Salvador de Bahia

Wow, I was there for about 3 weeks. I met sooooooooo many people in Salvador and had a great crazy carnaval too. I don't know how to start talking about this place.





As I said in the previous post -long time ago now, Salvador is the town of music and Capoera. In the histolical suburb called Pelorinho, you can hear the drumming sound all day and night. It is very hard to walk, because they are cobbled-stoned streets with a lot of up and down. Another town called Olinda also had cobbled stoned streets too, but Pelorinho´s one is more uneven and those steep hills made it even harder to walk. When I walked for half a day around the town, my legs got really tired.


There is Salvador famous food called Acarajé. The ladies with white traditional costumes are selling them on the street. It is a bun made of some kind of beans and they deep fry it with palm oil. When you buy it, they cut it and put some stuff called vatapa inside. I don´t know what they are, some are sticky and some of them are like paste and fried shrimps too. I liked it, especially loved those nice cruntchy shrimp bit. But as they use palm oil to deep fry the bean stuff, it can get a bit heavy. I also liked the one called abara which you can buy from those same ladies. Instead of deep frying it, they did cook it in the banana leaf somehow so it is not oily.


Well, I had two weeks before the carnaval in Salvador. I took the purcussion class combined both group and individual. This was so much fun. I really enjoyed, but I already forgot what I learned there after 1 month away from the class. well, next time I should bring my video camera or MD recorder, but the important bit for me is that I had so much fun there. Music and samaba in Salvador is a lot different from Rio. After 3 weeks being in Salvador, I was actually missing my Brazilian music from Rio in Brazil! Salvador got a lot of African rythm, afro raggae and Axé. With Axè, there is particular caliography for each song, so the local people know how to dance for each songs, but I wanted to dance samba!

During those two weeks while I was waiting for the carnaval, I met so many people at the hostel. We hang around together and had a lot of night out and had so much fun. One of those friends is a Fench girl who was there to play samba in the band for the carnaval. She had same big red streak on her hair and such a party girl. Actually at first she talked to me coz I had same hair colour as hers, but she had it for 15 years! I have mine for 5 years and was thinking maybe its time to change, but now I am thinking I can keep going with this. One night we went to favela with her other French friends, another Israeli friend from our hostel and the Brazilian guy she was hanging around with. We were sitting around a truck with the local Favela guys and talking and drinking. As I didn't understand what they were talking in Portuguse, I started tapping samba on the truck. Soon one of the Brazilian guys joined me tapping the truck with another rhythm and the others followed. We had a big tapping truck jam session. It was so much fun. In Brazil, even if I don't know much of their language, I can communicate with them by music and dance, that´s what I love so much about Brazil. We went to see the samba bateria she used to pla with in Paris too. She got me in for free! The samba bateria here has caliography too. I saw the tamborim player do that a lot in Rio, but in Salvador even surdo players has caliography. They sometimes put their big drums up in the air, or as you hitting the drums you get down together with other players. It looks so good and fun, but it will be really tiring to do that. She had a lots of connection. Her music directer in France knew this berimbau player in Salvador who had a berimbau concert there one night. Her friend left her name at the door from France! and I could manage to get same privillage (free entry) as her, lucky me. The concert was great. A lots of berimbau and percussions. One time he had this recording machine(my friend Ingrid has the same one) on the stage just on his own and started playing one berimbau to record the sound and played another one to add different tone on top of it and kept doing a few times. That was a great solo jam. The first time I heard so many varieties of berimbau sounds.

I met so many other people in Salvador too. At some points I was hanging around nearly every night with different people. I was pretty tired before the carnaval already. So I decided take a break from those party days and those hassles in Salvador. The hassles, I mean, there we have to constantly be very careful with our belongings and also people keep coming to you ask for money or trying to sell something. I wanted get away from all of those fuss before the crazy carnaval comes and recharge my energy.

to be continued.