Oi, Brasil!

Or, hi Brazil!

Yes, the time for my first Brazilian blog post has come. What excitement! This post could easily have been huge, so I have skimmed over some things which I'm sure I'll come back to in future.

View from the Elevador Lacerda, joining the lower part of Salvador to the upper part

First things first. What am I doing in Brazil? I'm here as a tourist, but also to do a small-scale linguistics research project, which is relevant to my course at Oxford. I have six weeks (closer to five now!) to record interviews with twenty people, "corpus-gathering" - to use the linguistics term. But I will have plenty of time to discover interesting places and things and people too.

Where am I? Well, I'm staying in Salvador, which is on the coast of the state of Bahia, part of the north east. (To be pedantic, these first few days I've been staying in Lauro de Freitas, which is about 30km outside the city, but I'll soon be moving closer in.)

So, onto the normal bloggy stuff!

In the Pelourinho, a square in Salvador's historic centre

I arrived very late last Friday, after an entire day of travelling. I flew with TAP, whose planes are all named after prominent Portuguese people - so I went from London to Lisbon with Amália Rodrigues (legendary 20th century fado singer) and from Lisbon to Salvador with Damião de Góis (a Renaissance philosopher and author). It's a fun idea! My flights were fine - despite discovering TAP pilots were on strike when I arrived at Heathrow, everything went as planned. 

At the airport I was met by a really friendly family, who were hosting me for the first couple of days. Since it's not particularly relevant, I won't go into how and why I went to stay with them, but suffice to say they were absolutely lovely, and I really enjoyed living with them at the weekend. I took some time to relax, and got a bit used to Brazilian Portuguese, and made friends with their two cats and their dog - as well as with the people! 

On Saturday night Marina, the daughter, took me to the cinema to see the Avengers with some of her schoolfriends, which was great fun. We also had a fab lunch on Sunday, complete with a big chunk of meat served at the table off a skewer, and interesting food like farofa and fried banana. I'm sure I'll write loads more about food in future and will try to include pictures!

Menacing skies over the weekend

On Monday I went in to Salvador itself for the first time. The weather had got much better - after being pretty wet and uncomfortably humid at the weekend, it was now just very hot and sunny (and has stayed that way, apart from a couple of quick and heavy showers). I got a lift in with Emília, whose family I have been staying with the rest of this week, and met up with two friends from Oxford. Malika is working here in Salvador and will probably make frequent appearances in the blog! Eleanor was here for a few days on holiday from her job in Rio de Janeiro. It was fantastic to see them again. 

Malika and Eleanor

We wandered around the historic part of town for a while, had a fruit juice, and went to the Ribeira district, where we saw the Igreja de Nosso Senhor de Bonfim. It has a tradition of multi-coloured fitas (ribbons) which are supposed to bring particular blessings to pilgrims who wear them - or, I'm guessing, tie them onto nearby railings... We then had a good lunch of moqueca, an amazing local seafood/fish stew, nearby.

Lots of fitas

Malika and more fitas

Later on I got a bus to UFBA (Universidade Federal de Bahia), the Bahia State University, where I was meeting Artur, Emília's son, and one of his friends, to get a lift back to Lauro de Freitas. It was my second experience of Bahian traffic jams, which are not pretty. I very quickly learnt the word "engarrafamento" as it took us nearly 2 hours to get back. Still, all the time in the car is a good opportunity for chatting in Portuguese, so there's always a positive.

That evening I settled in at Emília's house a bit, and enjoyed getting to know her and her daughter, Marta. I had an early night, because on Tuesday it was an early start to get to university. Artur and I got a lift with another of his friends, Renata, leaving at about 6.30 and arriving at UFBA at 8.50 - apparently the traffic was particularly bad that day! By a combination of walking and getting a bus, I met up with Malika and Eleanor near the beach at Porto de Barra, and we had a very nice morning swimming and chatting and resting in the shade. The downside was that, despite staying in the shade 90% of the time, and wearing lots of factor 50 suncream, I came away 'slightly' sunburnt, as I discovered later... but it was worth it! While on the beach we ate freshly made acarajé, a kind of traditional street food involving bean paste fritters and fried prawns, which was very nice.

UFBA isn't quite as pretty as Oxford...

I then went to meet a linguistics professor at UFBA, who one of the Oxford tutors had put me in touch with. He was very kind and is helping me out with finding participants, finding somewhere to make recordings, etc. Then I got a lift back to Emília's with Renata again.

Yesterday I went in early again, and met Malika in the historical centre. We went to where she's living and had a good chat and made some lunch, which was all super fun. She then went to work and I went touristing. I went round a couple of churches, and learnt some history, saw a collection of African art, a collection of Brazilian religious statues, and visited the Jorge Amado museum. It had synopses of all his novels and various things related to him - quite interesting and especially good for a student budget as it's free on Wednesdays. 

The Igreja de São Francisco - decorated with nearly a tonne of gold

The Jorge Amado museum

Malika and I then met up again and had a juice - I tried seringuela, helpfully and accurately translated as "tropical fruit from Brazil". It was delicious! We said goodbye and I got the bus back to UFBA, and met Renata to come back here for another relaxing evening. This morning I had intended to go into Salvador again, but in the end decided against it because I didn't fancy getting up at 4.30 for a lift at 5. So I've been catching up on admin, and blogging. Rumour has it there is a swimming pool that I can use nearby - I think the next couple of hours are sorted out! I just have to remember my sun cream...

Thank you for reading; until next time!