end of winter/summer updates [by Anna]

we are good way into the high season now and since we more or less finalized some upgrades to our territory, everything is business as usual now. check-ins, check-out and everything that comes in between. since the standard amount of employees in hotel business is one for each five rooms, and we have actually six rooms, everything in betweens also includes now helping serve the breakfast and cleaning up afterwards, loading the washing machine and hanging the bedlinen afterward etc. and since we fired the night-guard, it also now includes watering every day cleaning the territory in front.

we have been in Jeri for almost a year now. i am finally considering taking a kite-surfing class. since people from all over the world come here to surf, i thought it was silly i didn't. our surfer friends from last season have started coming back and the village is busy.

both Marina and i have finally bought our tickets to Moscow, which we will visit in October. it's been a while since we left Jeri and i'm really looking forward to seeing family and friends, and inhaling some cool air.

meanwhile, here are a couple of things we did - we finally took care of the territory outside the fence. we put yuccas all along the east side, replaced the missing palms and moved the ones that were not in the line. now there is only one big one left, but it has to wait until rainy season. for those who is wondering - fences and nets around the small palms are meant to protect them from donkeys and cows that eat them.

then we got rid of the messy plants in front of the entrance:

before

after

and finally, we solved the problem with the neighbour pousada's windows going out to our territory. technically, it is not allowed, and since according to the local legislation all the constructions should be at least 1,5 meter away from the fence, we thought the owner would be willing to collaborate and close the windows.

before

he refused to do it though, motivating it with the fact that he cannot have rooms without windows. well, we thought we couldn't have someone else's windows going out straight to the passage in front of one of the rooms, so we had to think creatively. so basically this is how it looks now. the neighbour still have the windows in the rooms, although the view is questionable, and we have spared our guests the necessity to remember that there are other people close to them!

after

check more details about our pousada at www.atlantis-jericoacoara.com

before and after (mostly after) photo report [by Anna]

it's been a while since we posted anything, so maybe it is time to do some updates!

so we are half way through the rainy season now. people say, it is the driest rainy season in years. indeed, we are a bit disappointed with the amount and frequency of rain. believe it or not, the sun and the heat do start getting tiresome at some point! every day we hope for some rain and every day it's sunny and hot. so far it rained maybe every 3rd-5th day and the longest it rained was 15 minutes at a time. it seams though that for the nature it is quite a lot of ready, and everything is green. the serrote hills are green and the desert around the village turned green. it makes me nostalgic as I think of summer in Europe. the landscape is even more beautiful than before now!

as for the occupancy, we closed March and April with 44% and 62% respectively, which is higher than we had projected originally, but still not quite enough to make up good numbers. oh well, luckily the low season does not last that long here! now in May most of the places close and it is the lowest of the low. however we seem to be ok for now. today Marina picked up four Russian tourists from jardineira, so we are happy! the last week of May we will close to go for one week field-trip to Lennçois Maranhenses.

meanwhile, our team has expanded with yet another female member - it is Zhuzha. her mother is a Doberman and the father is supposedly pit-bull. well, we doubt the latter, although it seems as her character is the one of a pitt-bull. Zhuzha is a very active puppy and it is pretty much impossible to take a picture of her sitting still. however, it appears that she learns fast, as I already managed to teach her to sit. and she is not even 2 months old yet!

since we are not super busy these days, we've been using this opportunity to do some maintenance. amongst other things it includes polishing up the look of the hotel - adding the numbers to the rooms (after some clients managed to mixed up the rooms and walk in on the neighbours in the middle of the night), painting more things red, making a new storage for the gas container and taking care of the garden.

the old solution for the gas container

the project

the result

Marina and I have rather different ideas about the garden (to put in mildly) and since Marina's ideas are much more dramatic and involve a lot of cutting down and taking out, she always makes sure to invite the gardener the day I am away. I am not completely agreeing with that approach, but I'm sure I will get even with her on another occasion :-) meanwhile I have been spreading some grass and cutting some plants to make them look more neat. also we finally found out that our papaya tree is a she, since it started having baby-papayas!

new grass

before cutting

after cutting

as a bonus - a shot with some sort of strange seaweed that invaded the beach a couple of days ago.

the strange seagrass

Daily life - rainy season, garden, the angry bird, Luna goes for a swim [by Marina]

So, the low (rainy) season has started, however, it's not raining too much, as mentioned before in Anna's post.
We are happy to notice that our occupancy rates are higher then forecasted and by the middle of the month we already reached the monthly lowest target. However, due to little amount of tourists and high competition among half-empty pousadas in Jeri, the rates are drastically dropping down and we have to implement some cost-saving measures in order to be able to still make some profit.

Low season also means more free time for the owners and therefore a good possibility to do some maintenance here and there. One of these days I collected a bunch of flower pots that were standing around the garden and painted them red - our Russian signature color :-)


While I was busy with the pots, spray, solvent, and all my artistic mess in the area behind the kitchen, the piririguá bird that made a nest on top of our palm tree got stressed up by the noise and decided to protect the chicks (or, the eggs? whatever it had there in the nest).



Actually, I wasn't even aware of the bird's nest on our palm-tree until that moment. I don't go around the garden randomly looking for some piririguá nests, you know... So, it was quite a shock for me when one of the small coconuts fell right next to me, I look up and see the angry bird some meters above - I bet the piririguá was aiming at me, but it missed it. I saw more coconuts around the nest, ready to be launched and withdrew myself closer to our closet. You have to respect the local inhabitants, you know ;-)

After 2-3 weeks of regular rain, many trees in the garden got full of flowers - all at the same time. It's so amazing to look around one day and find so many nice surprises here and here, some of the flowers that came out we weren't even aware of!

Luna also enjoyed some benefits of the "color-it-red" campaign and now she's a proud owner of 2 clay bowls matching her new collor.

That morning she got me worried by the way. 



Half and hour after breakfast I noticed that she was gone. Normally she hangs around the breakfast area or stays in the street in front of pousada, but now she was really gone. I even walked around the neighbor trash cans to see if she hasn't fully satisfied with her breakfast, but nothing. 
She showed up one hour later happily wagging the tail, dripping wet&salty. I figured she decided to take a swim in the sea after breakfast. Well, it's a good start of a day, I must admit, however, she could have left a quick note or something "gone to the beach, brb, kisses", couldn’t she? ;-)

Of graviolas and hammocks [by Anna]

so we have been quite busy lately - fully booked pretty much since late December, with just a couple of windows here and there. I think both Maria and I are pretty much looking forward to the rainy season to start now, so that we can relax a bit. as a preparation for th rainy season Marina has signed up for the music school to learn how to play guitar and i have finally started taking surfing lessons.

I had heard many times that it is very difficult to learn how to surf, just as I had heard that it is difficult to snowboard. what can I say, although I'm normally not very good with coordination, I thought snowboarding was easy to learn, and I thought surfing was not a rocket science either. so, first I got some instructions on the beach and got to do the standing-up sequence about five times. then it was time to go into the water. the instructor was pushing me onto the waves and I had to do the rest. on my first wave I manged to get my feet up on the board, my forth wave I manged to ride for about twenty meter and the last wave, when my one hour course was finished, I rode all the way to the beach almost.

so, if you take one hour course it's BRL70 (238NOK/31EUR/1245RUB), three hour course would be BRL50 an hour (170NOK/22EUR/889RUB) and you can rent a board for BRL20 an hour (68NOK/8,9EUR/356RUB). the first hour covers standing-up sequence, the second - paddling techniques and the third - catching the wave. i'm going to take the other two courses when I come back from Norway, as this week I work the mornings.

our first graviola in the garden has finally ripen. actually, the correct English name is soursop, but I think it sounds ugly. just as the Russian name - cметанное яблоко. anyhow, it was the first time I tasted it, and I quite liked it - it has sweet and sour flavour that doesn't really remind of anything, so it's not easy to describe it. another good thing about graviola - it is argued to have anti-cancer effect.

we have a first friend-guest at the hotel these days. it's Claire, my French friend with whom I used to work in the Student House some 11 years ago. as the hotel is full, I conceded my bed to Claire and I'm sleeping in the hammock at the reception. the first night I didn't sleep that well but once you get used to it, it becomes addictive! there are so many comfortable positions, it is incredible! as contrary to the bed the hammock is three-dimensional, it provides very nice support to the body. no wonder the hammocks are so popular in this part of Brazil. I decided that I will continue sleeping in the hammock after Claire has left. meanwhile, here is Marina doing a demo of the most comfortable positions we've discovered so far.

Daily life - unequal fight against the insects [by Anna]

Here is Jeri we don't really have a problem with any insects, although the mosquito can be annoying on a windless night, as I have already mentioned. Cockroaches here are quite peaceful insects who live in the garden , in bushes close to the ground. Actually you don't ever see them, until some neighbour hotel start spraying the poison against them, and then they come with the wind. The New Year's eve is approaching and I guess everyone is preparing, so last week in two rooms at the same time the guests saw two roaches in the bathroom! We were quite shocked (let alone the guests), as we never ever see them, but we took the matter seriously and decided to spray also.

A tiny bottle of poison is enough for a bucket of water. So we put on masks and gloves and set out to spray the rooms and the garden. The whole process took us about three quarters of an hour, despite the protection we felt nausea by the end of the process and we were afraid that the frogs and lizards would also feel not quite well after the spraying. We were very excited to see if any dead roaches would pop the next day, but there weren't any. I have a suspicion that no one ever manages to kill them, they just migrate around...

Daily life - post and garden maintenance [by Anna]

So days go by very fast! We are entering the busiest period of the year and we are working hard trying to fill out the remaining vacancies that we have for the next couple of months. Everything is going well, despite the couple of power blackouts that we had recently (luckily during the day time) and the fact that the garbage truck broke down and the trash is really piling up now. 

I now manage to answer simple phone-calls without having to pass the phone to Marina or Dady. Never before I have learned a language this way – just listening to other people and then talking. Or I guess I did learn Russian that way!

Couple of days ago we received some packages – the heart-shaped forms to make fried eggs (our Australian guests were the happy eaters of the first ones we ever made); some strong pain-killers from my English friend Cynthia in Paris (she works as a journalist and she used to buy those for the B-52 lead-singer she told me) and a blue mini-bar for room 6 (now all our rooms have mini-bars).

The same day we also did some maintenance on the coconut palm trees. We were mostly after the big dry leaves (?) and those other dry parts. We would like to use them to make our ugly lamps look nicer. There are used a lot around here and we also would like to make our place look more rustic! 

A working day at the hotel (photo-report) [by Anna]

Marina has already described one of our working days. Now it’s my turn. Actually it is not a totally usual day since she’s away in Sobral to do some shopping for the hotel and I’m all by myself here today. I haven’t left the territory of the hotel the whole day, but luckily it’s big enough to have a walk around, and then again, I’m staying outside the house 95% of the time.

Jeri - Paris - Moscow

So – I got up at 7:30 to have time to shower as the electrician was supposed to come at 8. That was quite a naïve thing to do as the time here has different dimensions and he didn’t show up until after 9:30, and I knew he wouldn’t. But anyhow, it’s good to be there when the guests are having breakfast. While they were eating I stayed at the reception, answered some bookings, checked one room in, checked one room out and chatted with the Slovenian and the French girl staying in one of the rooms. The time between the breakfast and lunch passed by between talking on Skype with my friend Marina in Copenhagen, giving instructions to the electrician, sand-papering the hangers, writing business cards (yes, at the moment they are hand-made) and answering mails.

The hangers were very cheap – 5 BRL(2EUR/16NOK/87RUB) a piece, but they are very far from IKEA quality. Marina painted them already without sand-papering them before, and I thought that that only made them look worse, so I sand-papered three out of seven today on top of the painting. Actually, I think it gave them kinda rustic look with fits well with the rest, so I think we keep it like that.

the reception details

My friends ask me if we have any employees at the hotel – so I might as well answer this here. We have one girl who serves the breakfast, cleans the rooms and washes the bed-linen (which she by the way did by hand until we arrived with Marina’s washing machine!) and her name is Dasdores, or Dady in short. She’s super sweet, and although she can seem shy and quiet, she definitely has things under control! When Marina is not there and I would have people checking in or out, Dady would always stay and listen and help if I have problems explaining things in Portuguese. Well no, she doesn’t speak English, but I guess she learned to understand me better than people who don’t know me. Now, you might have noticed that one thing is sort of not on the list of the things that she does. That is cooking. And according to the Brazilian labour legislation we are obliged to provide lunch for her, so that’s what we do.

the evil cactus

Marina doesn’t like cooking so it is my job to make food for the three of us every day. The selection of products here is very very limited so I really use all the fantasy that I have to invent dishes each day. Most often we eat fried veggies with rice or I make pasta sauce with veggies, since none of us fancies meet. Today was my bonding time with Dady since Marina was not here. When Marina is here it is mostly them two having a conversation, and today I did my best to put together all my knowledge of Portuguese to have a meaningful conversation with Dady. We talked a bit about the family and the food and she told me that she really likes the food that I make and now when she comes home she doesn’t want to eat her Mom’s food anymore and the Mom complains, and also her husband complains when Dady doesn’t want to make the traditional food anymore. Well I was quite flattered, although of course I don’t want to be in the middle of the family conflict.

All due respect, I must say that I understand Dady – I don’t really fancy the local cuisine either. One of the most famous cearence (from Ceará) dishes is baião de dois, those two (dois) main ingredients being rice and beans. Rice and beans are present as a side dish for most of the main courses too. And I also don’t fancy the way the meat, fish and chicken are prepared and served here – straight from the grill without marinade, spices or sauce. 

bananas

Anyhow, after dinner I talked a bit more on Skype, did a bit more sand-papering and set to water the garden. Watering the garden is another thing that Marina doesn’t like doing, so it is my daily responsibility. I always do it between three and four o'clock, as the sun is already low and the leaves wouldn't burn, but I still can see everything. The whole garden takes about one hour to water, but I really take pleasure in doing it. In our climate everything grows very fast, and it is fascinating to see the difference from one day to another. 

papaya

For me it was funny to discover that bananas are almost impossible to get rid of – they keep on coming through as the worst weeds! We threw out the banana palms that we had as they require a lot of water to produce the fruits, and that is expensive. And without water they look very sad and dry. But those bananas don’t give up! Practically every day I see new ones coming!

Another funny fact is that a papaya plant grows very fast and is able to produce fruits at the age of 6 months. It also does require a lot of water so I do water it every day, we just hope it’s not a male plant as then all our efforts would be in vain!

Out of the many coconut trees we have there is only one or two of the ones that produce good coconuts. Well, it looks like a handful anyway. Oh yeah, and there is also this evil cactus that leaves a million of tiny little needles in your skin if you accidentally touch it, those are impossible to take out as they are barely visible, but they do hurt!

Anyhow, by the time I have finished watering, the electrician was also done with putting up the lights in the garden. I’m such a sucker for lights!!! Now people stop to take pictures of our lights, so I guess it is a good sign.

lamps with solar batteries!

Later on our Serbian friends passed by with some home-made guacamole and beers, which we finished in no time. When I finish this entry I’ll hang the hammock at our reception that has got a small make-over and continue reading the Danish book that I found on the shelf. It’s time to relax, and now my only tasks would be to receive and hand out the keys. Hopefully people won’t stay out all too long and I will be able to go to bed around 2 a.m. at latest. This makes long working hours, but it’s not super stressful so I’m not really complaining!

a bit of IKEA in Brazil

a lot of IKEA actually...

good night! :)