This is the blog for the Elmira College travel class to Brazil in May 2010.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Salvador de Bahia

This final leg of our class is here in Salvador. This is Brazil´s oldest city and first capitol, as well as its major historical slave port. The city is built at the mouth of a huge ocean bay, and it faces the water in seemingly all directions. We see many more ´pretos´here (or ´browns´as they call themselves). The African cultural mix as well as ancestral mix is quite present here, and it is a whole other Brazil!

Yesterday, we had the chance to take a tour of the city. The original Portuguese settlers built up on the cliffs and hills high above the ocean, and some of their beautiful old homes and buildings are still here. The view and real-estate being what it is, though, it means that a large number of incredibly rich and luxuriuous apartment towers have been built up on the hills overlooking the ocean as well. It is a very interesting mix. The oldest part of the town (the Pelhourino) is gorgeous, built with tiny cobblestone streets and squares, with 17th century Portuguese style stucco 2 story brightly painted (pastel) buildings lining the streets. It is quite hilly, even though the whole neighborhood is high up on a cliff above the lower beachy part of town.

The Pelhourino is also home to a very large number of Catholic orders, all using Salvador as their original foothold into Brazil 300 years ago. The Portuguese Catholic leadership believed that the indigenous peoples of Brazil were innocent souls to be saved (unlike the Spanish, who were split on the matter). Each church seems larger and richer than the last, with the most opulent and gold covered church being the church dedicated to St. Francis (which is ironic, given that his whole mission was to give onself over to helping the poor). It turns out that during Salvador´s days as Brazil´s capital, the church of St. Francis was the most rich and powerful church here, and it attracted all of the nobility and top merchants as parishioners. The Bishops were quite smart, and created a sort of seating chart for the church, with the most powerful people of status getting the part closest to the alter. Quite an interesting story came out of this church, and it actually had quite an important part to play in the creation of Brazil´s unique racial structure. It seems that unlike the British, the Portuguese settlers were mainly men who did not come with families. So when they arrived, they had relationships (and sometimes marriages) with local indigenous women, and later African women imported as or descended from slaves). This meant that quite a few very rich and powerful men had children who were racially mixed. At first, like in Europe, the Catholic church was very unhappy with this situation and did not believe that these mixed children should be baptised or could be saved. But as the generations passed, many of Salvador´s most wealthy families were becoming browner and browner, and because they were systematically excluded from the church, there was a growing sense of a problem among the Catholic leadership. So after about 100 years, the church of St. Francis decided to recognize the mixed race children and baptise them in the church. But then they had to be sure that the children all came from legal marriages, so the Church found itself in the position of being the only church in the world encouraging mixed race marriages. Of course the payoff to the church of St. Francis is that as a result, the wealthiest families of Salvador became members, and donated incredible amounts of money and gold to decorate the church. (Believe me, it shows! The church is like a cave made out of gold with a few frescoes and some fancy blue and white delft tile thrown in. Apparently, only the Vatican and the main cathederal of Mexico City have more gold by weight). For Brazil, the consequences of this interracial marriage policy have been amazing, in that unlike the US, where racial categories were separated and policed, in Brazil, for more than 200 years, they haven´t had the strict separation of races. And they have a much more fluid idea of race as a result; it´s not seen as necessarily a biological fact, it´s more based on appearance and social class than ancestry. A brother and sister with the same parents might be considered different races, or a person might change races as his or her fortunes change over their lifetime. It´s all very interesting!

Yesterday, we ate at a Brazilian barbecue restaurant, and it was quite an experience. There is a huge buffet with all kinds of side dishes, from sushi to empanadas. The waiters circulate to tables carrying huge skewers of all different kinds of meat, and you can take anything you want. So you might have a skewer of little sausages presented to you, then two minutes later, slices of prime rib, then pork ribs, then chicken, etc. And everything was top quality and delicious, so it was hard to stop eating (and in fact, several people really went for it!).

Our hotel is right across from a beach cove, but it turns out that it is really a surfing beach and not a swimming one (which we discovered after getting chided by a very good-looking Brazilian life guard). So yesterday some of the students swam in the hotel pool and then went out to watch the soccer game with Brazilians. The report is that it was quite fun.

Today we spent our day outside of Salvador, in the countryside. We visited a cocoa plantation, which is one of the main crops besides sugar cane in the region. We got to try the cocoa fruit (each bean is covered by a fruit that is a little like a small lychee), and the fruit was quite yummy. We had to be careful, though, not to bite down into the bean, which is quite bitter before it gets roasted. We learned that cocoa trees like to live in great humidity, but also in the shade, so the plantation was planted with tall palms and acaí trees as well as the smaller cocoa trees (which were slightly larger than apple trees, with bigger leaves). While we were walking around, several students discovered (or perhaps were discovered by) a humongous toad. It was literally the size of a large rotisserie chicken, and it was black and gray, and it didn´t seem the least bit afraid of us. I´ve never seen anything like it!

We also visited the small town of Santa Amaro, and we walked through the market place sampling fruits and coconuts and spices and hand-rolled tobacco in molasses ropes (OK, only a few students tried the tobacco, but it was very interesting to see). We also tried some home made camphor, which is apparently made right here. Some students are bringing home small bottles. This is also a tobacco growing area, so there were some hand-rolled cigars available in the market as well (and some are coming home as gifts, I might add). This was not in any way a tourist market, it was filled with local products and smells (some of which weren´t great). A cow had been slaughtered that morning, so several stalls and stores had beef parts hanging unrefrigerated right from the ceilings. There were unrefrigerated fish and crabs out in baskets. A chicken and several rather skinny dogs were wandering about. The spices were clearly hand-harvested and packed for sale by the sellers. An bent little old man with a machete hacked open some coconuts for us to drink the water. He had just dumped a pile of coconuts (hand picked?) right in the street and his entire business was hacking off the tops of the nuts and selling them.

The high point of the day (and one of the high points of the trip so far!) came at this market. In the distance, we heard some drums starting. As we walked over, we saw that a crowd had gathered in an open-sided covered kind of a pavilion or market area. It was a Candomblé ceremony! Today is the anniversary of the declaration of the end of slavery in Brazil, and it is especially celebrated in this region. Candomblé is the special animist religion of the region, similar (and from similar conditions) as voodoo in Haiti. The slaves who were brought to Brazil brought with them their animist religion, with the gods called Orixas. Each Orixa has dominion over a certain part of nature, animals, water, weather, plants, harvests and hunts, etc. Each person is dominated by a particular Orixa that gives them special strengths. A person might be visited by an Orixa who controls some part of them (this can be a problem as things like domestic violence get explained as being a temporary possession by an angry Orixa). The animism of Western African tradition mixed slightly with Catholicism here, as it had to be hidden and kept from slave masters. So many of the Orixas also have some of the powers and even the looks of the Saints, and unlike in the African version, people here can pray to an Orixa, much like praying to a saint, for intercession and help. Candomblé is very female dominated, and passes its priestships matrilineally.

Because of the importance of the day today, the ceremony we got to see was presided over by the highest priestess in the area, a very old lady who is directly descended from one of the original founders of Candomblé here in the state of Bahia. There were three large drums being played by men off to the side. There were women dressed in very large cotton dresses with a kind of special petticoat underneath that make the skirt sort of bell-shaped at the top but loose and floaty at the bottom. The women were wearing mostly white, with bright colored scarves and shawls and head wraps, and they had lots and lots of necklaces. They were dancing and singing in a circle around an alter in the center. There were several men in traditional African garb who were dancing as well. The songs sounded much like a sung chanting. There were clearly specific steps and moves, so this wasn´t just freeform dancing. At several points, they would change direction, or the drum beats would change patterns. Sometimes they would dance together, sometimes they would twirl in circles. They occaisionally lifted a large wood bowl filled with fruits and vegetables out towards the crowd or up towards the alter. Most of the dancers were middle aged or older, with the high priest being a very tiny old lady. On the alter in the center was a carved figure of a mermaid with a flesh colored tail. She was painted just like a carved saint in a church might look (except of course she was a mermaid). She was inside a kind of carved niche that also had a kind of Catholic look to it. There were fresh flowers around her, and some small bowls and small objects that we couldn´t identify from where we were standing. It was an amazing experience to have gotten to see this, and it was SO interesting!

We also got to visit the city of Cachoiera, which was once a very rich city and the center of the agricultural trade from all the nearby plantations. This is an amazingly beautiful city, in a mountain valley with a winding river at the bottom. The mountains are low and rolling with lot of curves, and the city has beautiful tiny colorful stucco houses backing up the mountainside on impossibly steep and winding cobblestone roads. Just upriver, they have built a huge modern dam, and when we were high enough up the side of the mountain, we could see the shining lake on the other side (looking awfully close to the top of the dam, I might add!). There is only one bridge across the river, and it is a one lane cast-iron bridge with a wooden plank floor. We had to wait for traffic crossing from the other side, then we crossed in our large bus across the planks. We had lunch up at the very top of a mountain, looking down on the city and the river and the dam. The ranch where we ate was 200 years old and kept by the same family that whole time. The view was incredible, and the house was built in the colonial style, with a huge veranda all the way around (where we sat and ate). There was a tile swimming pool and a lovely garden and lots of fruit trees including papaya and the largest mango tree I have ever seen (it could have fit the Swiss Family Robinson´s house, and it was dropping mangoes out onto the lawn even as we watched). There was a very friendly boxer there, and the students gravitated towards that dog and made such good friends that when it came time to leave, the dog got on the bus with us and didn´t want to get off.

We are back at the hotel now, and students have been night swimming in the pool. It is very hot and humid here (although not as much as the Amazon!). Swimming feels good. I think it is going to be a quiet night at the hotel for the most part as we got such an early start this morning. Everyone seems tired. We have much of the day free tomorrow for students to do research on their projects, although I suspect that some walking around in the Pelhourino and/or a trip to the very large and famous handicraft market might also be on the agenda for some students. Tomorrow night we get to see a cultural show that will hopefully include some capoiera, or the Brazilian martial art that was developed by the slaves here, and unless you know how deadly it is, it looks like a dance.

We have been so busy and learning so many new things, it´s hard to realize that we only have a few more days in Brazil before we return to campus....

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