And suddenly, not exactly sure how it happened, but there was one more week of the program left. I had written and turned in my ISP, the massive research project of the semester, and all I had left to do was to present my findings. Of course, this meant that ALL the other people in the group had to present When you multiply a 40 minute presentation by 24 people, that is a lot of time sitting through presentations. Some of the presentations were definitely interesting, but the sheer amount was daunting, especially considering it was all crammed into the span of two and a half days. We were again in the convent, again with a curfew and again, our collective group ended up displeasing the nuns, being too loud and racous.
The final day we were officially together, the program staff had asked if there were any suggestions for improvement. I settled in my seat, knowing that this would be a loooong conversation. Midway through, my parents showed up, and I essentially just left. I only know select parts of Salvador, so we went out to explore these areas. I realized quickly that I had never actually seen Salvador from the purely tourist perspective. It was a novel experience for me, having been a place for so long yet suddenly acting the consummate tourist. We went along the typical jaunts in campo grande, but then they pointed up to a fort that I had never really noticed.
here is the fort
My darling parents. I find myself fairly overprotective of them while traveling, telling them to be cautious and only showing select areas to them.
We continued our walking tour of the city...going pretty sketchy places, up and down hills and finally getting to avenida sete.
More graffiti. My mom was a fan of it too. It actually kind of reminds me of Bane from Batman.
The historic district of Salvador, the Pelorinho, seemed like a good choice to visit next. I had been here multiple times before, but this was the first time that people continually come at me with English, trying to sell us wares, trying to get us to exchange money---my parents do not exactly hide their identity as tourists.
On our first food outing, we went to a real restaurant, which was certainly a change of pace from the standard budget salgado fare. I ordered a Ceasar salad out of the vain hope that it would be a real Ceasar. Instead, it was a thing vaguely resembling a salad with a lime dressing. We had acaraje, a dish composed of fried bread and shrimp and shrimp paste (which I swear tastes better than it sounds) and a few other starches
Knowing my parents, it was no surprise to me that our next stop was the myriad churches inhabiting the Pelorinho.
The churches were pretty cool, and VERY ornate
They had this really cool facade present in the antechamber of the church. It was painted onto tile, and together with many of the other pieces constructed scenes from the past.
This guy was really awesome. I forget his name already, but the singular feature of his face that stood out was a gigantic mole on his forehead, and it reminded me of the scene from Austin Powers, where he is like moley moley moley (I know, I am a terrible person). I tried to get past this and when I did, this man schooled me on religion in Brazil. He went over the different artistic styles pertaining to the different time periods like the development of the baroque style. He taught me about sincretism, which is a mix of catholicism and the local religion of candomble. The orixas of candomble are equivalent to beneficient spirits, and he taught me about one of the most important orixas called exu, which is the messenger orixa, in charge of technology and communication, and he told me about how exu was the one orixa that had the potential for evil. He spent about an hour teaching me as we toured through the church...in Portuguese, which I was pretty excited about, that I could understand that kind of thing in Portuguese. I am just afraid of losing it all when I get back to the States.
The guide had a little story about this front of the church. Apparently, this is the baroque style, and the church switched to a more reserved style later on called the classical style. As there were too many naked cherubs and the like (risque right?), the church leaders covered up the front to the church with a white material, and only upon an accidenta; chip did a man realize that there was something under it. 8 years later with the aid of some of the local artists from the academy of art, they had restored it to its former glory.
A cool little crest of sorts
Saying goodbye to everyone was really hard. I had made some solid friendships during my time here, and generally liked everyone on the program. We had spent virtually every waking moment with each other, so it was really the end of the abroad program when we had to say goodbye. I already made plans to meet up with a couple of the people
I was hosting Ray, a friend of mine from the program, in the hotel room for the night, and as I was leaving, we agreed to meet back at the hotel at 6/630. This turned out to be faulty planning on my part. The parental units wanted to eat dinner in the city, rather in the remote area where our hotel was, and as I didn't want to make them go all the way back I journeyed by myself. I knew I first had to get to Barra to take the bus, and literally as I was explaining the plan to meet up with my parents, I spied the bus that I needed. Because it was extremely tight timing, with about two hours to go and at least a 45 minute bus ride each way without any traffic, I jumped on, pointing at a building and saying meet in front of that building at 730. I had a good conversation about my research on the bus over, and unfortunately I slightly overshot my stop so I had to run to the hotel. I knocked, Ray got ready, and we were off. We were relatively lucky and our bus came pretty quickly, but that luck seemed to evaporate when the bus started turning inland (when that kind of thing happens, you just want to get off, and try again) We took a new bus, and found our way to the meeting site in time.
Here is the Barra sunset
We then worked to find a decent restaraunt, as it was my mom's birthday and we wanted to celebrate it in style. My dad is picky when it comes to this kind of thing, but eventually we found a place that looked satisfactory. Looks did not deceive. As a few other friends from the program joined us, we decided to divide the food family style and ordered everything from an entire fried fish topped with onion rings to a very cheesy lasagna to the classic moqueca dish (a kind of bubbly and delicious fish stew). We ate to the point of stuffedness and then ate some more.
Very cheesy lasagna
Our group sans me, as I was taking the picture.
And then an early wakeup and a goodbye to Ray was all that separated me from going to Iguazu falls.
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