7 Days at Sea & 5 Days in Salvador, Brazil

I spent 7 days at sea traveling from Puerto Rico to Brazil and I had planned to put in a blog about that experience, but sadly – I became too lazy to do it! I have been journaling each night so that I can remember the experience on this trip as much as possible, but now I need to discipline myself into blogging too! So, to sum up my 7 days at sea – basically, the ship becomes a routine little piece of life where I get up and work out at the gym each morning, eat breakfast, go to the faculty/staff lounge – do some GLI work, journal, read, look out at the ocean, watch the sunset, eat dinner, go back to the lounge to hang out with the staff (who are just too much fun) – and then it starts all over again the next day. We lost 2 hours in the journey from Puerto Rico to Brazil and we passed the equator. So, I am now officially in the Southern Hemisphere. It is so hot at times that I cannot even begin to explain how hot and humid it is – if you go outside, you instantly find that you are dripping sweat within 2 minutes at most. Needless to say, everyone on the ship smells lovely all the time J but we are getting used to the weather. Inside the ship, the air conditioning is on and so I am freezing, but as soon as I step outside, I am sweating like crazy. It’s fun, as you can no doubt imagine. J Seeing land or birds has become the highlight of the day – so many times, I find that I am just staring out at the water for hours without even realizing it – everything is so peaceful and so far away – that I often find myself having the “I cannot believe I am doing this moments” over and over again. Everyone on the ship is feeling the same, so that there has been an almost instant bonding between all of us as we experience the world together.

Prior to getting to Brazil, the faculty and staff tried to inform all of us about Carnival, which is this insane festival that has been celebrated in Brazil for hundreds of years. Carnival comes from the term carne and val – meaning no meat – and so Carnival is this massive party for 7 days before Ash Wednesday so that the people can release any pent up energy, enjoy life, and just go absolutely crazy before the Lenten season. Such a crazy concept, to let an entire community go hog wild for 7 days straight – and its religiously based – I don’t ever remember celebrating as we went into the season of Lent as a kid – it was all about thinking of your sins, sacrifice, etc. and so the theme of Carnival is really fascinating.

Because Carnival is a non-stop party for 7 days, everything is closed – stores, banks, post offices, schools, work, etc. Everyone is partying, which also means that the area is incredibly dangerous for most people. For the 7 days before we arrived in Salvador, I continuously heard about how dangerous the area was that we were going to – women were told that they would be harassed, grabbed, robbed, beaten, etc. and the men were told that they had the potential to be robbed mostly. Women were told to go out only with other men in the crowd, never alone, and never with anything valuable. Hearing this for 7 days really freaked me out – to the point where I wasn’t really sure that I even wanted to go to Carnival at all. Tom and I decided to try and schedule a bunch of trips outside of Carnival so that we wouldn’t have to deal with all this stuff if we didn’t want to. We got all of our trips and for 4 of the 5 days in Brazil – we traveled outside of the city of Salvador to try and get a better feel for the country and also to avoid the whole grabbing, groping, harassment issue.

The most interesting and sad reality of Brazil is that 70% of its population lives beneath the poverty level, which inevitably breeds violence, robbery and upset throughout the country. As we approached Salvador, it looked to be a modern city and even had the city line of something similar to NYC, but then as we got closer, we realized that all of the buildings were pretty run down, graffiti, holes in the concrete and just really run down. (This visual of course did nothing to soothe any concerns I had about going into Carnival, but it is the reality of the majority of Brazilians). The city itself is filled with thousands upon thousands of squatters homes, which are basically small brick shacks that squatters built because they saw a piece of land and took it. But because the land is so scarce in the city, the houses are all built up on top of one another on hills – so as you drive through the city – you see the upper level of the city (aka the rich area, which is all pretty and nice) and then the lower level of the city (aka poverty stricken area – which we were told never, under any circumstances to go to – one night our cab driver took us through some of these areas and there were people all over the streets, I saw a bathtub on the street with a few people sleeping in it – people seemed to be drunk and they were stumbling over to the cab, it reeks of urine – it is not a happy place). Outside of the city, the country is beautiful – mostly wide open fields, the Amazon, rainforests, small towns and villages, farms everywhere – nothing like the city of Salvador, which appears to be so overcrowded that no one could ever pull themselves out of poverty without some serious assistance from someone.

Despite this initial look at Brazil, we had such an amazing time! We visited and learned about the African religion called Candomble, which is a matriarchal, goddess based religion. As slaves, Africans were not permitted to practice their own religions and so Candomble is their religion, which was hidden with the Catholic Church. Slave owners would try to convert their slaves and the slaves simply hid their religion within Catholic doctrine. Candomble is the worship of Orisha’s (individualized to each person) and the spirits of the earth, dead, and the other world. Each person is connected to an Orisha and she/he will give sacrifices and things to her for assistance. In Catholicism, the Africans simply turned different saints into Orishas. So, whites would think that they were praying to a saint, when in fact they were practicing their own religion. We visited one of the communes for the religion today and it was really interesting. They are very connected to nature and each Orisha is given a home to be worshipped in – so the houses are all painted based on the Orisha that is worshipped there (everything from blue, pink, yellow, green – it makes for a very interesting row of homes!) In one of the towns, Cachoeira, Candomble has a special group called the Sisterhood of the Good Death and they are all women who are direct descendants of African slaves. They spend their whole lives praying and working towards having a good death. Because they live such harsh lives, these women hope for the opportunity to die in a peaceful way. They hold a festival in August for the death of the Virgin Mary and celebrate her peaceful death and pray for the same. Hard to imagine spending your entire life hoping for death, but when life is lived in such a harsh way – perhaps it is not so difficult to imagine.

We also visited a Cocoa Farm and learned all about how to make chocolate, ate the cocoa fruit (tastes like a tart but sweet jelly and is white and surrounds the cocoa beans), visited a self-sufficient farm community (they only make and take what they need and are part of the Land Reform Movement in Brazil, which is trying to get people out of the cities and into the farmlands where they can live much better lives, live off of the land, and the communities that are built are just amazing – very utopian, but they are there for each other and are respectful of the land that they have – they share everything and it was amazing to see this lifestyle that we always hear about, but never get a chance to see). We went to the Itaparica Islands which are off the coast of Brazil, saw a Jesuit Church from the 1500’s at the beach (it was all white with a giant pentacle in the center – da Vinci Code anyone! – it also had a graveyard that was straight out of the exorcist, really really creepy – saw a massive tarantula spider and Tom screamed like a little girl!), spent some time at the beach (it has to be consistently 100 degrees with 100% humidity – I have never sweat so much in my life!), drank out of a Fountain of Youth (3 spouts for Love, Wisdom, and Health/Youth), ate the traditional Brazilian style foods (cooked in coconut milk and with dendi oil – it has to be the heaviest oil on the planet and every time I ate a meal – I felt like I had just gained 20 pounds – it sits in your belly like a weight, but it stands to reason, that when you don’t have a lot of money, the food that you eat needs to fill you up), drank Rosca’s (vodka, lime, and sugar – its their specialty – it is good), also had their light beers (Skol and Antartica – all taste like a version of Coors Light, but it is so cheap – 1 liter cost 2 reales which is equivalent to $1), went to a forest reserve and saw white tuft earned marmosets (pretty much just little monkeys that jump all over the trees – they are really cute), ate a ton of pepto bismal because the doctor said it would keep us from getting sick off of the food – and guess what, it worked!, rode on a skooner around the bay of Brazil, saw 4 dolphin fins on our way to the islands, and of course – we did wonder over to Carnival!

We went to the Pellourino district, which is much more low key, families are everywhere, kids, you can move around and dance without having to be too worried, there are restaurants all over the place, cobblestone streets and the usual insanity that is a massive party. Each night that we went to the Pellourino, I went without a watch, money, or anything valuable. If I did carry money, I stuck it in my shoe – and we always went out with at least 5 people. The Carnival scene was crazy – we saw naked men and women painted silver, ancient African costumes, drum beats, horns, groups of people parading through the streets, dancing, sweating profusely, popcorn, cotton candy – it is almost like a parade, but one that lasts 7 days & nights, went to a Reggae Club and danced with a bunch of locals, met some people from Italy, talked with native Brazilians about their culture, Tom got interviewed by Brazilian TV (I stood in the back with a bunch of the other people we went with – screaming and cheering), followed the most amazing group of Carnival – this Japanese group with just drums – they were so awesome, that we all danced behind them for at least 2 hours, got 1 reale taken from me by this kid who was selling beaded necklaces (I continued to see him for the next 3 nights and he would point and laugh and say what is the equivalent of “Stupid White Girl” – then on the last night, he gave me 2 kisses on the cheek and so the 50 cents that was taken from me was forgiven! J), got bracelets of string where you make 3 wishes for each knot and then when the bracelet falls off they come true – completely superstitious, but people just come up to you and tie them on, by the end of Carnival I had 3 on my wrist, ate candied popcorn that was pink, yellow and green (really awesome stuff!), and basically sweat my butt off! It was so much fun – after all the fearful preparation, we had a wonderful, safe time in Salvador. We did of course hear about the horror stories of the people who went into the crazy part of Carnival (not the kiddy section that we went to) and because of those stories, I am so happy that we just went to Pellourino each night – it was great fun with amazing people, performances, costumes, music and food. I only wish that we would have been able to bring our cameras with us – many people had their cameras stolen as they were held up by knife point – thus we decided, why take the chance! Some of Tom’s fellow staff members got pictures, so hopefully there will be some to share.

So that was Salvador, Brazil and now I am off to Capetown, South Africa!!! I don’t know if I could be more excited about this port. Of course, it is going to take us 8 days to get to Capetown – but I think it will be well worth the wait! I hope all of you are staying warm in the snow (I never thought that I would say this, but at times I really wished that I could be cold again J). I also have to apologize that none of you have gotten mail from me, but everything in Brazil was closed and so I was unable to even get to a Post Office. I promise that once I get to South Africa, the postcards and gifts will be sent!