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.”