Recife Aug 28

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Wednesday, August 28. This is the first real day of Kate's conference  — the First International Conference on Alcohol and Harm Reduction titled "Towards a Comprehensive Alcohol Policy in Countries in Transition and Developing Countries".

Reg has breakfast without Kate and spends most of the day in or near his bed recovering from the day before. Kate is busy with the conference. Perhaps Reg had too much sun, too many adventures and too much Pitu the day before.

Linda Sobell calls to our room late in the day to see if she might join us for diner when Kate gets back from presenting on her "Safer Bars" research. Later Linda comes down to our room and we share some wine waiting for Kate. Like us, this is her first trip to South America but she's been to Mexico a lot and even went on a language retreat in Costa Rica (of course Spanish and Portugese, while related, are not the same language). Over the next few days we spend quite a bit of time with her and have a lot of laughs.

Linda and Mark (her husband) used to work at ARF with Kate but they are now on faculty at a University/College near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They have a big house with a pool and sauna in a gated community. Kate had worked with Linda, many on a compendium project (a best advice, collected works book) when Kate was just starting out at ARF. Linda treated her pretty poorly at the time, but recognizes now that she had done so, and apologizes profusely.

We had the front desk call Tasca Restaurante/Cozinha Portuguesa, the Portugese restaurant around the corner (I just looked it up, it's about 5 city blocks away, a reasonable hike on foot). Tasca Restaurante | Cozinha Portuguesa is open tonight — 3rd time lucky! 

We're the first to arrive at the restaurant, unfashionably early, but we're hungry. And it's after 8:00pm anyways! We're looking for some excellent seafood (Portugese style) and are still trying. Linda hates fish and has veal. The menu has no English but we struggle through with some Port wine for an appetizer and Brazilian wines for the main service. These wines are good, not exciting but good. 

Back at the hotel, after our dinner, we have more caipirinhas at the bar until the conversation gets really salty and Reg toddles off to bed. Kate and Linda stumble into our room when the bar closes (perhaps they were asked to leave?) and finish off whatever wine that remains in our room. Reg tries to sleep through all the hub-bub and doesn't even recall when the party ended. It was late, he can confirm that.

The next morning Kate has a killer headache/hang over — no big surprise there!

These notes are from a densely detailed travel log we kept at the time. Kate recently discovered it in August of 2026 and I have transcribed with minor edits, corrections and redactions so as to not embarrass the living ....