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Published: January 12th 2011
Bahia minha vida
Happy New Year bloggees, I'm pleased to have released my death-grip on 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' long enough to update you all (I don't care how 2008 that is, I was late on the Stieg Larsson bandwagon). I'm even more pleased to announce that I have had no further contact with transvestite prostitutes nor grope-happy drivers. I never imagined that I would have to make these kind of declarations but hopefully 2011 will remain a sodomy-free year. Having said that, I must admit that I attended a Boxing Day Carnaval in which men dressed up as women and hit the town on the the huge floats and sound systems (known as
trio eletricos) that seem to resonate through the shaking streets every other fortnight. There's no shortage of things to commemorate unusually in the state of Bahia and over here drag queen carnaval to celebrate Boxing Day appears to be the most logical thing in the world. It certainly was a different Christmas.
I am lucky enough to have travelled a reasonable amount however I had never previously spent Christmas and New Year outside of England, at least not to my memory. Thus, this
year was the first festive period away from the family and suchlike; it was certainly the first time I have ever been in a garden swimming pool during a Christmas Eve party. It was very hard to believe it was Christmas and to be perfectly honest I was quite disappointed. I truly expected some sort of Brazilian twist but it was unfortunately just as mundane and commercialised as it has become at home.
The huge Christmas trees adorned with fake snow and garish baubles, the reindeer, Santa and his helpers and the blaring lights that have become inseparable from the Christian - previously pagan - festival were all fiercely present. Late December is the height of summer in Salvador, the temperature rarely drops under 28 degrees celsius, snow is simply unheard of and I'm not even sure there is a Portuguese word for reindeer. Thus, the whole festive theme seemed as absurdly out of place as Crown Prince Abdullah at Spring Break.
That is not to say that I didn't enjoy the period, I was just slightly disappointed that the Coca-cola-zisation of Christmas had reached here with such success. Despite that, it has to be said that Santa's
helpers were among the most divine examples of the female form to have ever walked the earth. It is safe to say that I will never look at a Father Christmas suit with the same innocence ever again. Anyway, as I had mentioned, my host family received guests on the 24th and upon the stroke of midnight the party had ended up in the swimming pool with the majority of guests all attempting to sing along in heavily accented Portuguese to a Paul Mcartney in São Paulo DVD. Truth be told, it was quite bizarre.
Christmas is not as big a celebration over here as it is in the UK, I know lots of people that worked all the way up until midday on the 25th and returned to work on Boxing Day. I myself worked at the project on Christmas Eve, something I would not consider at home. As a national holiday it is completely dwarfed by the all-powerful Carnaval. Incidentally, this year it descends to the streets of Salvador, Rio and Olinda in early March so get your plane tickets booked.
On Christmas Day itself my family took me to the interior of Bahia, a small
city of about 60,000 called Itaíbaraba where both sets of parents live. The current middle-aged generation of Bahia are rather like the Irish in the sense that they all have about 8 siblings. My host family are no different and we arrived at a house heaving with people, ridiculously hot with a barbecue in full swing. I won't even mention the quantity of food (specifically meat) on offer as it has been a long time since lunch and laptops and saliva rarely mix well. Suffice to say that turkey, lamb, pork, chicken and steak all played a big part in the festive cheer.
Christmas everywhere is traditionally a time for family and something that has struck me ever since my arrival in Brazil is the proximity people have to their families over here. It is rare to find families that don't get along, partly because holding a grudge is very un-Brazilian and there is too much fun to be had here to dwell on tricky issues in the past. I went to three different families for lunch and beer over the 25th and 26th and each one was rammed with people that all looked vaguely similar to the other.
Distant relations are as much part of the family as the immediate ones and the relationship between parents and children is a lot closer here as well. I know very few people my age that don't live with their parents and the vast majority only move out when marrying. Furthermore, parents are all extremely familiar with each and every one of their offspring's companions who in turn refer to any parent of a friend as aunt or uncle.
Boxing Day was the afore-mentioned drag carnaval. I went along with my host brothers who are 17 and 24 and their cousins and various other characters to this rather incongruous festival which happens every year. Aside from the drag, it was much of the same thing as the other
trio electricos I have participated in. Ice cold beer for 80p, incredible percussion and thousands of relationships beginning and ending within the space of a few hours. The town isn't huge but the streets were filled with men, women and children all gyrating, bumping, grinding, bouncing, jiggling and heavy petting. The children generally didn't participate in the heavy petting, at least not all of them.
It was a special way to
finish our stay in Itaíbaraba, an indigneous Indian word meaning ´Rock that shines´, and we left for Salvador early the next day. I went back to work until the 30th when I set off again. This time accompanied by a friend for southern Bahia to see in the New Year and witness some of the most breathtaking coastline in the whole of Brazil. Our first destination, Mamoan, is about 8 hours by coach, boat and bus away from the capital city. Coaches in Brazil are a very good standard, as you would expect from a country with a thriving tourism industry and reasonably priced. In Bahia the price you pay for tickets on the day of travel is the same as you would pay if it were bought two months in advance and there are rubbish bins at all bus stations as well as unattended luggage. When we first arrived at the station and I saw abandoned rucksacks I immediately wondered when the bomb squad were going to dispose of the imminent terrorist threat.
After an extremist-free voyage we arrived at the tiny fishing village of Mamoan. This is what makes travelling with locals so invaluable; there is no way you would have found it unless you were with someone who knew the area, a topic I will return to. We stayed in the 4-bedroom house of another friend along with other guests, jumping distance from the beach and bars. I saw in the New Year in my boxers in the sea whilst watching the fireworks display on the beach illuminate the ocean. Put simply, I can only really describe it as perfect.
Our host's uncle and aunt owned the house next door and continually invited us to eat with them. At first I was afraid of abusing the hospitality but they were so keen that it would have been an insult to refuse, at lesat that is what I told myself. Crab is the local produce and eaten very simply boiled with lemon and bread. Fish stew is also a prominent feature on the menu served with hot chilli, salad and the ever-present rice and beans. Their maid was a great cook and I ate their almost every day for the week that we spent in Mamoan.
Most of these feeding hours were spent fielding the questions thrown at me by our elderly host owner who was intent on asking me everything about England and indeed Europe that he could think of. He seemed particularly anxious to know what I thought about Churchill and the Beatles. This is a regular occurrence in this country; when people discover you are foreign, they are completely fascinated and take an immediate interest in you and your culture. When I compare this attitude to the reception that most foreigners get in the UK, it is difficult to not feel slightly ashamed.
For the following 8 days or so, time was divided between Mamoan and two other small towns in Southern Bahia, Ilhéus and Itacaré, the latter possessed the most stunning beaches I have ever seen, along with Morro de São Paulo (an island off the Bahian coast). The inland is filled to bursting with areas of intense vegetation with trees, plants and shrub of every shade of green imaginable under a faultless blue sky dotted with soaring vultures. The landscape is endlessly undulating with slopes and hills which seem to get higher and higher until they break out to the coast where it becomes suddenly flat and the shoreline is inhabited exclusively by majestic, swaying palm trees adorned with lime-green coconuts.
It is as if these palms are the guardians of the treasure trove of richly golden beaches, glistening pools and rock formations that lie behind them. Itacaré especially has areas of formidable forest containing waterfalls and rivers in its depths. Truth be told, it was tortuous to come home, especially since I was paying nothing for accommodation and next to nothing for food. So as not to leave the idyllic lifestyle behind, the idea of chucking in my passport and seeing out my days selling coconuts and crabs crossed my mind more than once.
In short, it was a fantastic trip. One of my constant thoughts during my time there was something I touched upon earlier; the importance of being with local people. This break really highlighted that for me as if I was unable to speak the language and interact with people to form these friendships there is no way that I could ever have anything like the experiences I had. The same goes for Christmas spent with my Brazilian family and their family's family and their family's, family's family.
I had a similarly unforgettable experience in July of 2009 whilst I was living in León in northern Spain. I was fortunate enough to make a couple of excellent friendships there and one of these was with an ardent Real Madrid fan named Borja. He generously invited me to spend a week in his hometown of Aranda de Duero, a small Spanish town close to Burgos. I spent one particularly unforgettable day there with his father Jesús and his childhood friend who happened to be the captain of the city's police force.
On this day, I was taken to an incredibly tiny, seemingly ancient village where Borja's grandmother lived and his father had grown up with his friend. Telephone poles were considered newfangled and if you were any taller than 4'9" you would have to stoop in order to enter any house. I can say with reasonable certainty that I was one of very few foreigners to have ever set foot there. When the residents heard that I was English I was dragged to meet one of the 'village elders' who they all spoke about with great admiration as he spoke perfectly fluent English. Upon meeting the señor, I discovered after three sentences that his 'fluent English' had run out and he didn't understand a word I had said. Unknowingly, I had shattered the reputation of one of the elders in a matter of minutes by accidentally calling a bluff which had lasted for decades.
The most memorable part involved another barbecue. This time on top of a hill in the remote Spanish countryside where decades earlier Jesús and the police captain, Ramón, had created their own wine cellar dug deep into the earth. While Ramón was expertly grilling fresh lamb and toasting bread on the fire, Jesús lit a candle and went down into the cellar which was really little more than a large tomb hewn out of the earth. Protected by camouflaged chicken wire, it was icy cold as soon as you descended on to the first step and grabbed the string banister. It concealed extremely strong homemade bottles of red wine from a collection that the two friends had been cultivating longer than I had lived. As I sipped at the blood-red beverage it occurred to me that no travel agency on the planet could provide an experience anything like the one I was currently savouring. Another truly, and I use the word with reluctance, authentic experience that could only be obtained with a knowledge of the local language, culture and people.
These memories which I will hopefully maintain for a good few years to come are the reason why I don't understand why many travellers, specifically anglophones, don't make the effort to learn foreign languages and cultures. I don't see how one can make travelling a really worthwhile pursuit when you can't communicate with the residents. It's all very well to take pictures in the most popular tourist spots and rely on guides and luck for speaking English, the universal language. Yet, I consider it to be a highly superficial experience when you only spend time with your own compatriots and other tourists. In my fair experience, I can say the most interesting places are often the ones where a tourist agency hasn't been hastily thrown up and the inhabitants haven't been sufficiently affected by widespread globalisation to want to learn the language of Hollywood.
Of course, my bias as a linguist has led me in part to nurture this critical attitude and I genuinely would like to hear comments from others regarding this. Feel free to call me righteous and self-satisfied if that is how this commentary sounds as I am starting to suspect it does.
Righteousness piety aside, life in São Salvador goes on as usual. As the new academic year is about to start, I have been spending more time in the community visiting the families of the new pupils which has provided fascinating insights which I will keep for the next blog. This coming Thursday is the 'Lavagem of Bonfim', a huge religious festival which happens in Salvador on the second Thursday of the new year. I am planning to attend along with roughly a million others who take part in a 6km procession between the two most famous churches in the city. You can look forward to an account of this, the biggest religious celebration in Brazil in the next edition as well.
I hope that my first blog in 2011 has stimulated some thoughts of your own and I am keen to hear other opinions on some of the subjects I have mentioned. Until the next blog then readers, I hope this one was worth the wait.
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angie
non-member comment
finger on the pulse
A fine blog Marc. It is very encouraging to find that you are learning lasting lessons about the significance of having your "finger on the pulse" in all that you do in life. Your aptitude for language clearly gives you the opportunity to connect so meaningfully with the local people but it also takes a certain desire and humanity to feel as you do? This is so uplifting and believe it could be down to your Catholic teaching. Continue to be interested in your fellow human beings. I salute you.