with fishing rods and these pirarucú would come up and snatch them. Pretty cool. On the way back, rain clouds formed and we made it back just in time before it started to pour. We were going to wait at the lodge to bring a couple of the people to the airport, so we had lunch there. Afterwards, it was only a few minutes more before we were set to head to the marina, then the airport. In the waiting time, I taught a little bit of english. Once everything was done and they were at the airport, we spent a few hours in the city centre, doing some shopping. We needed a lot of supplies for the big jungle trip next week. It's kind of sad to say, but tomorrow will be my last full day at this house with the family. Of course, I will be with Jeffson in the jungle, but I'm only with the rest of the family until midday monday! We're hoping to be able to make it back home quickly after the jungle and before my flight, but if time gets tight, i will have to go straight to the airport. Anyway, when I returned home, not much else happened. We had some coffee, then the family went to church. I opted to stay back and rest since I was very tired. Later on in the evening was not much more than watching tv, surfing the internet, playing iPhone scrabble with my mom. Eventually, I found CNN in english on the TV again. They only had one news story playing the whole time though - about the plane crash in San Francisco. Pretty crazy news - lucky the death toll was so low for the kind of crash it was! One of the reporters amused me a little bit though... I thought that you needed to have an above average vocabulary to be a news reporter, however a lady, reporting at the hospital proved me wrong. Her (near) exact quote: "They are very concerned with these...concerns because of course, the are very...concerning.". Well, I found it kind of funny. Anyway, it was a cool day overall - tune in next time for the Sunday edition.
I had a friend tagging along with us on my back today
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