02 December

Food.

On Friday was made a pizza, from scratch, whole wheat, adorned with olives, decent tomatoes and Brazil's small, odd mushrooms. I took the lead on baking Howard family chocolate-chip cookies, which, with only brown sugar to be had and glass casserole pans to put them in the oven, became a dark-brown brownie-formatted confection. Enjoyment seemed to be had regardless. The uninitated, of course, did not know what shadowy, Platonic ideal cookie they missed. The pizza was very good.

ACBEU was closed this Sunday, (we were promised that it would be open every day these last two weekends for the purposes of researching and writing final papers, but Clara Ramos has a questionable relationship with the truth) so a previously formed concept of picnicking there (with Trader Joe's peanut butter smuggled into this pagan land) was transferred to the Museum of Modern Art on the bay. The Museum was closed when we arrived, so we ate up the hill from the gate, with a good view of the water and atleast five degrees celcius too many, continuing a streak of cloudy and oppressively humid weather. As we were finishing, the museum creaked into public operation and the skies snuck into a precipitation; both were welcome.

This Modern Art Museuem has what I can only feel is an advantage over many other modern art museums, that of being situated in buildings dating from the 16^th or 17^th century. Being inside the fresh-looking restoration of a colonial building adds much to an exhibit of white folded sheets with various simple pictures and cryptic pictographs painted on them in black. The gap in both time and purpose leads to a surreality that I can only hope such...art packages are attempting, for I know not what other objectives they could serve. Another building, its inside made into a very open wooden space, also possesed walls, to which were attached folded (and un-folded!) pieces of canvas covered in thick layers and gobs of paint. At one artfully uncentral point on the floor sat several pieces of canvas rolled tightly and painted what could be called fire-engine yellow. I know not what flighty, status-quo defying intent inspired the execution of this particular piece, but to my mind it was unmistakable the recreation of one singular moment in the migration of a family of yellow sleeping bags across a colonial-era modern art museum.

All of these canvas-centered works came from a single Italian whose name escapes me. Thanks to world of the plastic arts, allowing the flow of culture across national borders without having to involve the word “globalization.”

26 November

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7112558.stm

This is a good summation of how unreasonably insane the final game of Bahia's season was: 7 people died and 60 people were injured while I was in the stadium, and I had no idea whatsoever. This was after being smashed between hundreds of people (and robbed) on the way in, and almost being trampled to death in the process of leaving (and losing sight of everyone I was with.)

Masses, meet opium.

24 November

A few doors down from ACBEU is a German school which is joined to the Goethe! Cafe (Really.) One or two nights a week it hosts live jazz. Something about the very particular phenomenon of modern jazz made it surprising every time the group leader spoke Portuguese instead of English between the sets – the “Jazz Guy” is a stereotype that speaks one language only. During the two hours we spent there, 5 different drummers and 3 different bassists took turns playing. The frequent and casual line-up shifts gave the feeling that events such as these were an even better opportunity for the community of American-style Jazz players than it was for fans of the music. (Not to accuse them of wholesale cultural importation – I noticed at least one riff borrowed from the forró of the Northeast's interior.) A pleasant, drowsy escapist affair. Escapism felt needed after an afternoon spent walking to the football stadium in order to procure student tickets for Bahia's final game on Sunday. The pace we observed after thirty or so minutes standing in line lead to the realization that it would take several hours to get the tickets we desired, if they didn't run out. It should be noted that the student line was at least five times shorter than a main ticket line, which had several thousand people who seemed willing to stand and shuffle slowly forward for 4-8 hours. Lines are never conducive to good moods, but this particular afternoon was also overcast and suffocatingly humid, and filled with walks through a dishearteningly worn down shopping district, being shoved by a beggar (not a pan-handler, I suppose, because political correctness does not exist in brazil, as far as I know) for withholding, minutes after giving all my cash to another beggar, and seeing the painful irony of a homeless man wearing a t-shirt printed with what I have come to gather serves as the Brazilian government's logo, which calls it “A Country Of All Of Us.”

06 November

Last Wednesday I was unoccupied in the evening, so I called up 59,000 of my closest friends and we decided that it would be great fun to all go attend a football match. Bahia (one of Salvador's two club teams, betwixt which there is a great rivalry.) just so happened to be playing a team from São Paulo that night.

The insanity began on the bus ride to the stadium. The bus wasn't exceptionally crowded, but it was being jostled up and down forcefully by the number of Bahia fans jumping up and down and belting out football chants. (Those social divisions in brazil which are not created by outrageous wealth disparities seem to largely defined by the preferred reason for clapping and sanding.) We got off some distance from the stadium itself and navigated by following the steady stream of people in red-and-blue Fiat-sponsored jerseys. On the way we purchased tickets to the game from the healthy population of ticket scalpers. R$12 each, from what I heard this was only R$2 than a directly purchased ticket would have been...however one could actually accomplish this. When we reached the stadium an hour or so before kick-off, several thousand of those previously mentioned acquaintances of mine were relaxing in the adjoining street or in front of the WalMart. (Well, Bompreço, owned by everyone's favorite global retailer) The fact that, while WalMart had secured a space that would be so well-frequented twice a week, the space in front of the store itself was tightly packed with independent vendors of foodstuffs felt like a small victory.

It does seem very Brazilian that one thing which would be exceedingly egalitarian would be a football match, and a ticket to the match does allow one to sit in any seat still found open, from the first row to the nosebleeds. (If one takes the small step of averting one's gaze away from the luxury/executive/glass/ boxes.) We plunked down near the right side of one of the goals, eight rows up. Bahia took the lead in the first half, and took a 2-1 lead with a dramatic penalty kick (on our side of the stadium!) Infelizmente, the São Paulo team scored a quick, anti-climactic goal in the last few minutes of the game to leave it a draw. Leaving the stadium was a rather claustrophobic affair, to say the least. In inching forward with the high-density crowd, one does almost adopt the basic one-two step of the samba. Coincidence?....Yes.
Sidenote: the peanuts are roasted but the popcorn is covered in coconut.

5 of we students made some delicious middle eastern food one Saturday evening (after another round of bike rental at the park), under the general direction of a fellow UCSB student who grew up in Israel. A Berkleyite took the lead on latkes while another Israeli made strong Turkish coffee for us to drink during the preparation. I personally have never grated so many potatoes in such a short time. The rest of the meal was made up of falafel, the requisite hummus, an Israeli avocado salad, another salad of tomatoes, mixed greens, parsley and lemon, along with exquisitely spiced chicken and plenty of pita bread. Dessert was less culturally authentic, consisting of that same pita bread covered in Nutella – there's never really a bad time for the stuff. We shared our creation with four less culinary active students, fellow UCSB student's host mother and the maid/empregada who showed us around the kitchen and helped us with some of the steps, especially the chicken. The host mother, at least, seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. More surprising was how much she liked the instrumental hip-hop that was being played in the background – she asked who it was, and later asked her aforementioned host student where she could get it. A nice evening, and it was very satisfying to be able to contribute directly to the best meal I had in brazil.

On Wednesday, around 15 ACBEUistas went to see a Candomblé ceremony at Ilê Axé Opo Afonja, a terreiro dating to the 1910s or so. It lasted several hours. A long bit of dancing counterclockwise in a circle, during which some of the participants are possessed by orixás. These dancers then become the center of the rest of the ceremony, as they dance the moves particular to their orixá and are hugged and offered flowers and money.

It really was quite a reminder of how often religion converges with theatre. I'll root for Candomblé against Pentecostals any day of the year, however. Pentecostalism has its megachurches, Candomblé has its houses decorated with white paper streamers and pink paper cut-outs of Oxossi's sword. Pentecostalism has TV sermons, while Candomblé houses are giving out free meals at each ceremony, attracting a poor and hungry crowd, some of whom eventually become more intimately involved.

29 October

The past week saw

Slovaks.

A couple, 30 and 27, who have been traveling around South America, mostly Peru and Argentina, and arrived here in Salvador, staying in the small hostel section the capoeira school maintains. They have apparently been doing capoeira in Bratislava for a good three years. They weren't here for too long, but those of us doing capoeira on a daily basis got to know them well enough to not want to see them go. Very nice people, and with very competent English that lead to plenty of stories and conversations. (I learned a bit about what it is like to grow up in a town of 25,000 built solely for the purpose of housing workers in a gigantic aluminum plant.) They went with the capoeiristas and 6 of we UC students on a (free!) trip to Cachoeira last Saturday. Cachoeira is on the recôncavo (coast of the Bay of All Saints) an hour and half or so by bus north and west. (Salvador is at the eastern tip of said recôncavo.) It was a major center of the sugar economy, but nowadays it is rather sleepy. The main thrust of the economy now seems to be historical tourism and cultural events. (The side of the bus that the Municipality of Cachoeira sent to pick up the capoeiristas describes the city as “heroic.”) The event this particular Saturday was a batizado: literally a baptism, but in this case the conferring of capoeira belts. The kids receiving the belts had a wide age range; 4 to 14 wouldn't surprise me. It was apparently the one year anniversary of this youth capoeira program that the Ginga Mundo in Cachoeira, with help from its affiliate in Salvador (the school I've been going to) and some Ministry of Culture money. The downside of such a small town is that when some sort of Christian group gathers in a town square at 6:30 or 7 AM to shoot off fireworks for Christ (or however they excuse their behavior) there is a good chance the sound will reach your residence there. The upside is that a walk around town feels safe, and can lead to some very odd sights – a man washing his car at the river, backgrounded by another man doing the same on the other side of the river. Clara, O Diretor, describes Cachoeira as boring, and has therefore organized a intra-UC EAP talent show to pass the time on our two-day trip coming on the 10th of November. Those of us who have already been should have plenty of things to explore, however – and we still have an argument to settle over just how far away that bridge is...

Traveling with the capoeiristas revealed that they have the same amount of energy at just about all times – too much to keep up with. We met Saturday morning at the school and then walked about 15 minutes to where the bus would meet us – berimbau played all the way. When we arrived, the bus wasn't yet there, so they started an impromptu roda (circle of people inside of which one plays) on the sidewalk. When we got on the bus, they immediately started singing, clapping and drumming, not stopping for the entire voyage. It wasn't much afterwards that they were back in a roda for the events of the first night, occasionally starting sidewalk rodas until the early hours of the morning, playing berimbau immediately upon rising, and then everything again for the actual batizado in the afternoon. Then singing the entire length of the bus ride back – until we stopped at the site of a car crash on the side of the road, to which they immediately rushed to help. I wasn't aware of what was occurring until after the crash was already crowded by those assisting and spectating, but those who did see it up close seemed very affected by it. It was an odd crash, involving only one car; one girl was thrown clear and scalped in the process, three were trapped in the crushed back. We heard upon arriving back in Salvador (I don't know through what channels) that two or three had died. It left everyone in an odd mood to end a weekend on. While I (I think, in the end, fortunately) avoided any grisly sites, I was left with the somewhat surreal image of a helicopter landing on the freeway some 15 or 20 feet in front of me.

Enough of that, and back to the real point of this entry: talking too much about capoeira and capoeira-related events. Although this one could also be filed under Slovaks or Favela. The Slovaks' last night here coincided with a dinner at the capoeira school for more capoeira children and their family. The food was not the main attraction – acararu, a concoction based largely on okra, and therefore very slimy – but there was an interesting musical experiment involving the combination of berimbau and fiddle and berimbau and guitar, (the second being perhaps more successful) a room full of the children's drawings, (the same room had rope swings for the children – this combination did not aid the drawings in staying attached to the walls) and, after the dinner, a completely mad benefit bazaar of unwanted items that had been brought in. The style of salesmanship employed was a mixture of shouting, banging on things, making ridiculous exaggerations and pretending to be mother to various dolls. I purchased (for a mere one real, which honestly didn't seem to be enough for a benefit) a yellow t-shirt,100% polyester, as is the unpleasant and much too hot Brazilian style. The back seems to indicate that it was a football jersey, likely for a youth club, but the front is emblazoned simply with the words “PASB'S MOTHERS.” It may have rocketed to the top of my t-shirt collection in terms of strangeness, although it may still have competition from Jakey's Middle School Computer Club Candy Sale shirt. After a bit of clean up, we headed to the house of one of the younger capoeiristas – we didn't know at the time just how far into a favela it was. However, I would say it was a good experience, as I went somewhere I would never walk if I wasn't in a large group lead by residents of the area – somewhat imposing ones at that. The residence to which we arrived did, it has to be said, fit a number of Brazilian stereotypes we have been told of. While the area immediately outside was dominated by dirty concrete, various crumbling features and idling chickens, the inside was quite well up kept. It was also entirely free of furniture – it did, of course, have a decent television set. (This ended up playing salsa and a concert DVD of the South African reggae star Lucky Dube. I saw the same DVD elsewhere later; I am guessing it has experienced a spike of popularity after his recent unfortunate death.) The capoeiristas were, of course, nice enough to accompany us to hail a taxi to return us to our homes. Shockingly, many taxis will not stop for groups of 9 people standing directly outside of favelas!

We started the third “module” of the culture class recently. Our new professor is an interesting character; originally from Barcelona, his accent at times sounds Scottish. He began his academic career in literature, but then studied media in the U.S., leading eventually to video ethnography in Bahia and West Africa and a PhD at the School of Oriental And African Studies at the University of London and an Adjunct Professorship at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. Module 3 is concerned with Afro-Brazilian religion, which largely means candomblé. An all-group trip to a candomblé temple (terreiro) is planned next week, and I should be taking a smaller group trip on the 7th as well.

This weekend, when looking for the nearest TAM Airlines office, I finally got close to an architectural wonder I had only spied for afar. It is possibly one of the ugliest buildings in the world, and it achieves this in a simply marvelous way. Glass boxes lined in red, sticking out seemingly at random, compose this wondrous tower, giving the appearance of a skyscraper built entirely out of 4x2 lego bricks by an 8-year old who has not gone to Architectural School. Most of these boxes are also covered in overgrown “decorative” foliage, as if those who created it, upon realizing what they had wrought, abandoned it forevermore. It seems to be home to a sort of Chamber of Commerce for the state of Bahia.

18 October

Today was the day of the Culture Class midterm. For a test I was told was multiple choice, there sure were an awful lot of essay questions. Even if the format was a bit of a surprise, it didn't feel all too difficult. It helped that there were questions involving Jorge Ben and Gilberto Gil, which I would have been fairly well equipped to answer before the class (although I did learn a few new things about them as well.) The test also provided me with an opportunity to compare Getulio Vargas and Otto Van Bismarck, which I had been itching to do for a number of weeks now.

The administration decided to celebrate the midterm with free tickets to (and mandatory attendance of) the Balé Folclorico in good old historic Pelhourinho. The Teatro Miguel Santana is a very small space, which seemed good for such a forceful performance. I actually have very few negative comments to make about dance on this occasion! Although the dances (all together, an hour's performance) were obviously very well rehearsed and choreographed, Afro-Bahian inspired dance still seems to me to be much more natural than ballet or the modern Western Art Dances. It was interesting (and perhaps a bit satisfying) that all the dances performed were in some way familiar already – during the candomblé dances, I could identify a number of the orixás represented, and I had already seen the dance which involves beating two sticks against the ground and the other dancers' sticks. Also of interest was the fact that the least enjoyable was the capoeira=inspired dance. Perhaps because I have been seeing a good deal of skilled capoeira several days a week, the influence of dance was most obvious during that segment – that is, taking something authentic and making it camp and ridiculous. As I don't believe I've mentioned much about Pelhourinho before, some notes:

About twenty minutes north of Vitória, it is the historic district, where one can still see old colonial buildings (with some new facades and re-touchings,) including the 16th-century governor's mansion which was the reason for Salvador's founding. Across from that mansion (now a museum) is a ridiculous glass government building without a first floor that was active during the dictatorship. That square is also home to the top of the Elevador Lacerda, which can be taken the cliff to Comercio and the lower city, by an odd donut-shaped fort in the middle of the water that was built to ward off encroaching Dutch. A good view of an interesting (if run down) part of the city. Pelhourino is also home to the Pierre Verger museum (a French photographer who took a great number of photographs of West Africa and Bahia beginning in the 40s,) the first official capoeira school, a culinary school, the Jorge Amado Foundation, Olodum's performance space and plenty of other cultural centers (and, of course, shops.) Pelhourino is also home to the strangest form of beggar or peddler I've yet encountered: they wander around offering to tie cloth bracelets around one's wrist (these say Lembrança do Bonfim, Bonfim being a Saint associated particularly with Bahia, the bracelets supposedly bringing good luck upon finally breaking.) They can be very adamant about tying these bracelets, and very insistent on their complimentary nature. When the tie is complete, they are equally insistent on a payment or donation in exchange for the bracelet. Hard to blame them, yet it still occupies a very odd space in between begging and trinket hawking. Apparently, Pelhourino was, before the 90s, a favela, and many of the historical buildings were run down or in ruins. After it was designated a UNESCO site, the government put some money in it and it became a center of tourism in Salvador. Still doesn't look like Disneyland.

17 October

On the bus to Lençois I developed a bit of a sore throat, and from Tuesday and Saturday of the next week I was what is at times referred to as 'under the weather,' with a case of indigestion, a fluctuating fever and an utter deficit of energy. However, on Sunday around 11, a friend from the program had the doorman ring up my host mother and came in to tell me that we were leaving for Praia do Forte at noon. So I found myself going to Praia do Forte. The trip is around an hour and a half to an hour north along the coast, once one figures out which bus one needs to get on. We actually covered most of the distance in a white van that told us it was going to Praia do Forte, and that we could go along as well for R$7. (On the way back, we encountered plenty, plenty more of these vans waiting for anyone who wanted to return to Salvador) Praia do Forte seems to be advertising itself as an eco-tourism spot, with whale-watching, a sea turtle reserve of some kind, trips through the nearby forest...and the first lodging one sees upon entering from Salvador, an establishment under the belief that it is an “eco resort.” While its ecological credentials may be fine, the town (if it can even be called that) is also appealing to the up-scale consumption market, with clothing stores, fancy restaurants and over-priced Mexican cuisine that all come together to create an ambiance that could be (and was) compared to Disneyland. Eerie, perhaps, but there was also incredibly ice cream. Once the six of us located the very pleasant hostel (which we shared with an entire class of small-town Bahian high schoolers on a weekend trip with their physics teacher), we only had a few hours of sunlight left, and I'm not sure if any of us had much of an idea of how we could embark on the more eco-tourist-y mini-trips. Still, we managed to make a fun evening and morning of it, even if it made me feel like a lazy tourist. The beach was home to rock formations which formed tidal pools home to plenty of little crabs and brilliantly blue fish, along with water that was not only felt a perfect temperature but also somehow softer than regular water. A hard thing to climb out of. Our stay at the hostel also gave us free entrance to a place run by some sort of sea-turtle conservation group, home to turtle shells, informational boards in Portuguese and English....and pools with large sea turtles themselves. Very large indeed. A clever evolutionary strategy, to cover yourself in a hard enough shell to allow you to float slowly around and live for decades and decades. At the end of the day, we managed to erase some of the lazy-tourist feeling my ending our stay with lunch at an unmarked building advertising a R$6 lunch, which was an authentically Bahian plate of rice, beans, Meat and spaghetti, served in a back room with a hanging light bulb and The World's Tiniest Kitten.

So basically, if you find yourself in a resort town and you have no idea what to do, here is how to have a good time: drink for eight hours. Start, say, around six. Go out to the inexplicable structure in the middle of the town that functions as a motorcycle display by day and begs to be a tree house at night. Play drinking games in the middle of the resort town. Invite Brazilian high schoolers into tree house. Try to teach high schoolers drinking game. Hang from roof of tree house. Find random Brazilians playing pagode, a subgenre of samba mostly fixated on dancing over and down onto bottles. Have one of your party play them a song about being a puritan farmer. Leave them because they are kind of assholes who only care about girls dancing over bottles. Give more alcohol to high schoolers. Watch your friends try not to say inappropriate things to high schoolers in broken Portuguese. Bring out headphones, play them rap music. Stand around in the street after midnight until a cachaça drinking-game that revolves around not liking George Bush breaks out. Have a physics teacher who has been drinking with his 15-17 students ask if you have any weed. Make sure to get to bed before 4 so you can go look at huge turtles and eat yourself some delicious motherfucking ice cream.

And there's your weird-ass fun time.

The area of Salvador (either called Comercio or very near Comercio) that is, in appearance, closest to an American downtown (in that there are plenty of glass skyscrapers that one can imagine financial services companies being comfortable in) is quite the surreal sight when abandoned. This last friday was Children's Day, a holiday that, with Teacher's Day on the following Monday, creates quite the themed four-day weekend. Passing through it on that day, I couldn't see a single person. The sudden drastic change in architecture, when combined with the lack of people, gave the impression that Sony Pictures has decided to install the set for a movie set in post-Apocalyptic Los Angeles while I wasn't looking.

A bit farther along the coast from Comercio is Orfãos do Bonfim, once an orphanage and now (I believe) a Monday-Friday Boarding School for children from favelas...I'm not sure if it is scholarship-based, government-funded, church-affiliated or what have you. It was one of the three or four locations that Clara (director of the English program at ACBEU and general Brazilian-Who-Makes-Things-Happen-For-Us) offered to help us make a connection to in order to do some volunteer work. Two weeks ago those of us who chose Orfãos went to see the place, meet some children and choose activities to help with when we could return. We may not have been aided by the fact that, due to a lack of communication, we arrived a half-hour late, but all the students who showed up did not end up doing much more than simply observing, excepting the two who helped with the gym class. Everyone felt either ignored or looked-upon as an unwelcome presence by the teachers. During the brief recess, I was simultaneously asked to race from one side of the courtyard to the other, to play capoeira and to give piggy-back sides, with various children pulling in one direction or another so that I could join them in their preferred game. A difficult proposition which at one point left me physically toppled to the ground by elementary-age Brazilians. I'm not sure if these kids were especially a handful, or if any kid one can barely understand would be hard to deal with. An odd volunteering experience, and while playing with the kids was...fun in a very, very tiring way, the general feeling of being completely unhelpful and unused did not seem to make many of us itching to return.

At the moment there isn't too much more about the recent weekdays that I can easily recall. Most of the days are filled with classes and oddly compelling naps, which, followed by a bit of homework and then capoeira, seem to be quickly over. Not an unhappy way to pass the time, but it certainly does pass. Now that I no longer seem to be ill, the weekdays may see some more variety, or they may see volunteer work. Here is where a transition to the next paragraph would normally live and build a nest out of stray punctuation marks and hanging participles.

There are two malls currently being built here, in a city where I am a twenty minute walk from three malls and which is said to possess South America's first or second largest mall in Shopping Salvador. If consumption really is the magic bullet for economic growth, then I suppose all these favelas must be a cultural thing.

Fred

Things about Fred, the teacher:

Teaches at a university, a public school and for this program.

Went to a military school during the dictatorship and was punished with jail time for many reasons, including going to a protest and calling in a bomb threat to prevent an exam being held on a Sunday. Says he loved going to jail.

Speaks some of about 8 languages.

Spent 10 straight years traveling, supposedly going to nearly every country on the planet, including three months in China with no Chinese language skills.

His command of English is such that he often ends up saying things which, while they do not make the best sense, seem somehow truer than something that literally made sense. Because of this, he is often asked for clarification by students who are unable to deal with this, and his answers are often deliciously unsatisfactory. “If you ask me, are we destroying the Amazon, I would say yes.” “The first twins in the world come from Nigeria. Second, Bahia.” “São Paulo is a city of 19 thousand people.” Believes world wide social unrest will break out in 2014.

30 September

The last week has been a reminder that I am indeed residing in the tropics. In the city of Salvador itself, it can be very easy to forget that, as I've been in cities with high temperatures and a few palm trees before. Last week, a group of six of we students took a twenty-minute-to-half-hour bus ride to the Parque Metropolitano de Pituaçu. The entrance of the park features abstract sculptures, playgrounds and swan boats, but our objective was the renting of bicycles. The 15 km bike path stays next to a lake for its entirety, and in most places it is surrounded by thick forest on the other side. It seems amazingly natural for a park in the middle of the city, excepting the moments when one passes an abandoned football stadium or spies a favela on a nearby hill. We saw at least a dozen tiny little monkeys. The next day I saw the same species of primate walking along the power line directly outside my window.

This weekend I and slightly more than twenty others went to Morro de São Paulo, a tourist outpost on the corner of Ilha de Tinharé. Getting there required taking a ferry across the bay and taking a bus to Nazaré, from where another small passenger boat was taken to the island. Being so tourism-centered does some strange things to a place. Many of the people spoke with Spanish vocabulary and strange pronunciations. One Brazilian on the beach with a barely-identifiable occupation knew some Hebrew. We encountered some Norwegians who were studying law on the island, and some volleyball was played with them. The island itself was, of course, very nice, with trees, cliffs with incredible mud, beaches protected by strings of rock, sand bars sitting off the coast. Ice cream carts that can be floated out to swimmers. Unfortunately, in the short amount of time we had, I missed the opportunity to do any hiking, going on a group tour that mostly ended up going to various beaches instead. (I was also sunburned fairly harshly.) The drive from the ferry dock to Nazaré actually did a better job of establishing a sense of location. Green, green, green, green, distinctively clumped trees, richly red walls of soil, small groups of cattle around small lonely houses, donkeys, small roadside stands with the Nova Schin banners which seem to grow in any spot that has seen human currency. What do the people in these small towns do, and where are those power lines going? The water was an amazing green on the return ferry ride, and in combination with the storm clouds it gave the bay in the late afternoon a very primordial look.

I received my official capoeira nickname. (Apelido.) Picapau. 'Cause I sound like a woodpecker.

Next weekend is the all-group trip to Lençois in the interior. Volunteering may begin in the next week or two?

27 September

It's always a bit strange when you walk into the dining room and your mother is sitting in front of the recently-purchased, aesthetically-decimating gigantic television with her head bowed because it seems it is that time in the televangelist broadcast. Such a thing really puts some meaning in her repeated “Gracas a Jesus Cristo” when she talks about its great colours.

19 September

At the beach, two of We Students began to attempt handstands and the like, and it prompted the arrival of a boy, whose age we guessed to be about 13 or so, came up, comparing/teaching technique and showing off. A beach vendor he (presumably) was acquainted with stopped by to exhibit his standing 360 degree back-flip. The kid spent another 15-30 minutes doing things to impress us. He moved on to the hand-stand-from-kneeling-position (easier than it at first seems,) then moved on to doing his handstands and cartwheels in the ocean, jumping backwards into the ocean, and finally throwing (or having us throw) abandoned aluminum cans full of sand out into the sea, waiting for them to sink, and then swimming out to retrieve them. It felt very much as though the three of us at the beach were his parents and he was constantly looking to us and shouting out “Watch This!” It was a fun, very human, very uncynical experience that didn't end with “and this establishes an agreement between us in which you give me money for being charmingly local!” (This is apparently what happens when you take a picture of a woman standing about in traditional baiana dress) or “I'm going to cut you!” His name was Pedro. Charming.

After Capoeira today (three days in a row is exhausting), a guy who has repeatedly come in near the end of each session to enter the roda with the more advanced players, and who uses a very odd style, said Hare Krishna to me three or four times, each one accompanied by a high-five. He himself did not have the traditional Hare Krishna shaved head (though neither did George Harrison). Is he a Hare Krishna? Does the combination of longer hair and headbands make him think of Hare Krishna? Is he certifiably insane? These are the questions that hover about like impossibly lazy birds.