Olá Brazil

-
 

It was really just one photo that started this whole part of our journey

When we began making our travel plans this  January,  we dreamt of going two or three months to Arizona and New Mexico, to experience the flat mesas, the greasy diners, and the desert highways stretching endlessly towards the horizon.

But one day, just by chance,  we spotted a photo of a palm-fringed, gleaming white sand beach. The huge waves hitting the beach were spotted with surfers riding the crests.

It looked like a dreamlike Bounty beach. We simply had to go there.

We found out, that the beach was called Itacare and it was located in the Brazilian state of Bahia. We looked it up, and as the nearest international airport would be Salvador, Salvador was going to be our starting point.

And as an extra prize: The time of our arrival corresponded exactly with the last days of the famous Salvador Carnaval.


No hotel available
At this late point,  the masses of people coming to the carnival made it impossible for us to find an available room in the city center - we had to look towards the outskirts, to Itapua.

Here we found a small hotel with the promising name 'Hotel Ellegance', but, as it turned out, it was not elegant or glorious at all.

From the sign in the lobby, you could see the rooms were actually to be rented for just two-hour intervals and listening to the activities in the neighboring rooms - we found out people weren't wasting their time!


 Anyhow. Now we're here, our first experience ever of Latin America.


We've just walked along the beach and in many ways, the run-down resort area of Itapua resembles what we believe Cuba might have looked like in the 50s - before Castro.



Brightly colored small houses, hotels, and seaside promenades are lying side by side in a beautiful old-fashioned style.

Here the bathroom mosaic tiles function as an exterior decoration in harmony with a shocking pink wall. One entire house is bright green and the neighboring building glaringly orange.

We saw colors, which should have clashed, but seemed absolutely perfect in this seaside resort!


This evening, we discovered our hotel is located just next to a festival site, which is the epicenter of the local carnival. During most of the night, we got firsthand knowledge of the Brazilian way of partying. 

And, boy, do they know how to party! 

The booming music from outside, literally made our door, windows (and teeth!) rattle and vibrate to the beat of the samba.

It continued until 3:30 AM.

It probably would have been a little less noisy, if we had stuck with the original plan and gone for the Arizonian desert!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Night under the full moon: A unique Parisian gathering

-
Image
  The other night I was invited to a so-called Full Moon Party in the center of Paris. The host was a guy Rita and I met, when we, a couple of years ago, stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. He arranges these casual parties at the middle of the Pont des Arts and he has done so, come rain or come moonshine, every month for the last many years. As I approached the iconic bridge, now mercifully devoid of its plague of "love locks," I was greeted by a cacophony of excited chatter in a United Nations potpourri of accents.  French people as well as expats from many corners of the globe mingled freely, their laughter and chatter forming a symphony of human connection that was actually quite infectious. As I accepted a glass of wine from a beaming Spanish astrophysics student, I pondered the curious phenomenon before me.  Here we were, a motley crew of strangers, united by nothing more than our shared presence in this city and our willingness to gaze skyward toge...
Read more

Stumbling into serenity: The secret garden of Saint-Serge

-
Image
The other day I walked the streets of the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and here, on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon what seemed like a portal opening into another time. Entering through an unassuming gate, and going down a narrow,  semi-private alley, I was transported from the frenetic present into a hidden,  quiet garden that turned out to be the garden of the  Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.    Photo: SortirAParis Before me unfolded a scene that could have been plucked from a 19th-century Russian novel: Long-bearded orthodox priests wearing flowing black robes and cylindrical kamilávka hats, moved unhurriedly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly parishioners sat in the garden, on rickety chairs, chatting in a melodic blend of Russian and  French. The abrupt transition from bustling street to  tranquil sanctuary was so jarring that I half-expected to find my smartphone transfor...
Read more

Entering the Boros bunker - A mind-altering artistic journey

-
Image
Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin's Mitte is like walking into an ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942,  is now the home of an eccentric private art collection.  Inside the building's almost anthill-like network of  underground corridors and crypts, numerous swirling shapes and colors spark the walls into lurid illuminations.   A flood of phantasmagoric images washes over the senses - kinetic sculptures twisting with reptilian menace, multimedia installations flickering with layered meanings. Each new room opens like a portal into a new creative artistic mind - and the story about the building is as exciting as the art which is  displayed inside it. During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand  civilians from the massive, nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945 the Red Army repurposed the building for prisoners of war and it later became an East German warehouse. After the wall tumble...
Read more