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.
