Just when my Spanish had gotten competent enough that I could get around Argentina without a care in the world, I went to Brazil. And it´d been easy to forget how hard it can be just to order a chicken sandwich until the first time I had to do it in Portuguese.

I decided to save Rio de Janeiro for the end of my two weeks in Brazil, and instead to head straight to Salvador, the capital city of the Northeastern state of Bahia. Salvador was a deeply complicated place, somewhere I’m still struggling to get a grasp on, but it’s also where I spent the majority of my time in Brazil. I’m going to do my best to describe it.

Salvador is beautiful. It’s a port city split vertically into a cidade baixa and a cidade alta, connected by an elevator overlooking a light blue bay. There are crumbling churches, fading, colonial era pastel buildings blackened by soot and city, the occasional spattering of blue and white Portuguese tiles.



Salvador is African. Before Rio, Salvador was the Portuguese capital in Brazil, and the region received the majority of the enslaved Africans sent to harvest sugar cane. Their descendents are still there, and they make the city Brazil’s blackest. Men practice capoeira (a dance-inflected martial art developed by Brazilian slaves) bare-chested in the streets alongside women in plastic chairs embellishing cornrows with colorful ribbons and beads. From a balcony, older women walking down the street in traditional, lace-trimmed hoop skirts stark white against dark skin look like plump, strutting hens. Round women sitting behind fortresses of metal pots on the sidewalk sell acarajé—bean curd buns fried in woks, split open with a thin knife, and stuffed with a variety of sauces and spicy shrimp to make a hot, crumbling sandwich—which I’m told you can also still find in parts of Nigeria today.

Salvador smells. Of pools of cooking oil in street stalls, and skewers of white cheese grilling on hand-carried paint cans of glowing charcoals stoked by quick, shallow breaths. Of machete-cut portions of a bulbous white fruit I still can’t identify in the market, of beer and cachaça, passion fruit caipirinhas and mounds of trash everywhere rummaged through by beggars. Salvador smells—and when I left the city everywhere else I went smelled strange for a couple days because for the first time in a week it didn’t smell like piss.

Salvador is loud. From tables set up on the street waiters shout orders to second-story kitchens. A short time later, women emerge from the kitchen, ringing hand bells to catch the waiters´ attention while they slowly cradle the meals down to the street on trays lowered by pulleys. There are animated conversations, beggars begging and vendors hawking (cashews, fresh-squeezed juices, cigarettes, packets of gum, ice cream from wheeled white carts topped with green spaghetti mounds of coiled orange rinds, coconuts drilled open to drink the water inside and iced sugarcane juice pressed from seven foot long stalks). There is always at least one radio, and no matter what´s on, everyone seems to know the words.

Salvador during Carnaval is especially loud. There are people everywhere, processions of drummers through the streets, cars crawling along with speakers blasting from open trunks, men selling beads, confetti and feather headdresses, and a samba or axé band right outside your window that doesn´t stop playing until 3AM at the earliest. I didn’t notice a single moment of pure silence until I left.



Salvador is fun. Carnaval in Rio is more of a spectacle to watch (huge glittering floats, women in elaborate sequins and feathers and nothing else), while in Salvador it’s a party to take part in—the biggest street party in the world. In Salvador for the most part only children wear costumes—sequined bikini tops and feather skirts, lots of cowboys and Batmans—though there is a sizable group called the Filhos de Gandhy (Sons of Gandhi) whose members dress in white turbans, long robes and sandals, and who spray perfume into the air as they passes. (Apparently the group formed out of solidarity with Gandhi´s philosophy of non-violence, though from observation its members appeared less than inspired by his abstinence from sex, alcohol and tobacco.)

During Carnaval in Salvador hundreds of thousands of people pack the streets to dance behind trios eléctricos (massive trucks with eardrum-shattering speaker systems and live bands performing on top) that slowly complete the parade circuit over four to six hours. When it poured down rain the first night of Carnaval, no one could be bothered to give a shit—everyone was soaked to the bone but still dancing wildly, arms waving, belting out the words to the songs they knew and the ones they didn’t (à la Spring Fling 2006), jumping across trash-filled gutters overflowing with water, dodging men’s outstretched hands and shuffling away from fights that broke out periodically in the crowd.

Salvador is poor. If carnivals are often notable for their symbolic usurpation of the ruling order (“bottoms up”), in Salvador the ruling order fights back. Even in the free-wheeling block parties, wealthier Brazilians and tourists pay up to US $200 per night to dance in roped off bloco sections immediately surrounding the trio eléctricos and boasting their own private security. And even as revellers toss their beer cans to the ground there are young children that scurry along collecting them in large sacks to earn a few centavos at the recycling center later on.

Or there is the leper who slithers along the street on his belly and flip-flop-covered hands. Or the beggar boy with whom I shared some of my lunch one afternoon who didn’t even say thank you—only suggesting, I think, just how damn hungry he really was.



Salvador is frightening. I’m not usually prone to harboring unreasonable fears-- indeed I’ve exasperated at least a couple of you on occasion with my insistence, on principle more than anything, not to be scared when maybe I should have been. In Salvador I can say, both without shame and without demanding any sympathy, that I was initially scared even to walk outside. My first thought was simply that I needed to leave. Something, I’m still not sure what, made me stay.

This is what I’d read could happen: if I wore a skirt, hands would be up it almost immediately; if I wore earrings, they would be ripped out; if I took the wrong taxi the driver would radio ahead to a nearby accomplice who would carjack and rob me.

This is what actually happened to people I personally knew in Salvador: a dozen people had their pockets emptied by Carnaval mobs; one guy was robbed and punched in the face; another had his credit card information stolen at a rigged ATM; several women were groped to varying extents; a girl in my hostel was nearly raped on a street not far away; a friend of a friend was sent to the hospital with machete wounds across the chest after a robbery.

This is what I did: I assumed everything with which I walked outside the door would be stolen; I kept a token amount of cash in my front pockets ready to hand over quickly if necessary; I stayed with as many people as possible at all times; I took off the Claddagh ring I never take off; I hardly took my camera anywhere (which explains the dearth of pictures … sorry).

And in the end, it is important to point out that nothing happened to me. Was it luck? Some. Caution? Certainly. There were very real dangers in Salvador. But there was also an element of hysteria and, as we’re talking about the blackest city in Brazil, undoubtedly an element of racism. Without knowing the language or the culture well, I was particularly susceptible to both of these. I tried to be conscious of their effect on me, but I couldn’t claim immunity from them.

Wherever I go my only job, as I see it, is to come home. But it was exhausting and disheartening to feel that I had to assume the worst of everyone all the time in order to do this.

And yet, while assuming the worst, I was constantly reminded that most people are good, and that the most vulnerable people are also the first to appreciate the smallest gestures of kindness. I’m grateful beyond words to the man who translated the ATM instructions for me the first time I withdrew money; the menacing-looking guy with prison tattoos who came out of a restaurant to warn some friends and me not to continue walking down the street because there were robbers further on (as in, shit, even I wouldn´t go down there); the waiter who, when I ordered a juice and didn’t recognize all the vocabulary, emerged from the kitchen with a tray containing every kind of fruit on offer so that I could first simply point to the kind of juice I wanted, and so that he could teach me the words for each in Portuguese afterwards.



Salvador was a lesson in fears, in letting go of those which paralyze, and holding on only to those which make you smarter. I can’t be fearless and at the end of the day I wouldn’t want to be—the best I can hope to be is fair, and brave.

Leaving Salvador was, in many ways, a relief. As I walked down a small cobble stoned hill with my backpack to catch a taxi to the bus station that last evening, all I could think was: Carnaval is over. Thank God. And then I realized that that’s the whole point. Just before the bottom of the hill the doors of a church were opened to the street for the first time since I’d arrived.

A section of my guidebook that I naturally didn’t look at until I´d arrived in the country reads: “Brazil’s special combination of problems and cultural characteristics makes it a fairly dangerous place for women to travel alone.” These warnings were stronger for Salvador in particular and strongest for Salvador during Carnaval.

On that last evening in Salvador, from the street I saw that inside that church--built by slaves for themselves only during their free hours at night, and then only during the full moon when there was enough light to work by--there were dozens and dozens of worshippers celebrating Ash Wednesday. It was a scene as beautiful as it was unexpected, and I could have stood there watching for hours. The Dylan line ran through my head: There’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is.

I left Salvador that night with two distinct impressions: that I probably shouldn’t have come at all—and that I’m glad that I did.



Instead of heading to church myself, I opted for a secular post-Carnaval and headed 14 hours south along the coast to Arraial d'Ajuda, a beautiful little beach town a short ferry ride away from Porto Seguro. I know most of you are in New Haven right now, so I'll do you a favor and spare you the details of the hammock, the white sand, and the ocean water as warm as a swimming pool. After a couple days there I took a long 24 hour bus ride to Rio. ("Long 24 hour bus ride" seems silly to write— pound of feathers, pound of bricks— but if you've ever done a long 24 hour bus ride you´ll know exactly what I mean.) My best friend from elementary school is studying abroad in Rio and she was nice enough to put me up for a couple days even though we haven't hung out in about ten years. I had a great time. Sure, Rio has sprawling favelas, the occasional dengue fever outbreak and drug lords firebombing city buses to welcome the new governor to office, but what I saw of the city was tranquil and gorgeous (again, no pictures, sorry).

I wanted to see Ipanema Beach in Rio one last time before I got on the plane, and after a couple minutes my khakis were drenched in the surf. This put me in the strange and privleged position of being able to say that my pants dried somewhere over the Atlantic, and that I brushed Brazilian sand out of my pockets onto Madrid yesterday, and onto Lisbon today. Before you get too jealous, I should also say that thanks to consecutive overnight plane and bus trips, and a hostel with a late-afternoon check-in time, I was also in the considerably less enviable position of being able to say that I hadn't taken a shower since two countries ago. Gross.

I recently figured out how to make calls using Skype, so if you have a crazy ex-boyfriend and you're in the habit of screening sketchy-looking numbers, stop. Next time it'll probably still be him, but there's also a slight chance it'll be meee!

Love,

Fitz