new look

look - i've got a new look!

brazil, 5 months after the fact, was great. vast and varied, so it's hard to envision it in any particular way. i guess i've been trying, without knowing, to come up with one quintessential brazil moment/scene/landscape/experience, so that i could sum up our six weeks there easily. i can do that with peru - my peru 'moment' is eating head soup in this dusty town 2 hours west of arequipa, being laughed at by children and barked at by dogs, while waiting for the 'bull fight' to begin. you know. i can do it with argentina - san telmo on a cold sunday, drinking a big beer, eating peanuts, and watching street tango. i can do it with ec, of course, sitting on a bus careening wildly over and down 5000 m mountains, fighting over the window with the person behind me. colombia? new years in cartagena, on a carriage ride next to the ocean, swigging from a bottle of rum with ant and the carriage driver, bits of firework falling in my hair. but brazil's moment is difficult. there were vermont-esque cobblestreet mountain towns, tropical islands, snooty beach towns on cliffs, big cities, suburbs, and a river hamlet. all too varied for one definition. so you can imagine my difficulty....

until last night. last night in this chapped, cold city, we braved the dark and set off for Brooklyn Academy of Music to see their 'red hot rio 2'. now, i agree with the rest of the world that brazilian music is amongst the best in the world. but, like the country itself, the music is so varied that it seemed odd that the ad for the show only announced 'brazilian music', and not what KIND of brazilian music. but i saw that babel gilberto would be there, so i figured the music would be bassa nova, mostly. b/c babel is bassa nova, right? and, largely, it was. but there were other types of music as well. and overall, it was a pretty good show. but my favorite part of the show was the very end, when the stage lights went down, and we could feel, without yet hearing, the samba drums approaching as Harlem Samba marched down the 1st floor album. they marched on and up on stage and drummed, standing in front of their own silhouettes on the screen at their backs. nice. and that was when the quintessential brazil moment was born in my memory. sometimes, you have to weed through things, great things, to find what stands out the most. so here it is - 

-pelhourinho, salvador on a tuesday night (july, of course). we are drunk off of street caipirinhas and kabobs, and it is about to rain. we hear music from all 4 directions, so we just pick one and follow the drum beats. the street we wind up on is choked with teenage girls carrying enormous drums strapped to their waists, and dancing tourists. we duck into a doorway and lean against its frame, buying a beer when a vendor with a cooler on his head passes by. some people we recognize from our language school are there, doing a funny dance, and we wave hello but do not join, choosing instead to laugh hypocritically at them. the drums are loud and we can feel them. the girls do little dances as they tap their drums much more gently than the sound it produces would have you think. then, it begins to rain and the crowd disperses. we stay where we are, sipping our skol and getting wet, not really caring, because it is july and we are in brazil.

seasons

they say its winter here in brazil. when we landed in sao paolo late sunday evening, we kind of felt it. we descended from the airplane via stairs, which i always find interesting because it makes me feel like im a president, or something, and immediately i felt a chill in the air. not a real chill, mind you, but a 60 degree chill. i put my fleece on and hoped that in recife, our ultimate destination that evening, it would be warmer.

about 8 hours later, after a long layover at the sao paolo airport and a quick flight north, we woke up, as the plane landed, to rain streaking the windows - sideways. when we got off the plane, we were supposed to be met by someone from our hotel, pousada peter, which is located not in recife but in neighboring olinda. olinda was to be hilly and nice, with art everywhere and forro (northern brazilian music) in the streets. anyway, we got off the plane and looked for a dude holding a sign with our name on it but, alas, there was none. we waited around a bit but no one showed. already extremely unimpressed with pousada peter, we got a cab. the cab driver drove like mad the long way to olinda. still, rain streaked the windows and we hydroplaned through most of the red lights encountered along the way. finally, eventually, we made it to pousada peter, but not without getting soaked in the progress. but the cab driver was extremely nice, and helped us stay dry as best he could.

the night check in guy (it was 5am) at the hotel didnt mention the forgotten pick up, and we didnt know how to, so the issue was dropped. we showed us to our room and we learned a few things: 1) they have bidets here in brazil, but different than in argentina. not another toilet seat but a hose like thing. interesting. 2) like many other countries in south america, toilet paper is not flushed. 3) there are electric showers here, too and 4) pousada peter decieved us because their website shows pictures of rooms that dont actually exisit. no matter though, we didnt let this last part get us down. we fell into bed for a nap before breakfast without even unpacking.

we woke up a few hours later, determined not to miss the free hotel breakfast. let me just take this opportunity to tell you how impressed i am with breakfast in brazil. they take it seriously here, and so far it seems that it is always included with the hotel. there are fresh juices, tons of fresh tropical fruit, eggs, bread, cake, cereal and strong coffee. really, anything you might want for breakfast is laid out on a table, and you just help yourself again and again while someone cooks you eggs. its such a wonderful way to start the day. so we had that and set off to explore olinda, though it was still raining intermittently.

olinda is, as more than one european traveler described it, (actually we only met 2. they both described it this way) very special. it is all cobblestone and hills, with views of the ocean and the buildings of recife from all angles. the people are friendly and there are museums and colonial buildings everywhere. what really impressed me, though, was the art. in olinda there is art EVERYWHERE. literally every other building is a gallery, which one is free to wander in and out of. the walls of the streets are covered in paintings, the hotels have art, the bars and resturants have art, even the bathrooms have paintings hanging in them. it makes for a lovely, friendly, if not a little sleepy, town. we spent 2 days exploring it and eating street food in the rain. after a while, the rain got old, our pousada became unbarably damp, so we left and headed for porto do galinhas, a beach town 2 hours south. we figured the rain wouldnt bother us there since we´d be wet anyway....

upon check

just when i thought i was out....

i have this friend with whom i am in frequent contact these days. but there have been times throughout the past 20 odd years (we met in second grade and i'm pretending to be younger than i am), during which we spoke only sporadically (clueless). the nice thing about those times during which our contact was infrequent, was that we would always, always pick up just where we had left off, not bothering much with the details of where we had been and what we had been doing since we last spoke. it was, and is, the sentiment of our communication that was more important, and we always managed to get caught up without the seemingly mandatory fill in session. so, you, my dear blog should be just like that friend of mine. therefore i will skip the details of the past 13 months and just pick the story up from here. and we'll get caught up along the way, somehow.

13 months later and here i am, a married elementary (charter) (see, there' s one detail down) school teacher with two loving kittens and an oddly shaped apartment in east harlem (spaha, didnt you know?). i love my happy home life but south america, of course, calls once again. other places call as well but anthony and i have decided that brazil will be next for us. so in 2 weeks, we will leave for a rather lengthy honeymoon of 6 weeks. we will start north, in recife, and go south towards rio. we might hit the pantanal and other places along the way. so if you are at all interested in stories about us bumbling our way around another south american country (but in portuguese this time) check back soon. i might have blogged something by then.