Salvador de Bahia

It’s already one week in Brazil, time passes very differently when it is not counted ! We talked with Paula and we decided to travel as if this trip would never end. And that changes absolutely everything.
We take time to discover this new country. For example

I learn Portuguese, I would probably be lazy to do it if I knew that I stay only one month, but as I don’t know, it worth it to learn it. We also take the time to cook and to buy vegetables on the local market, I try to bake bread as often as I can. We have the time to do all the things we don’t have time to do at home.

Salvador is the city I arrived to meet with Paula. It seems to have been a very important harbour of slavery in the past. Salvador has the particularity to have one part on a plateau and one part down, separated by a 100 metres cliff and connected by an elevator. This is also the city where there is one of the biggest carnaval of Brazil. The historical centre is a beautiful place with many coloured colonial style houses. At any time of the day or night you can hear music in the streets.

The weather is very hot here and it’s quite common to take 4 showers a day to clean the body from all the sweat appearing after each demanding movements. To fight with those high temperatures, Brazilians like to drink very cold drinks. The beer is always served at 0°C with an isothermal protection around the bottle. Sometimes the beer is even frozen.

Another thing that I notice here is the difference with Europe about security. Here, the policemen are in almost every streets of our neighborhood, they all wear a bulletproof vest and have a gun (sometimes they have 2 !) and the police is there 24h a day. I don’t know if this should reassure or do the contrary.

We do not take any useless risks and we follow the local advices about how to deal with security. On another side Brazilian people are known to be one of the most hospitable people in the world. And after one week it seems to be true.

The plans for future are :
On Monday we take a bus to go trekking and camping in a national park.
Two weeks later we go in a community to work as volunteers building houses with wood, growing organic vegetables, cooking, playing music,… If we are accepted here, we will stay 3 weeks minimum.