Not that I’m superstitious or anything, but I like to start the year on the right foot. Priority of the day—jumping over seven waves to get into Iemanjá’s good books.

I’m too much of an atheist to embrace the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion, but I have a thing for the Goddess of the Ocean. Or rather, I feel indebted to her. Last year, I was in Aracaju for Dia de Iemanjá and I offered her flowers as a gift. I wished my loved ones good health and happiness before throwing flowers into the sea and somehow, they did make it through 2020.

So yeah, may as well jump over seven waves just in case. We couldn’t do it on New Year’s Eve but I’m sure Iemanjá doesn’t mind latecomers.

All we needed was a beach, and it’s not hard to find on an island. We headed to Praia de Canasvieiras, a smaller beach usually packed with Argentinian tourists. Since very few foreigners made it to Brazil this year, we figured it’d be fine. Besides, it looked stormy—no point in driving to one of these lovely kilometre-long beaches and not being able to enjoy it under the rain.

And indeed, Canasvieiras was relatively quiet and cleaner than usual. Mark and I jumped over seven waves and since it didn’t look it would rain, we spent the afternoon at the beach.

It was so peaceful a wild dolphin came over and swam close to the shore for a little while.

Thanks, Iemanjá. Mark was super excited.

In the evening we drove to the only mall opened on January 1, Shopping Iguatemi. This modern, upscale mall looks completely out of place in the middle of the jungle and it was a strange experience to walk around when all shops were closed but the food court and the Big supermarket downstairs—yep, that’s actually its name and yep, it’s kind of big.

I feel lucky, we had a great New Year’s Day. It didn’t even rain, after all!