Sssoooo Brazil!! First off if any of you ever have a chance to go to Carnaval in Brazil, whether it be in Salvador or in Rio, go to it!! Rio has the more touristy Carnaval and Salvador has the more authentic Carnaval. I stayed in Salvador the whole time; The Guiness Book of World Records lists Carnaval in Salvador as the largest festive gathering in the world. There are 2 million people on the streets at times. The party starts at roughly noon, sometimes before that, sometimes after that. But it lasts until about 6 or 7 a.m. I didn’t stay out that late, the latest I stayed out was until 3 a.m.!! A lot of the locals stay out until 6 a.m. go sleep a little, then go back in the afternoon and do it all over again, day after day! Basically how it works in Salvador is there are 3 different circuits that the bands parade down. Each circuit varies in length. They have a really small one (for families and kids, not even kidding, tons of kids and families up at that one in the upper city in the Pelerinho area). Then they have a medium sized on that starts at a lighthouse (I posted a distant picture of it yesterday), this is the main one that I was at. Then they have a really big one. For simplicities sake I’ll just describe the setup for the Trio Electrico bands (the other kind in Salvador is the afro bloco bands). How it works is at the starting place they have all these huge trucks lined up that the bands play on (the bigger bands have 2 trucks, one truck for the band and a second truck that has a bar and a bathroom for select special people who have a certain t-shirt). At a certain pre-determined time the first band starts playing and then they send the truck down the street at a snails pace, literally a snails pace. Then when that truck gets down the street a ways (I have no idea how far apart they space them out all I know is that they’re about a half-hour apart) the second band starts playing and going down the street. And they have it down so that if you’re standing in one spot you can always hear one band, but the sounds from the different trucks don’t collide, I don’t know how it works. But the bands play until they finish the circuit and the bands that I saw played about half an hour after that too. But the bands play from the start of the circuit to the end of the circuit non-stop, they don’t take any breaks or anything, just song after song. And these are not short circuits either. The Barra circuit (the one by the lighthouse) is the one that I followed a band from start to finish on and it took them 5 and a half hours from start to finish. They started playing at 8 p.m. and finished the circuit at 1:30 a.m. and they kept playing until 2 a.m. I got back to the ship at 3 a.m. And I hear that the largest circuit takes 7 to 8 hours to complete. On the Barra circuit (the lighthouse one) each night they had probably about 15 different bands play, if not more. So basically those Brazilians sure know how to throw a party!!
On the last night of Carnaval I went to the Barra circuit with about 10 other people and we watched the bands go by and we saw Fat Boy Slim. Which was pretty cool. I’m not a huge fan of the techno music, but nonetheless, with a huge crowd it was pretty awesome.
That’s probably about enough about Carnaval, I could probably type about 20 more pages on it, so if you want to know anything else about it, E-MAIL ME!!
Brazil in itself is kind of an unsettling country. The middle class in Brazil is pretty much non-existent, everyone is either extremely rich or extremely poor. To put things in perspective for you here is a little tid-bit from my notes from the global studies class, “In Brazil the richest 20% of the population has 62% of the total income for the whole country. On the opposite end, the poorest 20% of the population has 3% of the total income.” Because of this the country has an extremely high crime rate. The poor don’t have enough money to get by so therefore they end up mugging/robbing people for money. Before we even got to the country we had to go to a bunch of meetings about how unsafe Brazil is and how we shouldn’t take anything that we wouldn’t want stolen. They told us this kind of stuff more times than I can count. But nonetheless after the first day in Brazil I came back to the ship to tons of stories of people getting mugged. After everyday we were in Brazil the amount of stories kept growing. Some people were mugged at knifepoint. I’m fairly sure no one got mugged at gunpoint, that story would definitely be going around the ship. And as far as we know, no one got hurt in any of these incidents!! In case your freaking out right now mom, I didn’t get mugged!! But some of the people in Brazil are pretty desperate it’s crazy as to the extents that some of them will go for even a few dollars. Some people got their cameras taken from them and that kind of stuff. But one of my favorites has to be how my roommate got held up, pretty much at knife-point for 10 Reals (Reals are the currency in Brazil). 10 Reals is not a lot of money. Two Reals is equal to one U.S. dollar. So he got held up for 5 U.S. dollars (there is more of a story to that, it wasn’t just a guy running up to him). That’s definitely not something you’d run into in the U.S. On top of that there’s no way that the police can control the crime because of how much of it there is. Another one of my favorite things about Brazil is at night the cars are not required to stop at red lights. They are just required to make sure that no one is coming the other way before they go through it. This is because if you stop at a stoplight there’s a chance that your car will get stolen. There was an incident of this that they told us about that happened in Rio about two weeks ago, I’m not going to tell that story on here, if you want to know what it is then E-MAIL ME and I’ll tell you. So it was fun to get in a taxi and go through all the redlights. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Plus a lot of the drivers go pretty fast, it twas fun!
But as a consequence of the crime, when you’re not in a populated area or if your by yourself (which is very stupid to do) or even just at night you constantly have to be aware of your surroundings and who is around you. That’s the one of the few things that I didn’t like about Brazil (the other one is the smell that you gain from Carnaval, very nasty). You constantly have to be on the look out. But if you stay in groups and you’re aware of things and aren’t being stupid you probably won’t run into any troubles.
That’s all I’m going to say for Brazil, if you have any questions or want to hear more than E-MAIL ME!! Jlissy1987@gmail.com
I just got the pictures of Carnaval from one person and the pictures are alright, I’ll probably post 2 of them or so when I get a chance and when the internet is being fast. But I also got some short videos but I can’t post those cause of the file size. But when I get back to the states be prepared for some short awesome Carnaval videos!! If you want to see more pictures from Carnaval go to the image part of google and search for, “Salvador Carnaval 2007”. There’s probably some pretty good pictures of the crowds and such on there.
One of the pictures that I’ll post is of the group of us that went. The orange shirts were our ticket to get into the (secure) area directly around the huge truck to follow the band around. And I look like a zombie in that picture, bah. The other one is just of a crowd.
And a few other small tidbits. One of the photos that I did post yesterday is of me with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and he signed my journal too! And today I got to each lunch with Captain Jeremy along with about 10 other students. Which was really cool, cause that doesn’t happen very often at all. Plus he’s the captain, he’s kind of a big deal.
Another thing I didn't mention is about Capoeira, it's a form of martial arts and it's done to music and it's everywhere in Brazil, it's pretty awesome. The picture where the guy is upside down is a picture of Capoeira. Google Capoeira for more info on it!
