Friday morning I had an opportunity to look at classes and pick a few to try out. The employees at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) are on strike so we are only allowed to pick one class there and as many as we can handle at Universidade Cátolica da Salvador (UCSAL). Jefferson (the program’s resident director) told us that he doesn’t feel that the strike is justified, but they are paid enough though they aren’t working, so for them it’s a beautiful deal. Right now I’m planning on taking Portuguese, a course on class/race/gender, a social work class taught by the guest lecturer on gender roles from my Brazilian Contemporary Culture course, a service learning course on health education and prevention of anemia, and possibly a course on agrarian rights through the law school. My Portuguese class starts Tuesday, the classes with UCSAL the following week, and UFBA still hasn’t announced when classes will start (…if they start).

I spent the afternoon reading through e-mails until 4:30 when Sonia and I went for a run up and down the hill on our street. Afterwards we showered and met up for pizza at a restaurant near by. Sonia is leaving Monday so we are trying to do all of her favorite things one more time. The pizza was incredible. We got half with ham, eggs, green pepper, onions, and olives and the other half with corn and chicken. The food, the company, and the conversation were all top notch.

We spent the whole day at a beach that we saw on the way to the airport last week. We laid down beach towels on some rocks a little ways off shore and had the ocean to ourselves. We saw lots of crabs and fishies and came back with all sorts of treasures. Tonight we’re planning to watch Cidade de Deus and sit and admire our paintings for a while.

Faye, Kaye, Andrée, and Tara: If you are reading this, allow me to apologize that I haven’t gotten your birthday cards in the mail yet. I have a postcard for each of you sitting on my desk and I promise to get them on their way Monday. Happy (early) Birthday!

Hello my lovelys. Well, Rio is one of the most famous cities in Brazil for good reason. I had a wonderful time and managed to see quite a bit during my visit. Saturday morning I met Bethany and Sonia at the bus stop at 8AM and we got to the airport by 9ish. The check-in line was slow but we had plenty of time and our flight was about half an hour late anyway. We got to the gate about 10 minutes before our official boarding time but there was not another soul there. After about 5-8 minutes a bleach-blond Californian looking guy sat down and started reading, but it wasn’t until nearly the time that our flight was supposed to leave that the majority of the flight arrived. Unbeknown to us, our flight went first all the way down to São Paulo then back up to Rio de Janeiro. We arrived around 4:30ish, instead of 1:00PM but it turned out to be freezing and rainy when we arrived anyway so it wouldn’t have been a great sight-seeing day. We took a bus from the airport to Shopping Botafogo which is a mall near our hostel. We overheard the Californian looking guy from our flight talking to some Europeans on the bus and learned that he was indeed from California and that his name is Chris. We asked if he was a student and how he knew Rio, etc. and he told us that he had dropped out of high school and spent 5 years traveling the world. He is a part-time microbiology student now and just visited a friend studying public health in the favelas of Salvador. He lived 11 months in South Africa and the experience completely changed him. He said that he stopped living for himself and decided to go back to school. I was, naturally, intrigued. I asked him about his impression of Africa and what he hoped to do now. He has traveled all over the sub-Saharan region and his conclusion is simply that “Africa is fucked.” They say that for every year of war, you must work 10 years for healing and war and destruction has shadowed Africa generation after generation. Originally Chris wanted to get educated and go back to help, but after visiting Brazil he is leaning towards working here b/c he feels that in Brazil he could make more of a difference and actually live a comfortable life. Fair enough.

Chris was headed to Botafogo also, so he was able to point out the stop to us. He came to Rio without any plans or preparations so we let him look at our tourism book so that he could look up the address of the hostel that he liked and said goodbye. In the mall we looked around for some food, warmer clothes, and a backpack for Bethany. (Thanks again for that overnight bag Mrs. Cobb. Bethany was able to use it on the way to Rio, then we used it for overflow on the way back.) By about 7:30ish we walked to our hostel which was only 1.5 blocks from the mall, but we missed it at first because its down a dead-end road between 2 restaurants. (I promise, it isn’t as sketchy as it sounds.) We checked in and settled into a 9 person room on the second floor. The downstairs was pretty nice but the mattresses and pillows were... in less than ideal condition. The beds were stacked 3 high in bunks and only the top beds were available. Sonia and I decided to share a bunk so that we could keep warmer and because she was afraid of falling off the bunk. Some European girls that had just left donated their sleeping bags to the hostel, so we grabbed those and made the best of the situation. We were too cold and tired to go downstairs to socialize so we just got ready for bed and I finished reading the last 10 pages of The Great Divorce. We had just begun talking when an Argentinean guy staying in our room walked in and asked Bethany if she would go out with him to celebrate his last night in Rio. Bethany was laying in bed with her purple scarf wrapped around her head and it was painfully obvious that she had no intention of going anywhere. He then proceeded to profess his love for her and insist that she must go out. It went something like this:

Argentinean: I… I love you.

(giggles)

Argentinean: Where are you going after this?

Bethany: We are going back to Salvador.

Argentinean: When are you leaving Salvador? Where will you go then?

Bethany: I’m leaving for home in the US in December.

Argentinean: You must come to Argentina. I want to see you. You must come.

(laughter)

Argentinean: You and I will be stars of the love.

(hysterical laughter)

Argentinean: That sentence… no good grammar? That does not translate?

Bethany: No… no.

(more laugher)

Argentinean: You will not go out with me tonight?

Bethany: I am in bed with my scarf on. (shows scarf) I can’t be anymore ready to not go out than this.

Argentinean: Ok, ok… I understand. Good-bye.

(starts to leave… but wait… here it comes…)

Argentinean: You are my idol.

Oh, Rio. What a lovely start to the trip! We didn’t sleep terribly well because someone was awake and making noise all night. For the first few hours the window kept flying open and misting me with cold and rain, but the guys fixed it when they came in. Sonia and I are both early risers, so we got up by 7:30 and got dressed. We woke up Bethany for breakfast which was included in the cost for the night. They had white bread, ham, cheese, watermelon, sweet pastries, and cereal. We ate, packed extra ham and cheese sandwiches in Bethany’s bag for later, and headed off to a hippie fair in Ipenema. It was another cold and rainy day, but the fair is a Sunday only event and it seemed worth seeing. We used the subway near our house and the buses for nearly all our travels and were able to get around easily that way. The fair was in a park a few blocks from the coast at the south most end of the city. We spent about 3 hours there and left with all sorts of treasures, including a painting each. The purchase of the painting alone made the trip worth it to me and I think the girls agree.

We went to the beach to eat our packed sandwiches. The wind was so strong that it made the waves crash stunningly. We could see a favela in the distance and islands through the spray of the waves. It reminded me of my trip to Switzerland with Grandma and Christy when we were standing in the alps looking at the Matterhorn. In both experiences I was numb with cold, looking out at something so beautiful and immense that science seemed a petty, silly thing and the unexplainable so alluring.

We went back to the hostel to drop off our goodies and ask how to get to the Museum of Modern Brazilian Art. We took the subway to Glória and walked to Parque do Flamengo from there, but the streets were all pretty deserted because it was Sunday. The museum turned out to be a flop because they were in the process of setting up a new exhibition and there wasn’t much to see. In general I think I agree that museums in Latin America are a bad idea. If you want museums, go to Europe.

We went back to Batafogo and found a church near our hostel to go to mass. It was a beautiful pink little cathedral and with the cold and nightfall, it reminded me of evening masses at St. Basil’s Chapel during the hurricane semester. Bethany didn’t feel well and I think we were all stiff and achy from the cold and wet. We got some fruit drinks and head back to the hostel. By 9PM we were all asleep.

It was a bit of a rough night for me. I felt nauseous and went from freezing to feverish. When I got up the next morning my stomach felt like mush and I could actually hear something sloshing around when I rolled over on my bed. I won’t describe any further but it will suffice to say that I had two spells of diarrhea and I threw up once during the day. I swore off the white bread, ham, and cheese sandwiches for the rest of the trip and committed myself to eating better. For breakfast I had granola and we bought fresh fruit off a street vendor. First we went to Santa Teresa, a historic little city on a hill that you can visit by train. It was named after a convent that was founded there and a few nuns were on the train with us. I would have enjoyed the visit more if I had felt better, but it was as soon as I got off the train that I vomited and holding it down occupied most of my attention. Next we went to Pão de Açúcar, or Sugar Loaf. Supposedly the mountain was named such by the Portuguese during the height of the sugarcane ear in Brazil in the 16^th century. Liquid sugar was placed to set in conical clay molds that resemble the shape of the mountain. Here are some fun facts from the brochure:

Sugar Loaf Hill geological constitution: primitive reticular gneiss

Sugar Loaf Hill Age: 600,000,000 years old

Urca Hill Height: 220 meters

Sugar Loaf Hill Height: 396 meters

Distance between Red Beach and Urca Hill: 600 meters

Velocity of Red Beach-Urca Hill Trip: up to 6 meters/sec

Distance between Urca Hill and Sugar Loaf Hill: 750 meters

Velocity of Urca Hill to Sugar Loaf Hill Trip: up to 10 meters/sec

Total amount of cable: 17,000 meters

Basically you take a cable from the ground to Urca, then Urca to Sugar Loaf. Both Urca and Sugar Loaf have nature paths that you can walk through with gorgeous vegetation and a breathtaking view of the Rio. The day was a bit foggy and I still wasn’t feeling my best so the experience wasn’t all that it could have been, but even so, it was worth the visit. I got a Sprite to settle my stomach and we walked around until about 3ish. The girls ate lunch up on Sugar Loaf and I had some pretzels. We decided to stop by the mall to get Sonia a sweater and to maybe see a movie at theater close by. We were speedy shoppers and everyone came out with something warm to wear: Sonia with a red knit sweater and Bethany and I with spandex pants. We went back to the hostel and napped/showered before going to see Transylvania. The movie was excellent and definitely a cultural experience. It was filmed primarily in French, but included English, German, and Transylvanian as well. It told the story of a woman who travels across Transylvania trying to find her lover and the father of her unborn child. When she finds him, he wants nothing to do with her and his rejection drives her mad. She runs away from her friend trying to help her, tries to find companionship living with a girl of the street, and eventually is found by a gold-hunter she befriended in her search for her lover. He takes care of her though her pregnancy, despite her resistance, and goes through his own soul-searching when she finally does give birth to her child. We went to a bookstore after the film and sat and talked about it and relationships for a good while. By this point I’m feeling much better and I was able to eat a solid dinner before bed.

Finally on Tuesday we had a pretty day. We met a girl from Sweden at breakfast (Christina) and she asked if she could go with us to see the Christ monument. The hostel offered a tour for R$35 each but another girl we talked to, a Hawaiian named Amy who had been twice, told us that we could climb there ourselves if we had all day and didn’t mind a good hike. We decided to give it a go and got some snacks for the trail. We got on the wrong bus to get to the Jardim Botânico where the trail starts, so we had to walk a good 30-40 mins just to get there. Sonia asked a police officer at the gate where to start the hike and he told us that it would not be possible for us to climb. First of all there are lots of false paths that we could get lost on. Secondly, we were all girls. We all tried to look as cute as possible and asked him if he could take a teensy-weensy little break and escort us up himself. He insisted that it would take to long, but offered to walk us around the park. After talking with him and working her charm, Sonia convinced him and the younger park guard with him to try and take us up the path if we agreed to take the gondola back down so that they wouldn’t have to wait for us. The path was pretty step at points and although we were shaded by the trees, we all broke out in a nice sweat. After what he estimated to be 10% of the path we came to a huge fallen tree from the rains that blocked the path. He made us turn back because he thought that if that tree had fallen, there were bound to be others as well. We didn’t get to climb the Christ, but he did show us several waterfalls and hiking around those woods was a worthy activity in itself.

We went back to the hostel and agreed to do the tour with them. It wasn’t actually a “tour” but you do get a taxi ride up to the statue, an hour to look around, and a ride back. The view from up at the Christ was quite possible one of the most beautiful views that I’ve ever seen. It was a perfect day to go, but I only wish we had gone closer to sunset. There is something about the clouds here right at sunset that can inspire strange things in a person.

We spent the last few hours of daylight at Copacabana beach, where Sonia and I went for a run barefoot along the shore. Christina and Bethany had hoped to layout or swim but it was too cold for that (remember, it’s winter here). There is no denying that the beach is lovely and its fame is well merited, but the next morning (Wednesday) we went to Ipanema beach which I found to be even lovelier. We spent the whole day there, first climbing on the rocks and taking pictures, then laying on and drawing in the sand. Sonia and I bought peanut butter, crackers, and a turkey pita at a grocery store near by and we stayed at the beach until sunset. I would rival the view from that beach with the view on the Christ or from the Swiss Alps- it was that gorgeous.

The flight last night was surprisingly on time, although we did have a scare when we looked at the monitor and saw that our flight was going to Natal (a city far north of Salvador). It turns out that the flight stopped in Salvador first, then continued to Natal. We got in at 1:30ish and got a reasonable taxi fare to Garcia.

This morning Bethany and I had the first part of orientation for the start of classes on MONDAY. It wasn’t terribly informative, nor was I terribly attentive. We had a walking tour of the different buildings owned by the university but I got completely turned around by our path (we walked through markets, took a bus, etc.) that I doubt that the experience will do me much good. Tomorrow we have the second half of orientation where we actually get to select classes. I’m apprehensive for classes to start because I’m still not confident in my language skills, but I’ll feel better once I know which courses I will have.

After lunch I caught up with Conchita and wrote the majority of this long entry. About an hour ago I went to the market to pick up some food and when I passed by Campo Grande I saw a huge march of protestors. From what I gather they are uniting for better treatment of the Northeast region and for better pay of employees at UFBA, one of the universities where I will be taking classes. The strike may cause one or more of my classes to start late, but I’ll know more about that tomorrow. Good?! Okay. Props on faithful reading. Até logo meus amores…

Hello beloveds! Well I finished with my classes and I’m off to Rio early tomorrow. I finished my paper late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning. After my final we all went to a karaoke bar (www.bondcanto.com.br) and I had a surprisingly great time. I was apprehensive at first because the bar smelled like strange cheese and I spotted a coat-stand with boas and hats in the corner by the stage. We got there just after 5:30 and everyone was given a R$15 credit for the bar. I prepared myself for an awkward night, but I think there is something to be said for throwing a random mix of Americans in an uncomfortable situation in a foreign country. Some how that is always a formula for a remarkable time. Our professors were singing karaoke and dressed up in boas by 7. They played a bit of everything from swing to farró. I even was convinced to sing “Wanna Be” by the Spice Girls with a group of friends that are leaving early next week while I’m in Rio. No further comments…

Today we went to a churrascaria, which is a restaurant with a fabulous salad bar and waiters that walk around with meat on a skewer. It was the most heavenly and gluttonous things that I’ve ever experienced. (It reminded me a lot of the cruise to Alaska.) I got to try palm hearts, quail eggs, and pão de quiejo, plus my fill of veggies and meat, meat, meat! I behaved fairly well and stuck to salmon and veggies until dessert at which point I was a bit too indulgent, but the meal satisfied me all day.

This afternoon Bethany and I walked to Barra to watch the sunset, then to Harry Potter with Baird, another friend from the program. I won’t be able to update again until Thursday, but I promise to take lots of pictures and tell you all about the trip.

Oi gente! I don’t have much to report from Sunday. I attempted to make some progress on my work, but it took me so much of the day to settle on a topic that I didn’t accomplish much. This morning I had a practical class on Bahian food at a culinary school in Pelorinho. We watched an expert chef prepare arroz de coco (coconut rice), moqueca de camarão (shrimp moqueca), vatapá, and farofa amarela. The basis of many of the Bahian dishes is onion, tomato, cilantro, palm oil, coconut milk, salt, and lemon juice. Dried shrimp is also present in many of the dishes and the smell of it cooking with coconut milk and palm oil is unlike anything else that I’ve ever smelled.

Many of the Bahian foods have their origins with candomblê and the dishes that are prepared for the orixás. In Africa these dishes were offered to the orixás and never eaten by humans as a matter of respect. In Brazil the traditions of the different tribes mixed and as a matter of necessity the slaves began to eat the food that they prepared.

Our chef also made a point to explain that if you go to São Paulo and ask for typical Paulisto food you will get pizza. São Paulo lost its traditional dishes as it globalized. Seeing as to how pizza isn't my thing, I’m in the right city for eating tasty traditional foods!

When I got home from classes this evening I started to work on my homework until Conchita came in. She fell outside of our apartment and her knees and hands were scraped up and bleeding. She told me that she broke her arm a few years ago and she has metal in her right arm that throws off her equilibrium. I made her some chocolate milk and got to play Dr. Amy.

My mother just said, "You had us worried when you started to be a marshmellow. We thought you were a steak, honey. You were acting all sticky...."

Any thoughts on what that is supposed to mean?

Oh procrastination! I’ve been trying to work on my paper and presentation for next week but I’m already falling asleep and it’s only 9:15 PM. My revised game plan is to update my blog and get an early start on homework tomorrow morning.

Friday morning I went for a run and met Bethany to go to Shopping Baja. She, Sonia and I decided that we wanted to go to Rio de Janeiro for our break between sessions. We went to a travel agency to buy our plane tickets because we were advised by our host families not to do any transactions online. We are leaving next Saturday (7/28) and returning the following Wednesday (8/1). We will be staying in a hostel where a friend of a friend works and touring the city. These girls that I am going with are smart and we’ve all agreed that we want to be in the hostel by dark fall each night. After we bought the tickets, Bethany and I ate lunch at Perini’s and managed to get a sandwich, a wrap, 2 fresh squeezed glasses of oranges juice, and a strawberry/chocolate/peanut crepe for the equivalent of $10. We had a restaurant coupon from the group excursion to Praia Forte left over because we split the tab last time, so we essentially ate for free.

In the afternoon we had an optional excursion to Cidade Baixa. We visited Forte Mont Serrat which is a fort overlooking a gorgeous beach, and the famed Igreja de Bom Fin which is a church where Mary is said to have appeared. The church was beautiful, though ornate. The most intriguing part was a room where lining all the walls were pictures and hanging from the ceiling were plastic legs, arms and heads. At first I had no idea what to think but I discovered that each picture or body part represented a request for healing. For example, if you hurt your arm at work you might have an arm hung there with your name on it, or if your loved one has died in a car accident you might add a plastic head or a picture in their memory. After walking around and looking at the pictures, the room struck me as quite beautiful. I confess that I found it border line grotesque at first, but I was won over by the faith and hope of the people whose prayers fill it.

To end the excursion we had ice-cream once again. I had a scoop of maracujá and mangaba, my official favorites.

Sonia, Bethany and I decided to see a dance performance that evening at a theater close to our house. The performance was entitled Desejo Fatiado or “shattered desire.” Going into it I knew that the topic matter would be intense because the pamphlet claimed that the dance enters into the question of what it is to exist and what it means to wait for a future that theoretically doesn’t exist. The stage was set with three glass cases filled with green apples and a wooden slab on top that served as a bench. The dancers were 5 men in tuxes and 2 women. I wish I could somehow convey to you the style of dancing, but the best I can say is that I had to keep telling myself throughout the performance to relax because I was getting so anxious. They used minimalist music and all the motions were abstract and violent. From what I gathered they were trapped, waiting. There was a section were a narrator came on in English but they spoke with such a heavy accent that I couldn’t understand anything except “cards” and “shuffle.” I think the message was essentially that life deals you cards that are outside of your control and that you can’t rely on anything. At the end a man at center stage sitting on a bench says vai (or “leave”) various times, each time progressively louder until he is shouting and the glass cases come open, spilling out the apples onto the stage. When we left the theater we stood outside for a good while discussing it before we headed home. It was a wonderful and thought provoking, though edgy performance.

When I got home Conchita and Isa invited me to watch Murder by Numbers dubbed over in Portuguese with them. That movie only increased my tension and anxiety, so by the time it was over all I wanted to do was sleep.

This morning I went with a group to the beach because all of the students going to São Paulo for the weekend are leaving Sunday. Sonia and I played Frisbee and I sat and wrote a draft for a couple e-mails that I had promised to write. (More replies coming soon!) Let me describe briefly what the beach scene is like. From the street level you walk down concrete steps to the beaches. As soon as you set foot on the sand, men and women renting out chairs and umbrellas will flock to you. You can rent a chair for $1 and an umbrella for $2.50 (USD). People rarely leave the beach without having at least one big green coconut filled with coconut water that you drink, then have it broken open so that you can scrape out the inside. There are also vendors of jewelry, swimsuit covers, and cheese dipped in oregano that they roast for you. The beaches in Barra aren’t continuous so when I want to run I have to run on the sidewalk on the street level. To play Frisbee Sonia and I went to one of the more rocky shores because fewer people like to go there.

When I got home and cleaned up Conchita showed me what one of the roots that we eat here looks like before it’s cooked and gave me a candy made of pure sugar cane to try. It is very popular in north-central Brazil where there is little food.

A few other quirky observations that I have failed to mention previously: When Brazilians talk about the past they snap their fingers, as if traveling back in time. They also don’t drink when they eat. (Have I mentioned this before?) They believe that drinking during meal time will make the food expand in your stomach so it is best to drink 2 hours before or after a meal. If any one is willing to research that, I’d be interested to know what doctors have to say.

Also, a correction. I said that the acarajé is made of corn, but it is actually made from black-eyed peas. Isa told me it was feijão or beans, but it looked much more like corn to me. Another dish that is typical of the region that I’ve had a few times is caruru which is okra and shrimp stew with ginger, pepper, and palm oil. It is a gooey, unattractive looking dish, but it’s pretty tasty once you get used to it.

Hello dearies. Another week down and I only have one more to go before I finish with the summer session. I apologize again for the delay in updates and e-mail replies. It has been another packed week, but I will try to catch-up over the weekend.

Tuesday the culture class was over gender in Brazilian society. A guest professor came in to direct the discussion and she started by having us comment on things that we had observed thus far. The commentaries went something like this:

-Brazilian guys are not subtle about checking you out. They will scan you up and down, blow kisses, and cat call shamelessly. You can observe this behavior even by boys of 7-8 years-old that haven’t even matured sexually. It is very much a societal-macho phenomena that is taught from childhood.

-If you are a girl walking on the street, don’t make eye-contact with any guys. Making eye contact means that you are giving them permission to approach you. Walk with your eyes down and don’t smile at strangers!

-Brazilian women are obsessed with being beautiful and skinny. They always dress to impress. I’ve yet to see a Brazilian that didn’t live on the street that didn’t have her nails done. The country has more plastic surgeries than any other country in the world. Bethany told me that her host mom confessed that the first things the moms do when they get their girls is call each other up and comment on their weight and how pretty they are. I’ve heard of girls who have been told flat out by their Brazilian family and friends that they should loose weight.

-Many of the host moms will encourage their student to go out, flirt, and make-out with Brazilians they meet. Kissing is seen as fun and harmless. You have someone that you’re dating in the US? What’s the problem? You’re in Brazil!

-Women here have low-income jobs. You never see a man on the street selling acarajé or doing housework.

After we finished discussing our observations, the professor gave us some more background information and statistics about gender inequalities.

-Brazil has among the highest rate of domestic violence in the world. 70% of women who are murdered are murdered by their husbands. Abuse is not viewed as a severe crime and many men literally get away with murder.

-There is a saying here that a man who is a man doesn’t cry. He doesn’t eat honey; he eats the bee. Parents will start out their son drinking at 7-8 years old because being able to drink is an important sign of masculinity.

-The average male has his first sexual relation at 13 years and the average girl at 14.5 years.

-There is a phenomenon called the wife-swap where men will divorce their wives and marry women ~15 years younger than him in the second marriage and ~25 years younger in the third marriage. Middle-aged woman always marry me older than them for several reasons, one being demographic. The ratio of males to females is 49:51 and a huge chunk of the male population dies between 18-35 years from risky behavior, leaving older women with few available males to choose from.

It was a fascinating discussion. I may take a class from the same professor during the full semester here to learn more.

Wednesday the class was over music with another guest professor. He was a practitioner of candomblé so he has a very spiritual relationship with the music. He explained to us about the different Indian, Portuguese, and African influences in the music. For example, the Indians viewed music as communal with the power to cure and vital to every part of life. The Europeans, in contract, had a much more individualistic view of music. Music belongs in the church and any talk about using it to heal is witchcraft and nonsense. The Africans brought drums, syncopation, and the same reverence for music seen by the Indians. The blend of the three made the Potuguese language and music today. If you have ever heard it spoken, Portuguese is a melodic language- it is a song in itself.

When the negros first came as slaves they didn’t have any instruments so using the body to produce noise (i.e. clapping, stompping, etc.) became fundamental to capoeira and candomblé. Next voice was added, followed by rhythm (drums), melody, harmony, and dance. We had a very interactive class and by the end we were all singing, dancing, drumming and harmonizing. We finished off the class by listening to some CDs that demonstrated the progression of Brazilian music.

Right after the culture class I went to the federal police to register with them (you are required to register if you stay in the country longer than 90 days). It took about 2.5 hours to get through the line, process my paperwork, and fingerprint me.

That afternoon after my language class we went to a Balé Foclórico in Pelorinho. (www.balefolcloricodabahia.com.br) According to the brochure it is the folk dance company that the New York Times considers to be the best in the world, and I must admit that I thought that it was incredible. They performed the traditional dances of the Orixás, a fire dane, the fishermen’s dance, maculelê, capoeira, and samba de roda. I would have enjoyed it as it was, but having studying most of the dances before I found it particularly interesting.

Today in culture we had class over the religions of Brazil. I learned that Catholicism has been declining since 1940 (from 95.2% to 73.8% of the population) and evangelicals have been on the rise (2.7% to 15.4%). The number of people who do not profess any religion is also on the rise (.2% to 7.3%). In Salvador itself the demographics are the following:

-9,837,905 catholics

-1,516,404 evangelicals

-96,303 spiritualists

-11,590 umbanda and candomblé

-1,707 jews

-18,499 of oriental religions

The point being that candomblé followers are a very small portion of the population but it has a strong presence in the city due to its ethnic importance.

He also told us that people change religions frequently here and practicing more than one is very common (i.e. Catholicism and candomblé; spiritualism and candomblé/Catholicism).

I don’t know much about spiritualism but he said that what he witnessed studying it literally kept him awake at night. He saw a doctor put his finger behind the eye of a person, perform surgery with scissors, and even perform heart surgery. No sterilization was performed and he never saw blood spilled. There is a house near the CIEE center and if I get brave I may have to see for myself.

Instead of having the normal 4 hour language class, we went on a tour the candomblé community. It was pretty dry and I can’t say that I got too much out of it. It was at the same place that we watched the ceremony. We toured a “museum” but there wasn’t much to see and the oldest artifacts that had were orange peels. Yep, orange peels. I did meet some adorable children however that posed so that I could take their picture and got to try some traditional food. Oh! I also saw chicken feet and other animal parts hanging on a porch as sacrifices to an orixá.

Tomorrow Bethany and I are planning to do a little shopping and stop by a travel agency to find out how much it would cost us to go to Rio or the Amazons over our break before the Fall semester starts. This weekend I have my final paper, exam, and presentation to prepare for. Wish me luck!