i got a fever, and the only cure is ... more cowbell

Last night another one of the profesoras - a bit of a deceptive term, since this one (her name is Concecao, pronounced con - seh - SOW) is only about 25 - from the school took us out to see some more local music. This time it was a percussion group made up of students and professors from the Universidade de Federal, which is supposedly the best of Salvador's 3-4 major universities.

One of the first songs was led by a professor who spoke very quietly (ironic for a percussion guy), was very thin, and dressed "like a beatnik" as one of my classmates observed, with a white flat golf hat, Lisa Loeb glasses and a black button down shirt and jeans. He started off playing waist-high bongo drums (or something like that - I don't know what the correct name for them is) and a few minutes into the song there came this roar of big bass drums from the back of the auditorium. Everyone turned around and around 10 kids with various sized drums, from large bass to smaller snare and bongo-style drums, marched down the main aisle with broad smiles. The sound was amazing. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

But ... once everyone got onto the stage and behind the professor, guess what he picked up? That's right, a cowbell. And he used it to lead everyone else with this unbelievably good percussion conversation, where he would hit the cowbell in the direction of a particular part of the band and they would answer back with some either simple or very complex response. So, basically the glue that held the whole thing together was none other than ... the cowbell.

A lot of what they played sounded like it could have been made up (oh, sorry, "improvised") on the spot, but after taking a step back I realized it had to take an incredible amount of skill and patience to be able to play this kind of music, and to get good at it. There were so many minor parts where one or a couple of musicians would wait essentially the entire song to hit their drum once or twice at the end, or in the middle, and for these people I'm not sure how they didn't fall asleep before it came to be their turn. A lot of them were clearly superior musicians, though, and it looked like they played percussion in addition to a number of other non-percussion instruments.

One particularly interesting instrument is the barimba, which is essentially a bow (one you hunt with) that gets held at the bottom, and the string gets struck by a stick (which presumably was originally an arrow) which makes a twangy, otherworldly sound and which has an amazing range of available tones. There's also a hollow shell, something like a coconut, attached to the bottom which when struck either close to or away from the player's chest can make a number of different percussive sounds.

And lastly, there was this hollow, tube-like horn that was made from a tree trunk, about 5 inches in diameter and probably 5 feet long. It sounded like one of those huge horns that Tibetan monks use and sort of sing through in this incredibly deep way, which makes them sound sort of like frogs. I'm sure my description is not doing any of this justice, but it was another one of those experiences that could happen only here and which I'm sure I'm not appreciating nearly as much as I should.

going to volunteer

Yesterday a classmate and I went to the city commercial center, near Mercado Modelo and the Lacerda elevator, to see about doing volunteer work for an organization that the school has an affiliation with. The organization has a website here: http://www.centraldecidadania.org.br/. Ivanildo was the name of the volunteer coordinator / manager we were supposed to meet there. We took a cab because we were late, which turned out to be a good thing because the cab driver dropped us off on the right street, which we would have had a heck of a time finding if we'd taken the bus. The building was very government-looking, austere, a little dirty, and somewhat institutional-looking. We took the elevator to the 5th floor, which turned out to be a bad idea, since it took forever and we would have made it up the stairs in about 1/10th of the time. In the hallway all of the doors were white, with no signs on them, and numbered like apartments. The doors all looked like they had been there since 1950 and never cleaned.

Ivanildo answered the door and greeted us warmly. In fact, every Brazilian that I've met here and had an interaction with beyond 5 words has been very, very friendly. He had us sit down at his desk, handed us two inch-thick stacks of pictures showing past activities, and proceeded to speak very slowly in Portuguese to explain what it was his organization did and what we would be doing. I was *shocked* at how much I was able to understand just by the fact that he talked so slowly, and I realized that he must be doing it perfectly for our benefit. At the end of our 30-45 minute meeting, he mentioned that volunteers always told him to speak more slowly. He also said (hehe) that we spoke very good Portuguese, which I let flatter myself for all of about 3 seconds. The people sent previously must have had guidebook-level language skills.

He explained that the organization wasn't government funded, because it hadn't been in existence (<3 years) long enough. They therefore survived on what looked like tiny ($10 average) donations from individuals and corporations, and a large chunk of their donations came in the form of goods and/or services from respective corporations. There were a couple of bags of beans and a stack of used books in the corner of the room that he pointed to as an example of this.

The organization was in the process of building a new education facility for after-school type programs, which once it was complete would be pretty nice but still had a lot of work to go. Their work was primarily with families that had out of work parents or were so poor that the parents might as well not work anyway. They provided things like food, educational materials, and educational programs and guidance for kids up to age 14.

I get the feeling that like many organizations in the States, there's sort of a staged approach to volunteering that lets them check you out and vice-versa, so that if either party bales then no one is a whole lot the worse for wear. He said we should meet him Wednesday, at which point he would drive us out to what presumably is their distribution facility, and we'd help load up the truck with packages (food, books, etc.) to be delivered to families in poor neighborhoods. He also said that they needed help translating their (very modest) web pages into English.

So me and 1-3 other students are going to show up there tomorrow to help out with the distribution. Since we'll be dropping them off in poor neighborhoods, I'm preparing myself to see some crazy and/or horrific shit. At the same time I'm really looking forward to it, since it was so surprisingly easy to communicate with Ivanildo, and since I'll actually get to help out some of the people here. Poverty is written on the sleeve of so many people you pass in the street, and it is just everywhere you go.

The city commercial center is right on the edge, or so I've heard, of some really poor neighborhoods as well, and it did look a little bit dirtier than an upscale neighborhood like Barra. It's linked to Pelhourinho by the Lacerda elevator, but you can also take a cheaper elevator / rail car which costs 5 centavos vs. the 1 or 2 reals it costs to take the elevator. This is like 2 cents versus 50 cents. So we went up to Pelhourinho and my German friend told me about the time he almost drowned and was in intensive care for a week. But that's another story.

German guy has quasi-hookup/date with our teaching assistant

So the German guy who's in my class for God knows what reason since he speaks Portuguese fluently went out on a date last night with a woman who I can best describe as our teaching assistant. You might find yourself asking a perfectly good question here: Isn't that against the rules? The answer, is, of course, yes, it's completely against the rules and maybe even against the law, i.e., teachers "fraternizing" (where fraternizing = making out &c.) with students. Which, to be honest, is pretty silly anyway since everyone is an adult and few are under 30. But god knows gossip makes damn good copy so I'm running with it.

I should mention here that our TA is approximately 25-30 years old, and has what could be described diplomatically as a full chest. She always wears low cut shirts, which is not out of the ordinary for a Brazilian woman of any age.

I walked by the bust stop (I mean bus stop) on an afternoon last week and saw her waiting there, and she said that my classmate had asked for some help finding his way to get an innoculation that he failed to get before he arrived in Salvador. She then went into this whole big deal about how it's against the rules, blah blah blah, for her to help him out but she was going to do it anyway. And she made a huge deal about how we couldn't tell anyone and I promised not to because, like, who cares. I never quite got why she was telling me this but I said if she needed any help I'd do what I could. I get the feeling now that she was using me as a barometer to see how good/bad I thought it was that she help him out or whatever.

So a couple of days later he tells me that she told him that she can't take him to the hospital or whatever to get inoculated because it's against the rules. Fine. No problem. He of course spent 3 hours on a Thursday switching between 5 or so different buses and ending up at a hospital that couldn't help him. La dee freakin da, I said. At least it wasn't me (laughing and pointing).

But then yesterday he tells me that she asked him if he wanted to "hang out" on Friday (last) night. I asked why and he said, somewhat unenthusiastically, that she said she "needed help with her English." Apparently she's taking English classes at a university here and might possibly get a job at my school teaching Portuguese. On Friday she taught our class, which I had to miss because I was still sick. Turns out it was the best class to miss because one of the teachers had everyone in all the classes get together at the end and sing some traditional Bahian song which the German guy told me was unbelievably painful but that's a whole other story.

He tells me about this English language social get-together or whatever and I still am not getting what it's all about, and so I press him and finally he says, "I think she likes me." So like any good buddy of 2 weeks I start immediately ridiculing him. He starts rolling his eyes, totally not into it, blah blah whatever. He calls her like he promised he would and they meet at one of the malls here, along with a couple of her friends, I think a guy and a woman.

So during the course of the evening our TA does the following: a) tells my classmate that she loves him, b) won't take her hands off him, c) tries to kiss him and I don't know what his level of resistance was (or not), d) tries to get him to stay over at her aunt's place for the evening, which is apparently major taboo (i.e., having your potential love interest stay over at a family's place if you're a woman). But hey, it's love - she said so, so f the rules, dammit.

My boy is a bit on the fence about the whole thing, to a level which I don't understand. I think he has trouble saying no, which I can understand, because she's definitely nice. I don't think he's terribly attracted to her on a physical level, although he has spent approximately 70% of our class staring at her chest. He was shaking his head this morning and asking me how he got into this, and I said "What did you think was going to happen?" For an answer I got a blank look into space lasting about 7 minutes.

Well it turns out that he wasn't cool with staying at the aunt's (loser), and sort of tabled the whole idea of whether or not the relationship will continue and to what level. He told her that he had promised me we'd meet in the morning to go to the beach. Which was true, but if he ditched me I could certainly have cared less, especially given the circumstances. We met but didn't go anyway because it's been cloudy and variably rainy all day.

This afternoon we were sitting on some building steps while I was stuffing my face with acaraje (Bahian shrimp quasi-taco) and he asked if I'd gotten the homework assignment from our teacher. Like any intelligent person I came back with "No, your girlfriend gave it to me." I am such a crazy character.

For my part, yesterday evening and night was spent watching Batman Begins for approximately the 900th time (I brought the DVD with me). At one point I pulled a bit of fuzz out of my navel. I wonder how long that'd been there.

my new favorite word

I read a book review on Amazon.com where a guy described a book he thought was poorly written as "craptastic". Awesome. From now until probably the end of next week my only aim in life is to figure how to shoehorn this word into conversation.

manioc

... is a kind of large root, that is a staple of Bahian food. You see it for sale on the street, at vegetable stands, in the supermarket, everywhere. It looks like the small, slightly twisty and/or warped trunk of a small (2-3" diameter) tree, with thin dark brown bark and very white beneath. The ones sold this way are meant to be cut up into slighly smaller, say, 6" long, pieces and boiled. Once boiled it's much softer, like when you do the same with carrots, and has the taste and consistency of stringy potatoes (consistency like sweet potatoes but taste and color like white potatoes) but maybe a little bit more sugary. Alone it's not that great, just like boiled potatoes on their own aren't that much to talk about, but with whatever you'd put on potatoes - butter, sour cream, etc. - it's really, really good.

Manioc roots are also ground down into a kind of flour and then fried, and then served as a side dish like rice with almost every Bahian main course, which inevitably has some kind of seafood as its main ingredient. The name of the fried flour stuff escapes me at the moment but it's sort of a dull yellow. The best way I can describe its taste is like french fries with the consistency of something like heavy wheat flour, although that doesn't really do it justice because it's definitely heavier than flour. You can eat it straight but most people mix it with a sauce of some kind or other, of which there is no shortage here, so that it goes down easier because otherwise it's a bit dry.

As many of you already know, I've never been one to go off at any length about any kind of food. Beats me why - my guess is that my lack of interest in the details of food has some genetic basis. But food is a strikingly integral part of Bahian culture. I can't imagine trying to describe the place without describing the food. When I was home in the States between trips to Salvador and someone mentioned Brazil, I would think first of the food more than anything and it would take me back instantly. And, besides the people here, it was one of the things I missed the most when I was gone. I know that any extended amount of time away from Bahia will be painful if for no other reason than being away from the cuisine. Coming from me that is an insane thing to say, but it's true. It's one of those things I never would have guessed or understood if I'd never come here.

Pelhourinho, Olodum, Argentinians, Germany

One of my fellow students, the guy who was determined to be at the same "level" as I (but who clearly speaks and understand Portuguese far better) is German. He speaks English without an accent, Italian, French, and (surprise!) German. We went to Pelhourinho this past Tuesday because Olodum plays there. I'd seen them already this past Saturday at the African-Brazilian music festival at the Farol, but it had been a week or so since I'd been to Pelhourinho. Everybody's always talking about it, since it's the historical district and the place to be when you're going out, so I went despite the 40 (~$18US) reals it cost to get in to see the band.

I was a few minutes late to meet him at the bus stop, and coincidentally as I arrived a bus that could've taken us there left the curb (typical). We waited for a few minutes for another bus, and skipped a few express ones because of the cost. A man asked us in Portuguese if we wanted to share a cab with him and the woman he was with, presumably his wife, and we said yes since it would be much faster. Once we got in the cab it turned out, after a few moments of trying to figure out what everyone's native language was, that the couple was from Argentina and had only been here a few days on vacation. Once this was established everyone switched from pidgin Portuguese to English. I told them I was planning on going to Buenos Aires in March or afterwards, and they said they lived in a suburb of that city. When I told them I'd heard that Buenos Aires was a great place I got somewhat unenthusiastic agreement from the man, I'm guessing (hoping) because he didn't completely understand what I said.

A song from Nirvana on MTV Unplugged was playing on the cab radio, and when it switched to a different song on the same album I realized that it was a CD. I asked the driver if he liked Nirvana and he said yes, that he also liked Led Zeppelin and a couple other of what I'm guessing were British-American rock bands that I couldn't understand because of his accent. The German guy suggested he might be playing this because we were in the car, which was very possible, but to me it seemed like a lot of work just to increase your number of tourist cab fares.

The driver, like all the cab drivers here and in any major city, was a complete nut, weaving at high speed and at one point screaming at a car who had been blocking us that they were idiots. Cab drivers must have a high rate of heart disease and high blood pressure, because they almost unfailingly get more aggravated and prone to road rage than anyone else, which is unfortunate since most of them spend 12+ hours a day driving.

We got out at Pelhourinho and paid, and the fare came to just a little more than a bus when split 4 ways. Before shutting the door I told the driver in Portuguese that Nirvana was "way cool". He laughed through a newly-lit cigarrette, gave me the thumbs-up (which is often substituted for a wave here) and we shook hands.

The popular neighborhood of Pelhourinho, like anything else in Brazil, is a mix of different types and styles. Large, open courtyards surrounded on all sides by European-style churches border an intricate maze of narrow cobblestoned streets lined with tourist shops, military police stations colored in shades of brown, and Bahian restaurants. On a Tuesday night the streets are crowded with tourists and locals, and you can't walk a block or so without being approached by young restauranteurs waving you towards their restaurants with a copy of their menu.

I can't help think of it as being like the Latin Quarter of Paris, or what I imagine New Orleans looked like before this year's hurricanes.

We ate a small dinner at a restaurant that I would rate at marginal at best, since the food was overpriced, not well-prepared, and the service left quite a bit to be desired. Plus they were playing Jackson 5 tunes while the band (outside, in back, where we sat) tuned up. Despite the drawbacks there were plenty of what looked like locals swarming in once it hit mayb 8pm.

We'd heard that Olodum went on around 9:30 or 10, which gave us something like an hour and a half to kill, so we wandered around the streets, stopping to watch a few bands play on the temporary stages set up for the evenings. There were also a couple of groups of kids and young women playing Olodum-like drums. The sound of these drums covers the whole range of percussive sound, from deep bass to tap-tap-tap little snare drums, and regardless of the song or beat it is utterly mesmerizing, almost instinctivey appealing. And the groups are usually between 15-20, sometimes maybe 30 members, usually all ages. There's also a wide range of enthusiasm. One girl in the group we stopped to watch for a while was dancing in sync with the beat, as the drummers for Olodum do (it's part of the show), doing things like twirling her drum sticks high in the air and raising her arms in an elaborate, ceremonial way when she wasn't drumming. Another woman who looked bored beyond sanity, shoulders slumped and eyes wandering around the crowd, though mostly looking to something unidentifiable on her left, played on of the medium-sized snare drums. When it came around to her to do what was probably the longest solo of the particular beat they were playing, she barely flinched. She was really good, but it looked like she was ready to graduate to more challenging work.

Mesmerizing as it was, you can only see so much of this kind of drumming before it gets repetitive. Plus it's a great environment for pickpockets to work in, so we moved on after about half an hour. My feet were getting tired and I suggested that we sit on the steps of one of the churches that surrounded one of the big courtyards, in a well-lit area where other people were sitting. My friend had a caiphirina (local rum, sugar, lime drink) and I had a spring water which I had thought was carbonated when I bought it but turned out not to be (dammit).

I think we were talking about the political situation with the war in Iraq and the world economy, and somehow we got on the subject of Germany and the current economic conditions there. This was a continuation of a conversation we'd had earlier at dinner about the newly elected female prime minister of Germany, who had been officially sworn in that day. In this earlier conversation he'd described one of the more powerful political parties, which he described at one point as being as far to the right as was legal in that country.

Since there was all this music playing as we sat on the church steps, I said that I liked Brazilian / Bahian music although it was notable that they always seemed to be yelling "Brazil!" in their songs. Not that the same doesn't fly in the US, I added, particularly in Country music but elsewhere as well. He said, interestingly, that he'd been brought up to not talk too much about his country, or brag or boast or doing anything that was explicitly patriotic, for obvious historical reasons. Only recently had there been sporting and other international events where German flags were very prominent. I pointed out that even if Germany had reason to keep their patriotic voices in check, there was much for them to be thankful for, one of them being that it was one of the largest (4th? US-Japan-China-Germany?) economies in the world, and this seemed to be proof that it had sprung back from the war. And he pointed out too that it had been 60 years already and Germans, at least, had to move on.

He quietly mentioned something I already knew: there are elements still in Germany, particularly in the poor regions of the East and elsewhere, that try to revitalize fascism or racism or whatever mix of anger and hate there is as a result of poverty, not unlike in radical Islamist circles, as my friend rightly pointed out. Germans are as disturbed if not more so than the rest of the world about the existence of these groups and the tension they arouse, particularly in a society that wants to remain open and free but at the same time move on from its past. I asked him if he'd seen the movie Der Untergang (Downfall), which was a German-made, fictionalized account of HItler's last days in the bunker during the Battle of Berlin, and he said he was one of the few of his group of friends who hadn't. He said, too, that according to Germans who had either seen HItler regularly or known him (it wasn't clear to me which), the actor that played him nailed the part. So much so that when he got into character on the set either before or after shooting, some people were genuinely scared by his presence. If you've seen the movie, which if you haven't you should, I think you'll agree. I told him that the part that struck me most about the film was that when things went wrong Hitler blamed all of his generals for their incompetence, and said something like "You can't even win a bloody battle, and I went an conquered a continent all by myself!"

He seemed particularly saddened by all of the beautiful places in Europe that had been destroyed as a result of the war. I hadn't heard anyone speak of this with such conviction before.

The human tragedy, in my experience, at this point is something that is always implicitly registered, as if even between two people who have never had direct experience with it (who in the world hasn't seen its effects?), it will never be forgotten but at the same time is still too almost horrific to comprehend, much less discuss with a level of true understanding. I think there are those that would caution against allowing "implicitness" not evolve into amnesia, and I would agree with that.

Anyway, it turns out that Olodum wasn't playing that night. But who cares.

The cop who was watching the club where they usually play told us they were in Brasilia for the weekend and would be here later, presumably next week although I couldn't really confirm this. The cop was exceptionally good-natured, and come to think of it, most of the cops I've talked to in Pelhourinho are very friendly, which is surprising when you look at them because they look like soldiers.

it was a nice evening until some dude put on The Eagles

Someone in a building adjacent to mine was playing "Hot in the City" and then "L. A. Woman" (Doors' cover) by Billy Idol, which, when wafting over the tops of tropical trees and bushes that you can see outside my window, is eerie in an early-evening, 80s-throwback sort of way. It was what I'd almost call a poetic moment until the same jackass switched over to The Eagles, first with "Hotel California" (OK, on fringe of cheesy, but acceptable), and then totally destroying it with "Tequila Sunrise" or whatever else that crap song is called.

I am currently skipping the first school-organized social outing that I've missed so far, because I can't keep from sniffling all over the place because of the cold I've got. I'm also freaked out like I always get with these things that I'll give it to someone else, so I might end up skipping class tomorrow too. I was there today and every time I sneezed everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me, and made little if any effort to mask their disgust at my condition. Not that I blame them. Because of that I'm guessing I might not show up tomorrow.

But back to the 80s music floating over the palm tree tops - I don't know if I'll ever get used to seeing a palm tree out my window. I don't expect that I will, and I think that's a good thing. One reason to come here was just for a change, and I definitely got that. At the same time I'm comfortable enough here that I don't really feel like it's a whole lot different than anywhere else. Strike that - anywhere else I've been. Take Palm Springs, CA, where I was a few years back for a rock-climbing trip. There was a man here in my Pousada who said he'd lived there, and that sort of brought that place to mind. To me there's more visible differences between New York or Maine and Palm Springs than there are between Palm Springs and Salvador. Or maybe just fewer differences between the latter two than you would expect. I'm sure there are people who disagree. But the parts of the world that I've seen, at least, which is primarily what most would still call "The West": Brazil, US, Canada, Western Europe, Moscow and St. Petersburg, are far less different from each other than I ever expected.

either I'm paralyzed by the meaninglessness of life in the modern age, or this cold is starting to get to me

My guess is that it's a little bit of both. Plus I stubbed my toe on the corner of my bed last night when I was coming back from the bathroom in a somnambulant stupor, and I think I might have broken it. Either that or it's gangrene that set in already, 'cause it's blue. It's so freakin blue and purple, actually, that I took a picture of it and posted it here. And let me just tell you, the picture doesn't do it any justice. It's much worse than it looks. Only someone as super-manly as me could have weathered it in the middle of the night without crying, which I almost did.

I really shouldn't be complaining, since for all intents and purposes my life these days is pretty much summed up by the lyrics of Margaritaville, sans the drinking (Does he even talk about anything besides drinking?). I did start to get a little nervous, however, that all of my previous posts were so brimming with positivity that they were starting to lack authenticity.

So I have a head cold. It happens almost every time I go to another country. The first time I left the US, in 2000, when I went on a 3-week train tour of Europe with my sister, I caught a cold like the first day, which provided me the opportunity to subsequently annoy the living crap out of her with my irritability and snot for the proceeding 3 weeks. And I think that the second time I was here in Salvador I had a cold almost exactly like what I have now. You would have thought I'd have picked up the immunity last time. Guess not.

My (and others') theory is that foreigners haven't been exposed to the same bugs that the locals have, so we don't have the immunity that they do.

My Portuguese teacher advised me to get and drink some kind of herbal tea that's got garlic in it. The added bonus is that I'll be repellent to vampires, women (didn't need the garlic for that), and people in general. Sweet.

apartment pictures

Pictures of the interior of my new apartment are available for viewing here.

Brazilian coffee just plain blows

It's true. As much as I like to tout all the things I like about this place, there's a cultural and logical black hole smack dab wherever they started to think about drinking coffee around here. Which is kind of weird, since as I was reading last night in A Death in Brazil, coffee was one of the, or maybe even the only (I was tired) major crops that the Portuguese and Spanish profited from in the years after dividing up South America between themselves.

In Salvador people drink black coffee, relatively strong but not terribly strong by US standards, out of these little plastic cups that are like the ones that come with a bottle of cough syrup. And they put lots of sugar in it. Soooo ... I say to myself, What's so great about that? And the answer is: Nothing. Drinking a "cup" of coffee here (called cafezinho, "little coffee") makes me approximately 1/16th as happy as I would be if I drank what I consider to be a normal sized coffee. And of course you can't walk into a luncheonette and be like "I'd like 16 cafezinhos please, and my friend here will have an additional 16 cafezinhos, and we'd like 1 more group of 16 cafezinhos to go (ignorant tourist smile)." There are some places here that serve large cups of coffee, but they cater to tourists, so going there makes you feel like ... a tourist. And there's also places that serve espresso European-style but again going there makes me feel the same as when I'm buying "authentic" New York paraphernalia (a 6" tall plastic Statue of Liberty") at a Times Square shop, of which there are approximately 1000, and all their stuff is made by slave children in some Beijing suburb.

So my coffee maker is this little one-cup deal (I'll try to post a picture here) that is iron, cup-sized, and has a little hook-shaped tube going over the top of it that looks sort of like a little faucet. You put water in the bottom (enough for a cafezinho glass ... sigh), coffee in the part of the cap that has a metal filter, and screw the top on and put your cup on the top. You put the whole thing with the cup on the stove, turn on the gas, and ... there's no pilot light.

That's right. I had all this set up last night, and was looking forward to placating my pre-caffeine buzz anxiety/exhilaration when I realized that I needed a match or lighter to light the gas stove. There's a lighter on the fridge which is of course spent (thank you landlady), so I had to go walk like 5 blocks to find a place where they sell lighters. And of course my Portuguese sucks so no one knows what I'm talking about ("luz para fumar?" is what I said), and the fact that I'm gesturing frantically like a heroin addict in withdrawal is not helping either. Finally I get one at a gas station, trudge back to my place, start up the stove, and hide behind my fridge while I'm watching the thing heat up, because I'm not sure I set it up right and I want to be protected in case it explodes.

So when it came out, quite anticlimactically, I drank it in approximately 0.03 seconds, which is 10x as much time as it took to put sugar in, and thought to myself, only 15 more to go.

got an apartment, finally

After about a week of wrangling with various opportunists who are looking to rent temporary apartments, I was able to secure a studio and slept there last night. The owner is a 40-ish woman who apparently is moving elsewhere in Salvador but wants to keep her apartment, presumably to make money off people like me. She was a bit of a wheeler-dealer, and lucky for me the deal was brokered in part by the owner of my pousada, and Irish guy named Sean who has lived here for 22 years. He was able to translate her furiously fast Portuguese for me, and talked her out of making me pay for the electric bill, which she wanted me to do but usually isn't part of the deal with temporary apartments here.

When they were talking, he told me that she said 2 things I should note: 1) careful when pulling down the window shade because it can fall off, and 2) she would prefer that I not have a lot of women coming in and out of the apartment. If she only knew how little she had to worry about regarding 2). I told her this through Sean but she seemed skeptical. When we were walking to the apartment (a block away from the pousada) I asked him what she meant about that, and he was like "I think she doesn't want you to bring a lot of hookers there." Whoa, people - I just met this lady and already I'm bringing hookers in an out every night? Don't I get a chance to prove my trustworthiness before being chastised like this? Aren't I innocent until proven guilty?

Sean went on, "It's really none of her business - you're paying the rent, you can do whatever you want. She can't tell you what to do." I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated his willingness to defend my rights to have prostitutes in my apartment, but we got in the elevator and they all started talking.

The apartment is relatively small, being a studio, and it's a bit girly, which is actually probably a good thing since people are always telling me that my apartment is so clearly a bachelor's, what with the microwave on top of the stove, etc. I would like to note that above the bed is a Picassoesque painting of two naked people in a passionate embrace and kissing. And yet somehow I'm the one generating all the concern about being sexually deviant.

The biggest perk about the place is probably the doorman, whose name is Jorge, who is always shaking my hand and putting his arm around my shoulder, and giving me the thumbs up (we've known each other two days). He was speaking all kinds of Portuguese to me and I sort of nodded for a while, but afterwards I sort of leveled with him and said I didn't understand Portuguese very well. This didn't dissuade him one bit, except when I was moving my last few things in he yelled to me as I was getting into the elevator "Wilkommen!", of course accompanied with the thumbs up. There are tons of German people here.

Cidade Baixa

Yesterday all the students and teachers at the school skipped class to go to Cidade Baixa (Lower City), the part of the city that (I think) is closer to the ocean. Cidade Alta is the rest, which includes the historic district of Pelourinho. There's an elevator called Elevador Lacerda which lifts people from Cidade Baixa to Cidade Alta, over a sketchy neighborhood. It's probably about 5 stories high and it reminds me of something out of Planet of the Apes, where you have some bizarre technological anachronism rising out of a scattered mix of sprawl and rubble.

In Cidade Baixa, there's a bunch of boat docks, slips, and all other things nautical, including nautical supply shops, which, coming from that kind of environment growing up, was a bit surreal for me. On the way there we passed a number of poorer neighborhoods, which consist largely of dense groups of shacks in varying degrees of disrepair. From what I've read, a third of the city lacks what we would consider adequate sanitation, and I'm guessing that some of the neighborhoods we passed were in this sort of condition.

On the brighter side, we stopped in the neighborhood of Rebeira at an ice cream place which claims to be the best in Salvador, complete with awards from the local restaurant review section of the newspaper. The cool thing about the ice cream there is that they had flavors that we'd never see here, like Kiwi, Guava, Passion Fruit, Mango, and a bunch of different nuts that I don't remember the name of. The guy behind the counter was frantically handing out samples of different flavors on little wooden spoons, so that by the time I was ready to order I had ten (not exaggerating) of them in my hand, and was pretty full. So I was like, OK, I'm good, let's go, but everyone else wanted to actually buy something (sigh). So I asked for Guava and Mango but somehow this got mistranslated to Kiwi and Mango, I think. It was pretty good although it was a little more on the sherbet side than I would usually get (in lieu of something more fattening :) ) I got it because one of the teachers said I couldn't get chocolate, only "frutas". Also when I got to the last 2 inches or so (sorry, 5 cm) my cone exploded and I had to stumble over and toss it in the trashcan. For some reason the folks I was with didn't even acknowledge that I spilled it all over myself, which I was very, very grateful for. They kind of just sat and stared, which was very refreshing and different from what I'm used to. In my experience people are more likely to sit and stare when you clearly need help with something, but then smother you with attention when you wish they would just look the other way. Not here. They sit and stare without prejudice to help or ignore.

We stopped also at the most famous church in Salvador, called Bonfim, where (gulp) people hang pictures of their sick or dead loved ones to solicit help from above in healing them or sending them on their way. It got pretty hair-raising in some parts. There were some very explicit photos of sick people, and hanging from the ceiling were wax casts of arms, heads, legs, etc., of aforementioned sick loved ones. On the front steps of the church that we descended on the way out, there were a number of poor, mostly elderly people asking for money, and there was one woman on the steps who looked like she had elaphantiasis in her legs, which I've heard is a problem here for people who can't afford proper health care.

Some pictures of yesterday are here.

they strain the milk here

I was at a luncheonette last night. They're everywhere here - small places that serve lunch, coffee, and and exotic juices from local fruits (mango, passion fruit, others whose names I don't know) which are very popular. This place is right up the block from me and serves as a luncheonette, food market, bar, and general social center. Almost every place that serves any kind of food or drink here serves beer. Places that look like cafes won't have coffee (this from experience) but they always have beer.

At this particular place they tend to serve beer in what looks like 20oz bottles, and they have these little mini-cooler things (similar to the kind of thing fat American guys hold their Budweiser cans in at the beach, a "coolie") which they put the bottles in to keep them cool. They drop them in the cylindrical main part of it and put a cap on it that leaves only the mouth of the bottle exposed. And of course each mini-cooler is an ad, labeled with a particular local beer. The really budget beer here is called Skol, and I think I saw it in the supermarket for something like $1US for a six-pack. There's also something called Schin (I think) which looks like it might be a little better.

But last night I went up to the counter and asked for a coffee. Normally here it's served black, in small cups similar to espresso, with the option for a lot of sugar, which is how most people take it. Unfortunately it's not really espresso, just regular coffee which is relatively strong but, to be honest, in the available small quantities doesn't really do it for me. There's a sugar substitute here which is also very popular, which is a clear liquid in a bottle and is available at any restaurant. I haven't ever tried it because it looks pretty gross, and one of my friends recently put too much in his coffee and he said it was awful.

The woman at the counter asked if I wanted it with or without milk, so I asked for it "com leite". She then proceeded to strain about 1/4 cup of milk into a small coffee cup, and then filled it with the traditional 1/8-cup or so of black coffee. I immediately understood what the straining was all about, based on my experience here. The milk always has chunks in it. I guess this is from it lying around in tropical heat (which really isn't that bad right now) for anything more than a minute or two. Every time I've had coffee in the pousada here, there's been chunks. Small ones, but chunks nevertheless. I'll admit, it took a bit of getting used to. But they'd have to do a lot more than that to come between me and caffeine. Bring it.

movies

I saw a movie in a theater A History of Violence for the first time last night. The other English-language movies that were playing were Chicken Little, Saw II, and The Legend of Zorro. One of these was dubbed and the others (including Violence) were subtitled. I was told by someone here a while ago that around 50% or more of the movies in the theaters here are American movies, usually subtitled but sometimes dubbed.

I went with a German guy, same age as me, who is new at the school this week and in the same class as me. He wanted to go to Iguatemi Shopping, which is the biggest shopping center here (and probably in Bahia, we also surmised). After speaking with some locals at the bus stop we determined that it was muchfaster ("Mais rapido, mais rapido ..." they said) to just grab a cab, which we did. It was about a 10-minute drive and cost us something like $R20, which translates to maybe $8-9US.

We wandered around for a while looking at stuff, talking about differences in German, American, and Brazilian culture, staring at women, and eventually making our way up to the theater. We got tickets and stopped to in the food court which had a Sushi stand.

Now don't get me wrong. I love this place. And I might be a bit of a snob when it comes to Sushi and/or Japanese food. Both are very popular here, but the quality of it sucks, and last night was relatively typical of my overall Japanese-food experience here. Part of the reason it's so popular is that there's a lot of Japanese-descended people living in Brazil. You'd think they would take more care in promoting their culture, but whatever.

We got in the theater, which was very nice (stadium seating and a great sound system) but which had the air conditioning cranked and was absolutely the coldest place I've ever been in in Brazil. I don't know what the thinking is there. Maybe they're trying to keep you awake. Our movie was good (it was my second time seeing it), but maybe for something like Saw II they don't want people dozing off. Who knows. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing I've seen here :).

the classical music group in a nearby apartment are playing Beatles covers

There's like a 3- to 5- piece classical (or whatever) group in one of the neighboring apartments here playing Beatles covers. Right now they're on "Revolution", although I think I heard "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" before, and a couple others. There's a flute, a bassoon (or something else deep) and a couple of strings (violin and cello?). It's people like these who do the kind of legwork that's earned Brazil the reputation as the partyingest country in the world.

turns out my Portuguese is just hand signals

So this is my third time in Bahia. I'm thinking and telling people back home before I go "Well, I don't know Portuguese, but I know enough to get around." It's really very similar to Spanish, which I took 2 years of in college but forgot most of, blah blah blah.

Well, guess what. Turns out I can't speak Portuguese for shit. I was in class today with a new student, who has a much better grasp on the language than I, and I didn't have a goddamn clue about a goddamn word he, the teacher, or anybody in the school spoke to me today, in Portuguese, English, Farsi, whatever. It was like I'd had my brain wiped clean over the weekend and left only with the minimum neural facilities to get me to class without wetting myself and sit there with my mouth open, staring blankly.

Luckily for me tomorrow is a holiday celebrating the day Brazil officially became a federal republic. Hopefully by Wednesday I will have learned enough to avoid being demoted to the class where they go over the alphabet again.

weather, shrubberies, and soccer (futebol) in Salvador da Bahia

Yesterday and today have been thus far completely overcast with cloud cover. This is the first time it's been like this in all of the (3) times I've visited Salvador. The first time I got caught in a restaurant when it started pouring buckets, and I think the same might have happened one day of the second week I was here, in July. Today we have the addition of wind, which we didn't so much yesterday, which leads me to think it's fixin' to rain a bit (or more likely a crapload). There are so many trees around the pousada (and everywhere, now that I think of it) that when the wind blows you can hear all the leaves of the trees slapping together, and it sounds like rain. I just now ran to my window to see if it was raining, and it turns out it was just the wind in the trees. I get the feeling, based on a hunch and on my previous experiences, that this is the kind of place where if it's raining, you'll know it.

Other than this weekend the weather has been very dependable - sunny with few if any clouds in the sky, low- to mid-eighties, and not as much humidity as I expected. AC is around but not ubiquitous, but most places have ceiling fans, which in combination with drafts coming through windows, seem to provide sufficient ventilation so that no place is really uncomfortable. Friday was one of the first days that was hot enough to really be noticeable. In class I noticed my shirt sticking to me only after being there a short time. Sweet.

And speaking of the trees - one difference (not as major as you would think) about a tropical climate vs. somewhere like the northeastern US is that, left alone, even in the cities, things will start growing out of everything. In NYC and other US cities the concrete seems to prevent trees and other big plants (weeds and grass notwithstanding) from just popping up. Not here. Either by design or by natural adaptation, or more likely by a combination of both, there are tons of bushes, trees, plants, you name it growing out of everything, from peoples houses to the beach to major thoroughfares. There's definitely lots of trees that are intentionally planted by the city, but this is supplemented by nature with its own landscaping.

My brother Tom had asked me if I had seen any soccer (futebol, here) games since I'd been here and I said no. Turns out I'm just extremely unobservant. Since he asked about it I've noticed that on one end of the beach (what I think is east of Farol da Barra, the lighthouse) guys play pick up soccer on Saturdays and maybe other times. If you keep going east past that beach (this is where I run every night), there's a place calling itself the Spanish Health Club, where last night they had what looked like a relatively major local game, under lights, with a lot of the locals and passersby cheering and yelling at the players, who were in official-looking uniforms. I stopped just in time (quite typically) to see the last 2 minutes or so.

The same end of the beach that has the pick-up soccer is also the best surfing spot. I've got to try it at some point, because I've spent hours already just watching people surfing down there. It's mezmerizing. You can lean against the wall/barrier which keeps you from falling off the walkway near the beach, and just sit there and stare at surfers and skimpily dressed women, and watch people go by. What more could you ask for?

And speaking of the barrier, that's where the origin of the name of the barrio I'm in came from. It's called Barra, which in Portuguese means barrier. The barrier, which keeps people on the walkway and water from coming into the street and neighbhorhood, stretches around the corner of Farol da Barra, I'm guessing for something like a mile or longer. Or 3km. Whatever.

the biggest barrier to intercultural harmony is produce

I have come to the conclusion that the major obstacle in the way of complete intercultural (at least in Western society) harmony is produce. I think that my sister would agree. This is based on my recent experiences, which, due to the fact that I never listen to anything anyone tells me or pay attention to anything I read, very closely resembled hers.

The K-man canonized the importance of fresh fruit when he got banned from his local fresh food market. People just can't live without it. It's healthy, it's fresh, it's delicious! It's 1/8 of the 4 food groups. And as a single man used to living in New York City, it became one of the few things I looked forward to when coming home from my mind-numbing job.

In an earlier post I related my run-in with the supermarket folks here after not labeling my apples properly which is evidently very not cool, both here and in Athens. Since then my Portuguese has improved a good 0.0037% so I have still not bothered to try to figure out how to properly label the fruit there. Luckily for me, on Thursday we had a class field trip to the produce market that was closest to the school, which is now my de facto fruit source. The cool thing there is that the guy follows you around and does the labeling himself. The uncool thing is that he follows you around. I don't like picking out fruit under pressure. I can't closely inspect the surface of a pear with some dude breathing down my neck. I mean, like, what's the rush? I'm the only one here at 8:30 in the morning. Whatever.

And that's another thing. More than in New York, people here are easily annoyed when you hold things up while trying to be polite. I was in Shopping Barra an hour ago (yeah, I found it, and it is sweet) and as I'm approaching one of the escalators a woman approaches at the same time, so I pause to let her go in front of me. Apparently that's not cool, or I'm some sort of sucker, because then the group of 2 women and 1 man behind me all try to cut in front of me. As if the frozen yogurt stand they're on their way to is going anywhere.

an ode to Guarana

The food in Bahia is fantastic. Most of it is seafood, and comes with this semi-optional little cup of hot sauce which if you take more than a teaspoon of it will pretty much just desintegrate your brain. But I'm guessing there will be plenty of other opportunities to go into detail about the food, which I'm sure I could write volumes on. I'd like to take this little slice of our time together to talk about one of my favorite indigenous Brazilian phenomena (besides the women, beaches, architecture, literature, etc. - you get the idea), Guarana, pronounced Gwah-rah-NAH. Guarana is a shrub indigenous to Brazil and Venezuela that has fruit which is the source of the taste in a number of caffeinated soft drinks referred to under the umbrella term "Guarana". Any respectable Brazilian restaurant in New York or elsewhere serves it, and I think you can buy it in some stores in some of the outer boroughs. There's a Brazilian restaurant on Central Ave in Yonkers that definitely has it (can't remember the name, something like Brasilia), and my guess is that Churrascurria Plataforma in midtown has it too. If they don't they suck and don't go there. If they do, they're awesome because the food is really good, albeit a little expensive.

Guarana Antarctica, the most popular brand of Guarana soda, distributed by PepsiCo (see the Wikipedia article) tastes a little like 7UP or Sprite, but frutier. And it's brown. But not in a gross way. Anyway, just check out the picture. It's the coolest thing in the world, and I've been belching the alphabet and obscenities in honor of it since I got here.

I would also like to point out that it totally kicks the ass of Hazelnut Spread, a concept so absurd that it could only be the brainchild of people who spent their childhood watching television and getting beat up after school not only by the jocks, but by the nerds too.

bow down to the samba king (that's right)

Well, the world might just as well stop turning because I went out to a samba club with a bunch of people from the school last night and we had a blast. For those unfortunate souls who have the free time to stumble across my blog without actually knowing me, this was totally out of character. But since I had decided beforehand that this was going to be The Summer of Matt (swat at bee circling my head), I had no choice but to accept the offer when it came to go out.

We all met in front of the school at ~10pm, and until about 5 minutes before we left it looked like it was going to be 5 women and me, which didn't make me feel good at all. Thankfully a British guy named Daniel showed up in a tank-top, shorts and flip-flops, fresh from a Capoeira lesson.

So we get in some cabs, show up at the place which is about a 10 minute drive from Barra. It's $R5 to get in the door. The door being the door to the high wood fence of a narrow, open-air space in between some 2-3 story apartment buildings. There's a big yellow banner sign over it facing the street saying in red lettering that it's an auto demolition lot. That's right. Maybe they move the chairs in the morning. On the way in I'm thinking it's going to be some dimly-lit New York style dance club, but it was almost the complete opposite - brightly lit, with a bunch of white plastic lawn chairs and tables with red tablecloths, a very modest bar in the back, which was more like a kitchenette, and guys selling drinks and kebab-type meat sticks from behind stacks of milk crates. There was an old woman sitting next to the bar in the back who took peoples orders, gave change, and then gave you a ticket with the name of your drink on it which you were to hand to the bartenders. This woman ended up being a bottleneck for the whole process since she was pretty cranky and slow, a bad mix for a high-energy Brazilian samba club. When I went to get a water there was nobody in line but once I paid I had to push my way through for or so rows of Brazilians pushing forward to pay for their drinks.

The band, up front, was something like 8- or 10-piece, with a 6-string bass player, a couple of drummer/percussionists, a guy with what looked like a ukelele and sang like a tropical Tiny Tim, and a few other instruments that I can't remember and/or identify. There was no stage and the band all sat on low chairs or just leaned against the back wall.

We sat down at two tables we pushed together, everyone got drinks, and we talked for a while since nobody was dancing. There was one Braziliera who was standing up front near the band who was movin' and shakin' in such perfect sync to the music that I even wanted to dance. She was probably 35. Her boyfriend was like 45, drinking a beer, and standing there with such an ambivalent expression on his face you would have thought he'd been lobotomized an hour ago.

Then suddenly about an hour into it people just started walking up to the front and dancing, and then Rosaria, the woman from the school who organized and schaperoned the whole thing, got up and beckoned everyone else to come. Me and the two women I was at the table with were initially hesitant. The dance floor, though, was so crowded and chaotic that it was basically just a group of people standing shoulder to shoulder, some moving in a quasi-dance motion and others just standing there getting drunk, smiling and laughing. Who finds that kind of thing objectionable? Not me, so I went up there and started dancing like Steve Martin doing his King Tut skit. With everyone so closely crushed together this was no problem at all, and in no way uncool, which is quite a departure for me.

Our party included two tall German women who were very popular with the Brazilieros, particularly two guys, one who was very tall and pretty young, and another who was shorter but more built, about my height. The first guy was pretty drunk and the second guy was stinking drunk, but otherwise not terribly objectionable. The second guy, if you could get past his deadpan expression and lack of tact, was freakin hilarious. His "maneuver" to get women to dance with him was to drunkenly lean into them, grab them around the waist and slowly start to hump their leg, or whatever (still not smiling). He did this with about 15 different women, many more than once, for the next hour and a half. All but 1 woman I saw pushed him away or ducked out of his reach. Rosaria was vigilant and defensive enough to fend off and/or push away any of the Brazilian men (who are known to be rather persistent) once things seemed to get a little out of hand. She did a lot of waving of her finger at these guys which seemed to stop them dead in their tracks.

So I was feeling pretty good, I'm movin, I'm shakin. But everyone is so close together that I can't keep from stepping on people's feet, all of whom are wearing sandals vs. my thick-heeled oxford dress shoes. And Daniel, who is clearly running on fumes at this point, is dancing to my right and looking at his feet to try to keep to the beat, and keeps knocking his skull against my shoulder. But he does it so regularly that I'm guessing he either doesn't care or can't feel it, even though I hit him pretty hard. Eventually he goes to sit down, with total respect from me since he's been doing all-out physical exertion for the past 6 or so hours.

So I understand that Brazilieros are persistent with women - no problem. But I'm not a woman, so I'm not used to this kind of thing. And so the women I'm with are having no problem fending off guys, and to some degree I'm sure are flattered by it. But as the reluctant descendant of Puritans I'm dying over here - and lets face it, what really matters in this situation is my feelings. This 50-or-so year old guy is pawing the woman from our group next to me. She's smiling, and pushing him away a little. He's smiling, and then they both look at me and I'm not smiling. He offers to shake my hand a couple of times which I do with reticence, but I decide to just go on dancing but keep close to the women I'm with because I'm freaked out (probably for no reason) about what the Brasilieros might do.

Eventually everyone is sweating enough so that I can feel all of my clothes sticking to me and getting soaked (yuck). Around 00:15 I look at my watch, a couple of people ask me what time it is, and we decide to go. I'm still so into the music, though, that I dance/push my way back to the fence and out the door, and still can't keep from tapping my foot and doing the occasional hip shake (it's contagious, people) once we're out on the street. Which is swarming with cops, who in Salvador look like military. They are wearing brown fatigues and berets, bullet-proof jackets, and at least 2 pistols each strapped their thighs and legs. Later the guy at the pousada tells me that they go specifically to the places that tourists are known to frequent, and also that sometimes schools, when they plan social activities, will call the cops to tell them where the students will be so that there will be a police presence there. I'm guessing Rosaria did this.

We're standing outside and the woman from our group who was being pawed next to me pops her head out the door and is like "Why are we leaving? I was just starting to have fun ..." We get into cabs and head back to Barra. Rosaria wants us all to be dropped off just outside our pousadas, but we decide to get out on the corner at the convergence of all our routes and walk the rest of the way, which at this time of night is not necessarily advisable. I make the 3-or-so block walk home all right, but stay tensed to break into a full sprint if necessary, and keep looking over my shoulder. Things are fine, though. I get back to the room, peel off my clothes, and cruise the 'net for an hour because I can't get to sleep.

And here we are.

I am your father

I don't know what we ever did without the Internet.

drums in the night

I went to a Bahian restaurant in Pelhourinho last night. For those of you that don't know, Pelhourinho is just about the oldest part of Salvador, which itself is very old, so it has these European-style, very narrow cobblestoned streets. Somewhat like Florence if you've ever been there, with tall buildings and a lot of old churches. Anyway, at night it's real dark in some places, although it's relatively safe. The local government loaded up the place with cops since the neighborhood was cleaned up a few years ago, to keep from scaring away tourists. Dani and I took a cab there. If I were the driver I would have taken us to the edge of the neighborhood and told us to walk the extra two blocks or so to get to the restaurant, since the streets are so narrow, crowded, and bumpy, and some of the turns are so sharp that it doesn't look like even the small cars they have here can make it without nailing a building corner. This guy, however, drives us up to within a block of the place (there was a barrier to keep cars out of the end of the street), over head-shaking, whiplash-caliber bumps and through the aforesaid turns that I was sure he was going to destroy his car on. Plus there's more people there than I've ever seen during the day, and this very loud, deep, heavy drumming sound is coming from the center of the old city. The streets are lit but some of them are still very dark in places. We get out and start walking around looking for the restaurant, and eventually have to walk right past / through the group of people who were doing the drumming. There were probably 10 kids with drums and 10 adults (the latter had the bigger ones). The type of drumming they do is inspired by the local group Olodum, who did the drum part in the beginning and elsewhere on the Paul Simon song "The Obvious Child" from Rhythm of the Saints. The music has some African origins but is considered a product of Bahia. It was very, very loud, especially since our restaurant was near the center where the drums were being played, and at one point the bass sound was coming through the wall and past my eardrum to the point where it felt like they were drumming on my brain. Once the food came I sort of forgot about it. It's the kind of bass sound that you feel more than hear - bone-jarring but in a positive way, if that makes any sense.

stumbling around Barra like the clueless tourist that I am

So I pulled a couple of winners yesterday, a few things that are bound to happen when you're a foreigner living semi-long-term anywhere. The big shopping center here is called "Shopping Barra", and I decided to try to find it yesterday after doing some general familiarization with the neigbhorhood (i.e., walking slowly, tripping on loose cobblestones, and looking up at the buildings). Of course the map which clearly shows its location was back at the pousada but I'd already been walking around a while and didn't feel like making multiple trips back and forth. So I went to a couple of places that clearly were not Shopping Barra, and on the way there, 2 different Brazilians - 1 guy in a car with his buddies and 1 woman walking on the street - asked ME where Shopping Barra was. Being the helpful guy I am, I said "Eu no falo portugues", which, loosely translated, means "rob me". The guy looked at me in disgust and peeled out, and the woman smiled and shook her head and kept walking. Hey man, I'm doing the best I can here just trying not to trip over the goddamn cobblestones in these freakin flip-flops, which, incidentally, I've only ever really used for maybe a total of 3 weeks in my life. The funny thing is that people are always asking me directions in New York or wherever, and I am almost always the last person you want to be asking how to get anywhere. But apparently no matter what country I'm in I look like the guy who knows where stuff is, which, sadly for these people, is far, far from the truth. I've even walked rapidly in the opposite direction after confirming to myself that I gave exactly the wrong directions, just so that the person couldn't find me and be like "Hey man (pointing and shaking finger), you told me the wrong place to go! And I came back here just to tell you that! Because I have all sorts of time, being a lost tourist and all, or in some cases locals ..." You get the idea.

There's more (sorry). I poked around for about half an hour at the supermarket I eventually went into (which was clearly not part of Shopping Barra) and settled on apples, crackers, and seltzer water as things I couldn't live without but didn't need a fridge for. I saw an older woman weighing her produce on a public scale there and thought to myself "They don't expect us to weigh and label our produce ourselves, do they? Because that would be silly." Well, guess what. I got to the register and the guy doing the bagging gave me an evil glare after the woman doing the ringing up handed him the bag of apples to go label since the stupid gringo failed to do so. He was amazingly fast, however (probably because it's so freakin easy), and I got away with my food which I guess is really all I cared about.

And finally, I stopped at a newsstand later last night to get some paid phone cards which are required for the payphones here (I don't have a cell and I refuse to get one). The woman told me how much it cost, which came out to $R18 (~$7US), but me, not understanding numbers in Portuguese, handed her the equivalent of about $50US. Lucky for me she was nice, and laughed and shook her head and was like "No, no ..." and just took the two $R10 bills I was just about throwing at her.

At the end of our Portuguese class this afternoon I asked the profesora if we could learn numbers tomorrow. She said yes.

Did I mention I got internet-connected today?

... which is the reason that this is my 4th (I think) post of the day. I have wireless internet (which I'm paying for, sigh ...) until I'm out of this place around the 18th, at which point I'll either get a semi-temporary apartment or move into a cheaper pousada (like the one one of my classmates is at, more on that later).

So check THIS out: the kid who set up the wireless here (he was working at the front desk today) not only set it up with WEP encryption, which for your average not-technical person is relatively impressive, but he even uploaded a pirated version of the firmware to his access point. The firmware was hacked (presumably by someone else) to give more features, including something which changes the WEP key every 30 minutes (and no, it's not WPA). Very, very impressive. He said he taught himself this stuff. And English, too. I told him I could juggle.

I had my first day of Portuguese class, which was awesome, mostly because I felt like I was in college again. If I'd only brought my torn flannel shirts, overworn upside down u-shaped baseball caps and Chuck Taylors, it would have been complete. There are 2 other students in the class. One is a woman my age from London who is on leave from BBC radio, and has done what I want to do, i.e., traveled from Central America on down to here over the course of a number of months. The other is a man younger than me (mid-20s maybe) from Switzerland, who speaks German, French, Swiss, and English, and likes to play guitar. The woman speaks Spanish. I speak English. Also my instructor's name is Maria, from Itabuna, with an Arabic last name and who is middle-aged. There's also a student teacher who sits in the back of the room and doesn't say anything but takes lots of notes. She's from Bahia (Salvador, I assume).

The class was just plain awesome. I can't say exactly why. Maybe because it feels like I'm doing something like a mix of extended vacation and/or going back to college, all in a tropical setting. I'm 100 yards from the beach and from Farol Sol, a lighthouse which is a central part of the Carnival festivities. Of course I probably won't be in this exact spot for that, but I hope to be here for at least part of it.

If things continue as they've gone for the first few days I've been here, I'm going to be just fine :).

smells fine now

I was looking at some of my earlier posts and saw how I complained about the mildly funky smell of my room at the pousada. Well, either it went away or I'm used to it now, and I could really care less which of those it is :).

ants

OK, so one minor complaint I have here in the pousada (hostel/hotel) I'm staying in in Salvador is that there are hundreds of very small (smaller than anywhere in the US that I've seen) ants everywhere. You can't really see them unless you're looking at something white and/or glassy like the sink, but when you sleep you can feel them crawling on your feet, etc. The first few times this happened I brushed them off but then after the third one or so I was kind of just like "the hell with it" and let them crawl around, which seems harmless for the moment. I'm guessing this is not the last I will have heard from the ants. It is fascinating to watch how fast they can move for their size, though. Not faster than the ball of my hand, unfortunately for them.

been here two days and already a crazy weekend

Daniella took me to what I guess you would call a bloc party yesterday, in a neighborhood that could best be described as "like Compton". I of course was a) the only white guy, b) the only person who didn't speak Portuguese, and c) the only person with my mouth open the entire time, for numerous reasons. We were there for maybe an hour before some HUGE dudes came by, one of them with dreds and tons of tattoos, and they sat down right next to us. The big guy with the tattoos asked me where I was from, and I told him I was from America. I should point out that as far as I can tell right now, there are many tourists from South America (Argentina, etc.) and Europe (Germany, Spain, etc.) in Salvador, but very, very few Americans. For this reason I'm finding that I tend to generate a bit of a spectacle when I say I'm American. Most people can tell I'm not from around here, but they don't know for sure where (Italian? Spanish? they say). I'm thinking in some of these cases it may be best to just say yes rather than correct them, and pray they can't speak Italian or Spanish or whatever.

Anyway, the house with the dreds shakes my hand, nearly palming my entire arm in doing so since his hands are so big. He knew some English because apparently he practices / works / teaches Capoeira (the local traditional martial arts / dance from Africa and slavery times) in Pelhourinho, which is the major historical and tourist area. The smallest of his two buddies, who still outweighed me by probably 50 pounds without a shred of fat on his body, spoke (in Portuguese) with what sounded like a lisp and gave me his phone number to call in case I wanted to learn Capoeira, which of course I do, but from what Dani says maybe not from these guys "because they may want to hob (rob) you".

So the guy with the dreds then asks if I want to smoke a joint, which I said no to, but which I took as an offer of friendship. Later Dani pulled me aside and said she thought these guys were drug dealers (to which my answer was "yeah, so?") and that they were bad people. I didn't put the two together but whatever. She said she thought they were wanting to sell us drugs, which if they were would definitely knock them down on the coolness scale.

I caught one of this guy's other boys checking out this one Brasiliera who was wearing next to nothing and nearly coming out of her dress, and we met eyes for a second. He gave me the thumbs up and I smiled and nodded and we both laughed hard.

I should also mentioned that they served Feijouada at the party, which is a sort of bean stew with chunks of pork and pork fat, spices, etc., and rice and salad. I've had it before in New York with black beans, which was good. This was made with white beans by one of the friends of the girl whose birthday party (and apartment) it was, and it was awesome.

arrived in Salvador, finally

I´ll be honest - the suspense was killing me more than anything, but now that I´m here I don´t feel so totally lost as I thought I would be. Don´t get me wrong; I´m clueless, and everyone here knows it, but my level of ignorance can only decrease so that´s a good thing. Even having slimmed my life down to 2 (one of them huge) bags and a box of books, I felt like I was lugging around far more than necessary. And of course now that I´m here it´s looking like I won´t need any of it. I´ll probably end up just shipping it all back home.

My room in the hostel is very nice-looking, much like Van Gogh´s room in Arles or (this one´s for you, Anne-Marie) our room in Hotel Castelfidardo in Rome. It does, however, have a bit of a ... smell, which of course is one of the reasons it´s temporary.

Well, the first big challenge here (after taking an hour nap - I got like 2 hours of sleep on a 20-hour-total plane ride) is to procure a phone card and start calling people. More to come later. Tchau ...