Salvador de Bahia

So Salvador de Bahia is probably the most bananas place I’ve ever been. It is a squalor on par with the back alleys of Tijuana, yet as beautiful as Hawaii at the same time. Since I am short on internet time and I want to record this place with as much detail as possible, I’m just going to bullet point some of the shit I have seen here.

-This place is a combination of Mexico and Africa, with a little Pirates of the Caribbean sprinkled on top. The people are Black, Latin, European; all mixed into one. Definitely, one of the most diverse places I have ever been. It has a hustle and bustle I have never seen before in my life. The streets are crowded with vendors selling coconuts with their tops machete’d off, native bananas, sugar cane drinks, roasting skewers with god knows what meat stabbed onto them. They shout and holler and cackle. Men with humongous carts filled with flour or yams or oranges groan their way in the gutters. Buses and motorcycles with 3 people attached zoom inches from the madness with no concern for braking or pedestrian life. Half the population is utterly destitute. They wander around in soiled tank tops from the seventies and jean shorts; their feet and faces caked with dirt and grime. People sit in window sills three stories up with their feet hanging out, or in the crook of a tree smoking, or on a curb, face to the sidewalk, napping the day away. Salvador de Bahia is a loud, grimy, gritty metropolitan getto.

-Our landlady, Agnes, is French. She owns a house here where she lives with her 3 Portuguese children. Two more babies lives back in France. She is an obnoxious ever-speaking woman and who has full command of her domain. Her home is guarded by her guard dog, Lucky, who we had to make friends with in order to enter the place. There is padlock on the gate to enter her compound, which she insists stay locked at all times for security. Agnes seems like she has a good heart. She same running in this morning to show us an iguana that had meandered into the back patio. But it is mixed with a street urchin mindset she has developed from living in a place as rough as this. Yesterday, we told her we wanted to leave because we don’t have internet. She began a yelling match, telling us that she needed our full weeks pay or else she would have to give her babies up for adoption and one of them would not have any songs or cake on her birthday next week. “Big Shit”, she called it in her deep, heavily accented and limited English. There is a tinge of crazy in her, so we decide to just pay her as an insurance policy. A scorned landlady just might forget to lock the gate one day and the shady homeless Rasta man from across the alley is all of a sudden is richer by two laptops, a camcorder, and a digital SLR.

-We cannot wipe our asses normally here. The sewer is so bad, that the people wipe their asses on paper, and then instead of throwing it in the bowl, they put it in the trashcan next to it. I went to the bathroom in a public mall yesterday and the shit can next to the toilet was overflowing with scraps of paper and big gobs of shit. I almost threw up.

-Speaking of shit. Apparently, it’s common to shit in the streets here. 2 nights ago, Peter and I saw a bum just squatting on the main boulevard, blanket around his shoulders, in full shit position, letting it out for all of Salvador to behold. We walked by the same spot yesterday and as hard as I tried not to, I of course looked for the shit to reconfirm our suspicions. I couldn’t see it, but the small of human shit gave me a couple gags.

-The food here is pretty solid. Yesterday I ate a beef knee. I never knew how delicious beef knee could be, but I was stoked to find out. I damn near picked that thing clean. We have also eaten a lot of Carne de Sol, which is beef BBQ served with beans and rice and salsa. And it’s cheap, the beef knee was $3 for enough to feed two people. We drink .30 cent coffee in the morning. Also, because Brazil is full of jungle, there is an abundance of fruit everywhere. So in the morning, we always get a juice drink. So far we’ve had the orange, lemon, and the best one, simply called “Fruta” which has something red in it. They make it right in front of you by fresh grinding a massive pile of raw fruit into a huge Pyrex measuring cup with a spout, the kind your mom might use to make pancake mix in. No sugar, no water, no nothing, just pure jungle goodness. Those cost about $1.50 and their a million times better than any Jamba Juice I ever had.

-Lucky, the guard dog, is a fierce little bitch. He growls and attacks the fence whenever another male dog comes by. But Agnes tells us that he is smart, and that he will recognize us when we come home at night if we whisper his name and say “passage please” in French. Of course, I forgot how to say this. Agnes also says that Lucky is the bouncer of the household and will pass judgment on anyone who we try to bring home with us. If she growls at somebody, we should be leery of them, if she attacks somebody, we are not to allow them into the compound because Lucky’s character evaluations are irrefutable. Also, Lucky is also the desk clerk at this motel. She is supposedly smart enough to see that when we leave with our bags, are no longer welcome. So if we were to try and come back even 10 minutes later, will be met with gnarled teeth and pointed ears. So far, though Lucky has been an absolute peach to us, and we both love him but fear him a little more.

-There are some aggressive ass beggars are here. One night, within a five minute span, we had two rough encounters. First, a bum came and put his nappy ass head on Peters shoulder. You should have seem Peter squirm. He could have just pushed his head off, but he would have had to touch it, so Peter just kind of looked awkward with his face contorted in disgust until the moment passed. Then, a woman came up to us and tied a little ribbon around each of our wrists and kissed the back of our hands. We call this the “rob me I’m a fucking tourist” ribbon. Then, she put out her hand for a collection. We said no, and began to take the ribbons off to give back to her. So she seriously got all dramatic. She made the saddest crybaby face I have ever seen, pouty lips, weepy eyes, downwayrd turned mouth. It was so sad looking I almost gave her some money. She was a master of the pathetic face. But it was all bullshit and she knew it too. So after a few seconds, she cracked a smile, busted up cause she knows how ridiculous she looks with her “sad on”, and then went over to the next table.

-We saw a great concert of reggae music on some steps to an old falling down church. It was very cool. The streets here are very colonial looking in the old part of town, they are European, but the tropical setting makes them feel kinda “New Orleanish”, or Caribbean, except unkempt for a few hundred years. So the setting was amazing. Dilapidated buildings, a massive row of steps, and a horde of body grinding Brazilians getting loose to the beats. This one old Rasta guy had a gimmick where he had a jug of booze on his head with a little spout on the front. He carried a bunch of little plastic cups. So for a few Reals, you could have a pull of his voodoo death juice. But he had great balance and could dance like Usher without spilling a drop. I thought for sure it was attached some how, but sure enough, when the songs were over he’d take the thing off and wipe his forehead, then put it back on top for the next one.

-On the way back to the hotel we came across a scene of great hysteria. A group of Brazilian drum beaters were pounding out a sick little beat on an army of snares, bass, and samba drums. An team of shirtless man dancers were in formation behind them, moving in beat with the rhythm and sending the crowd into a frenzy. It looked like a jungle war dance or something. Then, the shirtless dudes, who were all black, each grabbed a white woman from the crowd and started grinding on her. The white women were loving it cause the bodies of these Brazilian dudes are just retarded. In fact, all the guys here are straight ripped without even seeming having to try. Anyway, the black dudes I guess are a sort of gigolo clan and they grind up on these white women and then somehow get money from it by seducing them into paying for shit.

-Peter and I walked to the beach yesterday and found ourselves in a pretty sketch part of town. We saw a pile of injection needles laying in a gutter, came across a clan of wild feral dogs, and then saw one bum steal the crack pipe from another bum when he was sleeping. At least we think it was a crack pipe. Then we came across a highway underpass and had to walk over literally piles and piles of human shit to get underneath it. It was fucking gross. Then, amazingly, we popped up a flight of stairs and we were in a whole new Brazil. There were expensive cars, doormen wearing uniforms, a nice fountain in a beautiful city park. All this was just a one minute walk from the human shit obstacle course. The division between the wealthy and impoverished here is stark and obvious and disturbing.

-At the beach we saw some cool stuff. I ate a coconut. The kid who I bought it from holds it in his hand and then machete’s off the top in one clean swoosh, perfectly positioned so just a little hole is visible, where he throws in a straw and sends you on your way. Pretty delicious. Then, we saw some kids flying a kite out on a rocky outcrop. We walked out to them and found that they were flying homemade kites made of a sheet of paper torn from a coloring book. They would fold it just right, tie on a string, mount a little tail with twine, and send it skyward. And these things had wings! One time I swear they got one a few hundred meters away from us. You could hardly see it. Then, when the wind dropped and it fell in the waves, they’d pull in their string and make another one. They kept everything too, like little pieces of string which sometimes got tangled and had to be cut off. They’d wrap it around a rock and I’m guessing, splice it all together back home. Then, we saw the most amazing athletes I’ve seen in quite some time. They were older to middle aged Brazilian men playing smash ball on the beach with wooden paddles and a little rubber ball. I have never seen such athleticism. They would smash the ball back and forth to one another with such speed and accuracy that I was sure they’d be smacked in the dome, then at the last second a backhand would slice through the air and the ball would be returned twice as hard. One old guy, who had the body of a 18 year old steroid freak even though he was at least 60, would always dive and grunt and yell, even when the diving was fully unneccessasy. Then he’d roll, pop up with his face full of sand and let out a “HHAAAHH!” before getting back in the game. Peter and I watched for nearly 20 minutes with our mouths hanging open.

-On the way back from the beach a group of cops walked past us with their guns out, which was a little terrifying. The had them drawn and cocked and at the ready. They approached a group of kids sitting on their bikes and went full SWAT team on them, pointing their guns at them and hollering in Portuguese. It was fully unneccessary and we felt like we were witnessing some police brutality, but I think for here, es normal. Then, only a few hours later we saw another cop get into a Capoiera fight with a bum. I swear to god, the cop pulls his gun out, puts it into the bums neck and they begin to scrap. But the bum didn’t seem to mind the gun, he just kept resisting. So they squared off and began boxing. It was fucking nuts. Then, the working class folks of the neighborhood tried to intervene, so the cop called on his celly and about 8 of the biggest baddest cops I’ve ever seen rolled up. They had guns strapped to their legs, again looking like the SWAT team instead of normal cops. They threw the guy in the trunk of the cop car, and then took another bum in too, we’re thinking to either take care of the first bum, or cause his drunkass was in trouble too. The poor guys bum cart got left in the street and all the shop owners kept on saying ” aqui no”, meaning; “you can’t leave that shit here”.

-Lucky, the guard dog, attacked an American dude who came to stay here for a few days. He’s got a huge scar going down his chin and we think it’s a lifer, meaning it will be there forever. Poor guy. Just goes to show that this place is a bit rough on the edges.

More to come