Mar Grande



On December 22 my wife and I, accompanied by my youngest daughter, her husband and her two children − the boy  2 years and a half and the girl 9 months old – flew from São Paulo to Salvador and then took a boat to Mar Grande, a small city in the island of Itaparica.

We went to the house of very good friends. Many years passed since we were here for the last time, but we used to come here very often. In fact my youngest daughter and my friends' children grew together. Now that we are again together it is obvious that nothing changed. The girls that I knew when they were children, now married and with children of their own, treat me like a second father, with an indescribable amount of friendliness and warmth. My daughter is just like a sister to them.



I am now at the veranda looking at the sea, that is just a few meters away. Across the sea a beautiful view of the city of Salvador, where my parents grew. The view is magnificent, the sea is calm, the sounds that I hear are nature's sounds, that of the sea, and of birds, and once in a while a local fisherman that comes to offer fish, or shrimps, or lobsters, or crabs that he just caught. In the evening we can see the beautiful lights of the big city, but they do not interfere with the lights of the stars or the full moon's reflex on the sea.


My wife and I felt that we both needed to relax a little, and this is the ideal place for it. It is a paradise. And you can add to the paradisiacal island the circumstance that we are among very dear friends, who love us as much as we love them. We talk a lot, we laugh a lot, we forget that in a little while we will all have to return to our home and resume our work. Life is beautiful!
This is the last page of my blog for 2012. 

I wish you all a very happy 2013!
 

Particularly for those of you that are among the 10,000 people who visited these pages in English and the 20,000 who visited them in Portuguese.

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