Ericksons Come Blogging: Salvador - and associated adventures!

Well, in case you hadn't heard... I am still in Brazil. It's been almost three weeks since I left Utah and came to Brazil and let me tell you what!! It's a cool place. This city is in the northeast, so it has a different feel than cities further south like São Paulo. (I bet you are all jealous of my cool brazilian keyboard that lêts mé àdd symbôls ãll óver the plaçe)

Above is a picture from the plan. I am almost sure that we are here on this triangular piece of land.

The red circle is the Associacão Cultural Brasil Estados Unidos. That is the school that is coordinating our homestay here and we also take cultural classes, etc with them.

If you do a google search like this one (Graça), you will see the neighborhood where I am living. I live on rua Oito de Dezembro. This is our apartment building.

Above is a breakfast at the hotel. There was fresh fruit - passion fruit, papaya, melon, pineapple, pastries, tapioca with sweetened condensed milk and coconut, and acerola juice. (google it)

Our Brazilian mom is very nice. She makes us great meals three times a day and i even have a hammock in my room!

Not too long ago we saw Studio C on Brazilian tv... They were debunking, in a very official way, the shots to the face in the volleyball and soccer videos of Scott Sterling. "Mentira!!" or "Lie/False" was the final result. :)

This is a part of the city called Pelourinho. We are looking down on the "low city" or "Cidade Baixa". This is a commercial and traditional center of activity in Salvador. You can see the elevator on the left. It is called "Elevador Lacerda". It was built even before the Empire State Building, and at the time of it's construction, it was the tallest elevator in the world! They used it as a way of moving goods/people between the two parts of the city. The building on the right with a pointed roof is called "Mercado Modelo". It used to be a place where they would keep the slave and sell them. Here in Salvador, slavery was still around until about 1904. The official emancipation proclamation was in 1888, but because this was a very agrarian area, the state of Bahia didn't really free the slaves until later. It was a hard life for the freed slaves. They had trouble finding work and some would rather go back to slavery to have a place to sleep and food to eat. This seemed to be a lesson for life. Sometimes it seems easier to go back to where we had less knowledge, less agency, less problems, but when we press forward, we will gain even greater blessings and opportunities. I look at the city and culture that this state and the city I am in have, and I know that the afro-brazilian traditions have heavily shaped life here.

Below is the church of San Francisco in Pelourinho. It is super detailed and gilded. Slaves did most of the work, and seeing as they had no formal training on sculpture and painting, they did an amazing job.

Another church. There is a "praça" or plaza here in Pelourinho that has 4-5 churches within your sight. They all wanted to compete for the center space where they would be visible. There was a really big cathedral near there, but it was destroyed to make room for the railroad, which didn't end up going through there in the end. So now it is another plaza area.

This was a cool chair made out of tire pieces... It is in the Museum of the Jorge Amado Foundation. He is a famous author here from Brazil, and he lived here in Salvador much of his life. Also in the Pelourinho (hold on... a certain child of the 80's might be super excited), a famous singer named Michael Jackson recorded a music video with a drumming group called Olodum. I stood there in that same place! (If I was Brazilian, I would probably be super excited, but that wasn't the coolest part for me) The drumming group is super cool, and it is fun to see everyone, even the police officers, start to smile, shake, and jam out to the beat.

Part 2 - Chapada Diamantina and Lençois

The following pictures are from our trip this last weekend to a national park/area called "Chapada Diamantina" which translated means "many waters" and "honey bees"... Oh wait, that isn't right...

It means "Diamond Plateau". They used to mine for diamonds in this area. Now it is a national park. And nearby they grow a lot of pineapple.

This is a hill called "Pai Inacio". Legend has it that an escaped slave (who was the son of the master of the plantation) came here to escape persecution. His name, Inacio, was then given to the hill. "Pai" came because he eventually created his own "terreiro" of candomblé, which is an african-based religion that is practiced here in Brazil... it is more prevalent here in the northeast because of the large percentage of the population who came from African (slaves) ancestors.

The view is breathtaking! Even this cactus had to grow eyes in order to see what was going on.

I decided to try out my new superman skills... not half bad. My form is a little off.

Panorama!

The gang! We have, starting with the crazy guy in the light blue shirt, Joshua, Alex, Mitch, Maddy, Elisa, Aubrey, Angus, Shannon, Doug, Courtney, and Angela. Angela (also a BYU student) is here on an individual study, so she comes with us to do fun things, but she is not part of our official research group.

Part 3- Into Darkness

We went on a fun hike to a cave here called "Lapa Doce". Below is a picture of a spiky tree that I thought looked rather ominous. It does not want to be climbed...

The mouth of the cave... ready to swallow us whole... or hole... get it? Cave, hole? hahaha

There were a lot of cool stalagmites and stalactites in the cave. (Fun memory trick: stalagMites come up from the ground like little Mountains. StalacTites hang down from the ceiling like.... I don't know... the opposite of a mountian? Like a "T" hangs down. That's what it is like.)

The red is iron oxide. The white is just calcium carbonate. There was also some silica on the roof.

This one looks like a jellyfish!

A fun tree. And a fun picture.

Mamona - They use it to make bio-diesel and airplane oil.

There are a series of cool pools "poços" (literally means "wells") in the Chapada. The one above is called "Poço do Pato" because, apparently, the guy who lived nearby had duck "pato" feet.

This is the cozy town of Lençois. It was our base of operations for our activities. We stayed in a "pousada" which is like a bed and breakfast. It was fun.