Day 1 through Day 5, Jan 27th through 31st

My first night in Salvador after Nanda picked me up at the airport was a lot of new stuff all at once. Which, contrary to what one might think, locked it into my memory permanently. It's about a 35 minute drive from the airport to Nanda's neighborhood, the Graça ("Gra-sa"). Once we all got there and went up to the 5th floor apartment that Nanda and her mom live in, I met her mother Gisa ("Zhee-za") and their housekeeper and cook, Ana. Ana is very shy, but
she's a great cook and she keeps everything very clean. It's still kinda weird to me to not have to do my dishes, make my bed, do my laundry or cook my own food. I couldn't even describe all the delicious meals I've eaten from her so far, but let's just say she knows her stuff! Gisa is a wonderful host. Great smile, polite, warm, very wise (she's a geriatric doctor at a nearby hospital, and softspoken. I speak just enough Portuguese and she speaks just enough English so that we can understand each other and we've had several "conversations." It's a great and sometimes funny learning experience. So I unpacked for a short time and settled into my new abode, which is a classy little bedroom with an attached bathroom all for me. Then, we ate dinner and Nanda whisked me away out to an outdoor concert. I had my first taste of Brazilian beer there (kind of like Coors, most beer here is just average and served very cold as they don't want anything very filling or flavorful) while we watched an acoustic African bluesy band play. Immediately next door was a great place called the World Bar (the website of which you can visit at www.worldbar.com.br for photos and other stuff) where a killer party band was
playing. Even with no sleep, I perked up a lot and we shimmied and drank rummy fruit drinks for hours. God, what fun. Fernanda and her twin cousins Milena and Renata ("Mill-lay-na" and "Hay-na-ta") have the funniest dynamic between them and they are just endlessly entertaining. That night, I also met Renata's surfer-comedian boyfriend, Arto ("Ah-too," like Star Wars) and Nanda's classmate and good friend Murillo ("Mu-reel-oh"). He and I are very close now, he's the coolest person I've met here and he has enough happiness in him to go around for everybody. Finally, with everybody tired and the band finished, we walked the one mile hill up to Nanda's apartment and concluded my first day there.
The next morning, Wednesday the 28th, they all let me sleep in until maybe noon since I needed it so badly. Sadly, Nanda's great-uncle died that morning and they were all called away to his funeral. He had been suffering with lung cancer for a while, so there was peace and closure to it, but they were all a little less animated that day from losing a family member. They dropped me off at the nearby mall called Shopping Barra, where I hung out and bought some Converse shoes and some multivitamins and then hung out and met some really cool kids in a sunglasses store. At nighttime, Nanda picked me up and we went to eat some açai. Açai ("ah-sa-ee") is like a thick purple smoothie that you eat from a bowl and it contains the açai berry plus another fruit of your choice. Even though it's not much more than frozen and fresh fruit, plus granola if you add it, which I did, it filled me up like a Super Burrito! Afterward, we went to this outdoor restaurant bar and met Nanda's English friends Ross and Ian. These guys, seriously, are great. Ross is funnier than hell and very animated. Nanda says we both look like cartoons. She's probably right. Ian is well-mannered and sly, with a great sense of humor, and both guys have great British accents. We've spent hours bouncing expressions and slang off each other, plus I tell them my raunchy American jokes. WAY fun. We all split some giant beers (it's so hot here that you get big beers and small glasses so each person's beer doesn't get warm) and I mentioned the desire to have a martini, so we walked across the way a little bit to a place that had a nice wet bar. There we met Bruna, Nanda's beautiful friend from São Paulo who does a similar line of work (attorney trainees). When I ordered a martini, they brought me a glass of vermouth wine and cherries and a separate glass of vodka. So I said Forget it and stuck to these very stiff cocktails made with cachasa ("ca-sha-za") rum, fruit juice, ice and sugar. At this point, they were all rattling off tons of information about local events and history. The African mermaid protector and goddess of the sea here in Bahia (the Brazilian state in which Salvador is the capital) is called Yemanjá ("Yeh-mon-ZHA"), and there was a huge cultural festival for her planned for Monday the 2nd right on the ocean. That will be included in a later post, of course. There's also a huge party for the summer that's five days of live music on the beach (including Alanis Morissette on Saturday!) called Festival de Verão (Summer Festival). Plus they talked about the major influences of culture and ethnicity on Salvador being European, African and Indio, the indians that lived here before Portugal invaded in the 16th century. There are a trillion more details on that subject, but I'll spare you. After all this grand discussion, we called it a night and went to sleep.
On Thursday the 29th, the family and I all got up early, ate breakfast, and drove to a great surfing beach called Praia de Stella Maris ("Pry-a jeh Stay-la Ma-rees"). I tried my hand at surfing for the first time with medium success and only one giant bruise to show for it. I'd have liked to go at it some more to conquer my inability, but it started raining after about 2 hours and Gisa wanted to leave. But we had fun walking on our hands on the beach, Catching the Gator (surfing the waves without a board, just our bodies), and swimming in the waves until then. After returning home for a huge lunch, we got cleaned up and drove off to watch the sun set over the bay. Some beautiful pictures and really fond memories that night, for sure. Afterward, most of the people on the expedition split off to do other things, so the rest of us drove around in the city engaging ourselves in shenanigans for hours and got home for an early bedtime. Arto, Nanda's cousin Renata's boyfriend, was in especially rare form and we had a blast. He could put a smile on a widow's face. Really funny guy. But looks aren't everything, har har har!
Friday the 30th was a FULL day! Early in the morning, Nanda had work to do. She doesn't start her classes until Thursday, February 5th, but still has to work about 20 hours a week (her boss is super nice and is cutting her hours so Nanda has time to entertain me). So she dropped me off at the beach downhill from her house called Porto da Barra ("Poh-to da Ba-ha," or Port Barra, the name of the area and the neighborhood). From there, I walked about 3 miles up
and down to all these various historical spots like the Forte de Santo Antônio where some major sea battles and native uprisings happened, the huge lighthouse there that was the first one ever put up in Brazil, and a big statue of a saint-someone-or-other. Rather than swim around in the
super-super-crowded ocean, I thought I'd get another açai (which only cost about $2.25) and go for a walk. I passed through a giant flea market part of town, rocked out on a drum kit in a music store, temporarily burned my buttcheeks sitting on a marble bench in the sun (nice design, eh?), and generally soaked up the atmosphere of poor Salvador. Stupidly, I was wearing Converse shoes without socks, so my feet were achin' real good after a 6 or 7-mile stroll. Wearied, I made it to Nanda's place in time for lunch. I don't think I've fully elaborated on how excellent each meal is here. It's an experience all of its own. There's no garbage fast food or frozen burrito nonsense here. Ana makes full three-course lunches daily out of all kinds of different homemade recipes. Everything's fresh, there are probably 6 new kinds of cheeses that I've eaten in Nanda's apartment alone, the bread is healthy and abundant, and the fruit and fruit drinks are of a breed I've never had before. I thought I liked bananas before. After eating the bananas and papayas here, I may be a cynic of those fruits in Reno from now on. Fresh-squeezed fruit juice is something that's always "on tap" here. Plus, the way everything's cooked here and the ingredients used make every meal succulent but healthy. I can just tell. Anyway. One always looks forward to the next meal here. After a meal and a shower, we drove to the old town for a two-hour tour of the military history of Bahia at a giant sea fort called Forte de São Marcelo. I recommend looking at pictures of this place if you can do so online. It's essentially impregnable. It juts straight up out of the sea on a shallow sandbar, has an eight-foot thick circular stone wall, and is about 40 feet out of the ocean with sheer rock faces. No invading force could possibly get into it. It was spectacular. Plus, we took a boat all around the bay area and saw a bunch of old churches (I learned there are more than 360 churches in Salvador!), old forts (of which there are 11), and the old city where the original Portuguese aristocrats and bigwigs used to live more than 300 years ago. That was quite fun. THEN, just when I thought we might relax in the shade somewhere, Murillo, Nanda and I went to the first trading post in Salvador and cruised around inside for about an hour looking at all the wares inside. Everything is so cheap here! Nanda bought a really pretty silver bracelet with figures of all the 12 African gods from the slave culture here (on which I'll elaborate in a little bit), and we learned how to play a bunch of old African percussion instruments. One was the cuíca ("kwee-ka"), which makes that sound in Latin music that sounds like a monkey eeking or hooting. Also, the berimbão looks
like a bow (for arrows) with a gourd on the bottom that makes a trippy metallic twangy sound. The original banjo, sort of. Plus a huge assortment of gourds, bongos, congas, and cowbells and stuff. The old African slaves used to hold big ceremonies to pray to their own gods and pretend that they were actually praying to the 12 apostles. The Portuguese were trying to convert the slaves to Catholicism for a long time, but the slave traditions endured and are now very strong all over Salvador. The 12 are Yansã, Xangô, Oxum, Omolu, Oxóssi, Exú, Oxalá-Oxalufan, Ogum, Nanã, Yemanjá, and two others I forgot. For dinner, Ian and Ross met us at this excellent sushi place uptown. Also, Murillo was there plus a new guy Brendan and his girlfriend Marta. Brendan's a great English chap that works with Ross and speaks quite fluently in Portuguese and Marta was charming. She speaks no English, but speaks Spanish pretty
well. I, of course, lit up considerably upon hearing this because I've felt stupid like a baby due to my inability to speak Portuguese. She and I yammered on for the whole dinner in Spanish while everyone else fired English and Portuguese back and forth around the table. The three-way language assault made for some funny code-shifting. Murillo turned to the Brazilian waiter and said "with ice, please. With ice. WITH ICE. Yeah?," forgetting that the waiter speaks only Portuguese. Also, I turned to Nanda and Ian and asked them questions in Spanish. Ha! Again, I tried ordering a Martini, and again they had never had a person ask for that, so they screwed it up. But, funny anyway. The sushi was delectable and cheap and we all rode the intense crowd high for hours as we chatted and exchanged quips. We had all intended to meet up the next day anyway, so everybody split off and Murillo, Nanda and I went to his family's apartment to hang out. They had never heard of a White Russian cocktail, so I said I was pretty sure I could make one as long as he had Kahlua or some other coffee liqour. He didn't, but my approximation was pretty damn good anyway, so we drank some icy cream cocktails and watched a bunch of video of past Carnavals and music festivals from Brazil. About twenty minutes before sunrise, we decided to sleep at Murillo's place. It ended up being only about a 2- or 3-hour nap because Nanda's dad, Eduardo, called her at about 7:00 to say he had the day off and he wanted to take us sailing. Ay! That was Friday.
I woke up still somewhat drunk (whoops). We cleaned up and Eduardo and his friend Armando picked us up to drive us to his yacht club called Aratu. I've never sailed before, so I learned basically how it works over the two hour journey around the bay and then to a place for lunch. It's called Ilha de Mare ("Eel-ya dje Ma-re," or Island of the Sea), and it was easily in the top three most enriching experiences of my trip so far. It's a really small island (one can walk completely around it in about three hours) and it's just some very simple huts and brick buildings that serve food and serve as a neighborhood for the 50 or so people that live there. We ate under a giant fruit tree on woven straw tables while the fishermen there talked trash and laughed with their friends. We ate this giant plate of fried fish, shrimp with the heads, legs, eyes and tails still on (actually totally delicious, I ate about 15, very crunchy!), and vegetables with farofa, or flavored corn meal. It was like another world. Those people probably didn't have a telephone on their whole island, and even the men who survive on their profits as fishermen have no motor boats, only long wooden canoes. They were the salt of the earth. It was
great and it made me realize all the extra things I have. It initiated one of those introspective realizations that I was born and raised with computers, cars, phones, television, money, and an agenda. Quite the enormous contrast. We lazily ate our lunch over the course of an hour, then went swimming, got towed behind Eduardo's yacht for a while, and sailed back to the yacht club to drive home. That evening, I had to doctor myself up from a wicked sunburn on my back, and then Nanda and I went to an outdoor jazz concert that happens every Saturday night at the modern art museum of Salvador. Ian and Ross were there, and we all sat around listening to some really amazing jazz/fusion music while we drank Skol beer and ate acarajé ("a-ca-ra-ZHE"). Acarajé is as common in Brazil as hot dogs and burgers are in Reno. It's a deep-fried farina bun cut in half and served with a vegetable puree and stuffed with shrimp. They're like $1.50 each and they're deLICious. If you're a musician or you're interested, go visit Bahia to see some of the best fusion musicians you'll ever see. Those guys really cook and they're really, really tight musicians. The English Gents had to get up early, so they left and we left to go hang
out with Bruna for a little while. While the girls ate chicken with fried cheese on them, I people-watched in the veranda cafe where we were. Plus, absinthe is legal here, wormwood and all, so I got a little saucy on that stuff. This small green fairy came and sat next to me at the table after that. It was really cool. I saw actual Brazilian prostitutes preying on tourists there and thanked my lucky stars that Nanda was there to tell me valuable stuff like that. They looked pretty normal, really, but she knew somehow. I'm so naïve, I probably would have just thought they liked my blond hair or something if they'd approached me and acted so friendly. After a brief meal with Bruna, we went off to bed. Right now, I've been typing for about an hour and a half, so this concludes the first post. Stay tuned for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday as they've happened already.