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.