Albert visits Salvador

Albert (and Bethany) came to visit for my third week in Salvador. It was a working week: I ended up having three meetings and making multiple phone calls. The exhaustion of mono has passed. Meanwhile, Bethany had plenty of work on her own, and we had joint work to take care of. We have to apply for a mortgage, which requires gathering together every scrap of paper demonstrating that I indeed have money. We're in escrow on a house at 78 Raleigh Street, Rochester, NY, where we'll move after I come back to the States in August.

Above is a photo of Albert in front of the Lacerda Elevator, one of the famous postcard images of the city. Below is yet another photo in the series of views out my window. Like the view of Sugar Loaf and Guanabara Bay out of our apartment window in Rio, it never gets old. (My landlord stopped by the evening after Bethany left and guided me down the hall to show off the even more impressive view out the window of his larger apartment.)



We had a Monday lunch with the Vieiras down in Barra, and a later visit to Nosso Senhor do Bonfim Church and the delicious Sorveteria de Ribeira with Válmore driving. New slang Bahian expression: "O Pa' I!", a contraction of "Ohla Para Isso!" or "Look at that!" I could go into the nuances of where and when it should be used, but I'm still learning. I don't have many chances to use it in my relatively formal uses of Portuguese.

I have come to love and hate Salvador. I love Salvador because it's among my first experiences in Brazil and it's where I was made to feel like a member of the Vieiras' family. (Side note: They did an awesome job of making Bethany, despite her limited Portuguese, feel very welcome. We showed them pictures of the house in Rochester. And yes, as a side note, it's true that Bethany has done 99% of the work and I get to become a homeowner by default. I'm a lazy bum.)

But my dislike for Salvador grows every day. I don't mean for the people or the cuisine or the music or the sights. Those are all fantastic, warm, delicious, and welcoming. Instead, I severely dislike the city's layout and public transportation. Salvador is approximately the size and population of Los Angeles. It's enormous. The airport is thirty kilometers from the city center. The traffic is awful and getting worse.

However, while Los Angeles is more or less a grid or collection of grids, Salvador is a collection of loops and winding roads. To get to my doctor's visit yesterday, for example, I waited twenty minutes for a bus going to the main bus station and shopping mall, Iguatemi. I then took another bus down Av. Antônio Carlos Magalhães, which doubles back after it splits into Av. Juracy Magalhães Júnior (no relation, actually a political adversary of ACM). The bus ride home involved another twenty minute wait, two false starts of climbing onto a bus and asking if it passed Comércio and being told that it didn't, and sixty minutes in traffic. Perhaps I'm just in a bad spot for taking the bus. (Note: the touristy areas from Campo Grande to Barra to Rio Vermelho would be worse places.) A professor I met recommended that I live in Pituba, closer to the high-rises on Av. ACM and Av. Tancredo Neves. She has a point, but those local bus lines are even more confusing. (I got on a bus marked T. Neves to come and meet her office off Av. Tancredo Neves. It turned out, at the end of the bus ride, that Tancredo Neves is also a neighborhood. I took another bus and arrived late, after walking from Iguatemi.)

In short, I allow myself more or less 90 minutes to get to any work-related function in the city. And sometimes I still have to hop off the bus and flag a taxi.

The time wouldn't be extraordinary, except that it's consistently above 30 degrees and humid, and when the bus is stuck in traffic on a narrow avenue (I refer to Av. Heitor Dias in Sete Portas on the way to Av. Paralela as "Engarrafamento Avenue" - "engarrafamento" is the Portuguese term for traffic congestion, which literally translates to "bottling up"), I just have to lean forward in my seat and let the sweat and sunblock drip onto the floor so too much doesn't stain my shirt before an interview.

So, again, I love Bahians. And I hate whoever planned this city - which is no one; the city wasn't planned - with a passion. Salvador is very much like Los Angeles in that it's probably not a bad town if you have your own car, and an almost-impossible town if you have to take public transportation everywhere. (Finally, the taxi companies colluding and lobbying to guarantee that there's only one air-conditioned public bus to the airport, operating on an unreliable schedule every thirty minutes or hour, can burn in hell. Maybe hell for the taxi company owners - described here as in Rio as "mafiosos" - can spend eternity waiting in the sun and heat for a bus and fearing that they'll miss their flight.)

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Enough complaining.


On Saturday, after a week of afternoon rains that ruined chances at beach excursions, Albert, Bethany, and I headed off to Praia do Forte. It's a (quite touristy) beach town about ninety minutes by bus outside of Salvador. The sand and beach were nice, and the opportunity to swim (pretty much the first sustained physical exercise I've done since my mono diagnosis) were lovely. The ocean floor was sharp and rocky, however, and I scraped two of my toes when coming back into town.




The visit was a good break from Salvador and life in the Pelourinho. (I live right on the Praça da Sé, which has its ups and downs.) We had a chance to walk around the little town, and found the rarest of holy places on the main street: a Mexican restaurant. Of course we ate there, and it wasn't as disappointing as I had expected. Mexican food is hard to find here, despite the fact that the only ingredients that need to be added to rearrange mainstream Brazilian cuisine into Mexican cuisine are tortillas and avocados.

Praia do Forte is home to two interesting sites, of which we only saw one. We didn't get to see the ruins of the castle of Garcia d'Avila, a Portuguese settler granted an enormous land grant by the Crown in the 17th century. We did get to see the Tamar Project, which is an environmental group dedicated to repopulating sea turtles ("tartarugas marinhas") off the Brazilian coast.

Sea turles are fantastic.





As depicted, they had live turtles living in tanks, surrounded by educational materials about the turtles' lives, the project to save them, and tips on sealife preservation. I recommend Praia do Forte for the Tamar Project alone.

Tamar has other locations along the coastline. It involves local families, usually those led by fishermen, in turtle preservation and new economiic activities that help protect turtle ecosystems. The project claims to monitor about 1,000 km of coastline, which is quite impressive.

There was other sea life in the tanks, but it was most interesting to wait for a turtle to surface and breathe.




We made sure to buy lots of merchandise on our way out, to support Tamar.

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Albert and Bethany left on Monday. After they left, I made one call and received another, both of which declined to schedule interviews this week. It's Semana Santa, with Easter on Monday. Tomorrow is Holy Thursday. I'm instead working and planning for the next stage of the trip.

I have a plane ticket for a flight to Belém do Pará on Monday afternoon. (In an either foolhardy or brilliant move, I scheduled a layover in Guarulhos Airport in hopes of getting a São Paulo area code SIM card for use later in the project. We're now scheduled to visit São Paulo in late June and July, and it would help move things along if I could secure a SP phone number ahead of time. We'll see how successful this idea is.)

It's going to be six weeks on the road. I take "on the road" to mean living in hotel rooms, without all my luggage and without my printer-scanner. I've scheduled two weeks each in the capital cities of Belém, Pará, São Luis, Maranhão, and Fortaleza, Ceará. This will be the longest "on the road" period of the entire year, and we'll see how it goes.

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Oh, and my opinion of the Brazilian press fell a little lower. I was in the checkout line at the supermarket yesterday, and all three national weekly newsmagazines - Veja, Isto É, and Época - had dramatic front-page covers about the verdict in the Isabella Nardoni Case. Veja even had to write on the cover: "Condemned. Now Isabella can rest in peace."

The case is the equivalent of the Laci and Scott Peterson case in the US. A father and stepmother were convicted of dropping their five-year-old girl out the window of their high-rise apartment in São Paulo. They claimed that she accidentally fell. The event was tragic and gruesome, and the press coverage was overwhelming and nauseating. Only the public access station had the sense to wonder aloud why the press had instantly condemned the couple, and whether public opinion had been driven too far against them for a fair trial. (There was also an explanation of how jury trials, of which this was one, are conducted.) The rest of the press behaved as Nancy Grace, a loathsome human being, would have acted. If you want to know every gruesome detail of the crime, every speculation on motives, and every horrible description for the convicted, even before they were convicted, they're not hard to find.

Really, this didn't need to be a cover story. But I guess it moves sales. Had one of the three big weeklies tried to differentiate themselves with a different cover, I would have purchased it out of gratitude. Blech.

Food blogging: O Nordeste

Above is a bottle of prune/plum-flavored yogurt from Alagoas. Admit it, you couldn't think of a better name if you tried.

Sick in Salvador, Bahia: My rant about Brazilian television

So I’ve been to a specialist and taken additional lab tests and, yes, I have mononucleosis. It seems to be only a moderate case; I spend less time in bed or on the couch every day.

The common name for mono in Portuguese translates to “the kissing illness,” which is similar to the slang term in English. It’s a common infection spread during Carnaval. I have a feeling that people (the Vieiras, the doctor here) just don’t believe me when I say that I haven’t kissed anyone or had any type of saliva contact with anyone. It even seems far-fetched to me that I got it from a dirty glass or some other source. But so it goes.

I should note that there’s no evidence that I picked up mono in Brazil, or specifically Bahia or Alagoas. The virus is dormant for some time before symptoms occur, and the window of time (symptoms starting on the first Thursday in Maceió) suggests that I could have been infected in Rio, on a plane, or in the United States.

In any case, the doctor’s orders to rest and stay well hydrated, when combined with the fact that I have no home internet connection, have led me to watch a lot of Brazilian television.

Some background for a subtitle: the movie Wayne’s World, which I saw in the bargain bin in Lojas Americanas long ago, has the Portuguese title “Quanto Mais Idiota Melhor.” Literally translated, Wayne’s World becomes “The More Idiotic, the Better.” I found this both funny and mildly insulting to one of the better products of American pop culture in the mid-1990s. Anyway, if I were to write a documentary about Brazilian TV, I would entitle it “O Globo Me Faz um Idiota” or “Globo Makes Me An Idiot.”

There are multiple television networks in Brazil (roughly, Band, Globo, SBT, and Record). Of these, Globo is dominant. It’s not even close. Globo is also omnipresent: when you go to the notary, the supermarket, the bar, the restaurant, the bank, the pharmacy, the mall, the airport, the bus station, or any one of many other public spaces, if there’s a television nearby, chances are 95% that it’s tuned to Globo. Walking down the beachfront avenue in Maceió one night, past some hotels and apartments, I heard the iconic sounds (doo-doo-duh-doo-doo! doo…) of the novela “Viver a vida,” the current 9:15 PM Globo drama, coming out of multiple windows. (I might qualify this by noting that special sporting events (read: important football games) are sometimes only shown on SportTV, which will have a high percentage of viewers. However, SportTV is itself owned by Globo.)

There’s a long political history about how Roberto Marinho, Antonio Carlos Magalhães, and the military regime worked together to bring Globo to every corner of Brazil in the postwar period. Local distributorships were usually sold to local political bosses. Hence, for example, the Globo distributorship here is owned by ACM’s family and the Collor de Melo family owns the Globo license in Alagoas. I can’t provide the entire story.

In the time that I’ve consumed TV, I’ve come to two observations about Globo’s programming: 1) it’s incredibly insipid, and 2) it’s incredibly self-promoting.

WARNING: Rant to follow. As a mental health break, here are some photos of the view out of my apartment window in Salvador. I look down on the Lacerda Elevator, the south end of Comércio, and the old São Marcelo Fort. The church steeple in the foreground belongs to the Igreja da Misercórdia, the first hospital in Brazil. To the far left, near the Elevator, is the Palácio Rio Branco, the old colonial administration building for the entire colony of Brazil and current city hall. Visible ships are moving products in and out of the port at the north end of Comércio, and from other points in the Recôncavo Baiano (the shoreline around the bay). This view looks into the Bay of All Saints, with Itaparica island on the other side, about 15 km away . It’s truly magnificent.






Back to Globo. Start with the novelas. There are approximately five or six novelas playing on Globo at the moment. The afternoon one about people living on the frontier (unclear whether in Brazil or America) just ended, and has been replaced by another about a slave-owning plantation family and their relationships with their favored slaves. The evening novelas feature some woman who just got thrown in jail, a pair of rival rock music dynasties in São Paulo, and a novela about the difficult lives of supermodels who live in either Rio de Janeiro or Buzios, the resort town east of Rio.

The last is Viver a vida, or “To Live Life.” It’s the most important soap in Brazil at the moment. (It enjoys a charmed spot, at 9:15 PM right after the national news on Globo.) I explained to Neal that I finally realized what makes Viver a vida such captivating TV: all of the actors and actresses are drop-dead gorgeous. They’re hot, outstandingly hot, including the men and the older characters. The entire cast has more sex appeal than should be legal. Neal replied that this is true of many novelas. And while it’s true that novela actors are by definition good-looking – and yes, Brazilians are already on average beautiful people – I think that Viver a vida stands above the rest in the sheer sexiness. This is altogether fitting; it’s, as I noted, a novela about the lives of supermodels.

Of course, being soap operas, they’re ALL THE SAME. There are only a limited number of plot devices, love triangles, emotions, and manipulations possible. The plots move much more rapidly than do plots in US soap operas, but this doesn’t mean that they cover new ground. The Globo soaps are mainly shot in massive sound stages (bigger than aircraft hangars, and sometimes visible when you fly in) located west of Rio de Janeiro. Sometimes they feature new backgrounds. (The popular novela that previously occupied Viver a vida’s spot was about family intrigue in India. Some outdoor shots were done in India.) In general, however, the plots and emotions and actions have been constant since the debut of television here.

The other networks have their own soaps, but the production quality is slightly lower and none of the titles seem memorable.

On Globo, after the news and Viver a vida, they have Big Brother Brasil. The concept is the same as the original UK version, except that the show is shown five days each week. There’s little in a single day that can be edited down to good moments, but they show it anyway. I must confess that I’ve never watched more than a minute. I can get my fill of reality shows featuring idiots acting idiotically in the States.

BRIEF DISCLAIMER: I don’t mean to suggest that Brazil is alone in trashy TV. Goodness knows that the United States is a pioneer in the field: Jerry Springer, reality television, E, VH1, and so on. I would, however, wager that the average 24-hour line-up on NBC, CBS, and ABC is probably less insulting to one’s intellect than is the Globo line-up. (And I confess to enjoying Family Guy and the Simpsons, so maybe Fox should be thrown in there.) Whether this is a function of the level of education among viewers, in a country still in development, I leave as an open possibility.

I should also note that Jornal Nacional, the evening national newscast that comes between the soap about the rock producer families and the soap about supermodels, and sometimes after the local news, has the best production values of any news show in Brazil. (JN has its own complicated history and accusations of bias.) And unlike most other news programs, especially those on other networks, it doesn’t dwell on the latest grisly crimes of the day. Jornal Nacional’s news clips, available online, also helped me learn Portuguese, so I have a soft spot for the husband-and-wife weekday announcing team. (They have triplets and live in a penthouse in Lagoa in Rio.)

Globo then goes out of its way to use the rest of its programming – except for feature films (recently, for example, Herbie and Jurassic Park 3 – The Plotless World), mid-day news and dubbed anime cartoons – to promote the line-up of soaps and Big Brother Brasil. The weekend variety shows feature interviews with the actors and reality stars. (I recently figured out how much Faustão’s show is one long series of commercials. And I now want to physically harm Luciano Huck, but that’s another story.) A morning program with an incredibly annoying parrot puppet and a cosmetically-enhanced blonde features interviews of the same. Every commercial break recently has had an announcement about how “it’s worth seeing again the emotions of [novela about frontier life that is ending].” Commercials themselves feature the soap stars pitching products or program tie-ins. At lunch time, there’s even a game show that revolves around how much contestants remember about previous and present Globo novelas. And in every case, Globo just happens to find people in malls, on the street, and in the audience who can talk at length about how they feel about any given soap star or personality on Big Brother. I’m always astounded at how much people care. (The “people on the street” are, without fail, in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.)

The other networks feature even dumber variety shows (“O Melhor do Brasil,” whatever show Ratinho is on), news shows that feature a host fulminating about how awful crime and criminals are while his correspondents flash updates and stick their microphones in the faces of the accused (“Brasil Urgente”), a version of Wheel of Fortune sponsored by a cosmetics company that seems to feature players who don’t really know the strategies behind Wheel of Fortune and an older cosmetic-surgery-up-to-the-gills host who wastes time staring at the board and trying to figure out what the puzzle is (on SBT), a version of the Price is Right, and the same news and movies that Globo features. To my benefit, I guess, I’ve learned that Brazilian law doesn’t necessarily include Miranda rights. I was shocked the first time I saw a local reporter walk up to an accused, stick a microphone in their (dropped, hidden) face and ask them why they committed the crime. The taped police interrogation of the accused murderer of a cartoonist and his son in São Paulo has been played multiple times now. (He confessed to the crime. It’s a sad story.)

As an aside, one of the networks features the dubbed cartoons of Woody Woodpecker (“Pica Pau” in Portuguese). I don’t understand that cartoon. Woody is, at root, an anti-hero and a real asshole. The comedy consists of nothing but physical violence; there’s not a bit of clever wordplay. And then Woody the raging asshole always seems to win against his stupider, abused opponents. Who wrote and approved this garbage? (Unless the fact that Woody is red-white-and-blue is a political commentary on American aggression abroad during the Cold War, which might start to make sense….)

In sum, my brain is not enhanced by network TV here. I do enjoy watching football, but had to do it with the door closed last time because the neighbor down the hall kept cursing loudly at the TV.

There is one shining exception. The public access television station in Bahia (TVE, channel 2) has real investigative reporting, few commercials, interesting interviews, and Sesame Street (Vila Sésamo). I think I saw a similar channel in Alagoas that had an interesting interview with a PSDB state deputy and a member of an anti-corruption NGO about spending in the state assembly. (Alagoas still has problems paying public worker salaries. While I was there, the State Assembly voted an increase in their own annual bonus, to be retroactive to last year. By one account, with two or three exceptions, the state deputies in Alagoas are all self-interested crooks.)

Thank goodness for this public access channel. I learned that, in Portuguese, Big Bird is Garibaldo, Ernie is Élio, and Cookie Monster is named Come-come, or “Eat-eat.” Fantastic.

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My internet connectivity should be back up soon, and Bethany will be here at the end of the week. In sum, I’ll watch less of Globo, and my blood pressure will hopefully stabilize.


+++ Footnote: my beef with Luciano Huck. Huck is everywhere. He advertises more products than does any other celebrity in Brazil. He’s the goofy-looking guy pointing to products on signs at bus stops. Recently, his show featured a kid who was part of a surfing school in a favela in Rio. To fulfill the kid’s dream, they flew the kid to Hawaii to surf with Kelly Slater. First, they had to show the kid’s background – how he lived in a house on a morro that didn’t have a refrigerator. (They later showed this footage to Kelly Slater, who acknowledged that, while he grew up poor, Kelly never had to live without a refrigerator.) It struck me as a terrible use of money to fly the kid to Hawaii in a new wardrobe to surf for a few days when he continues to live in poverty. But at the end of the show, Huck promised to sponsor and help the surf school provide alternatives for kids in the favela. Okay, fine, whatever.

Fast-forward to next week. Huck’s show – the Saturday variety show on Globo – again features the same family. And he promises to give the family a new house. Great! With one catch: to win the house, the father, who, it is shown, makes a living selling trinkets and necklaces on the beach in Rio, has to balance on a wooden board over a rolling fulcrum for 45 seconds. What!!!??? This family’s fate is turned into cheap amusement for a national audience? Fuck you, Luciano Huck. (Postscript: the father succeeded. It’s unclear how they’re supposed to pay the maintenance on a new house, but I’m sure that will be passed over.)

Maladies and memories: Maceió, AL

I should apologize that I didn’t take any photos of Maceió. The sun was hot, and I was often sick during my visit. Below is a collection of my thoughts from the visit.

First, Alagoanos are extremely nice, warm, welcoming, and friendly. I enjoyed their company and their hospitality.

But there’s a contrast….
Maceió, the city, well, needs improvement. Friends who had visited rave about its beaches. And it’s true: the beaches of Ponta Verde, Jatiúca, and Pajuçara are nice. They’re palm-fronted, with acres of sand at low tide, a gentle curve not unlike Copacabana. The beaches to the north and south of the city are supposed to be even better.

So that part of the city is nice, and is appropriately full of new apartment buildings, tourist hotels, and tasty restaurants.

Then there’s the other part of Maceió. Two blocks from the beach in Pajuçara (the part where I stayed, most fashionable during the 1970s) are roads without signs for their names, full of dirt and often trash and low-slung houses crumbling under the sun.

I had almost all my interviews in downtown, or out in more distant neighborhoods. The center is terribly disorganized, with the same lack of street signs and no grid-like layout.

The city bus system is among the worst I’ve experienced. (I must admit that I only took two buses in Campo Grande, and one took too long and wandered so much that I finally jumped off to grab a taxi.) The buses run terribly infrequently, and one has to resort to asking every driver whether a given bus goes to a given destination.

Trash collection on our street happened once in the eleven days I was there. The rest of the time, I had to walk around torn-open garbage bags with remnants from the butcher on the other side of the street. There are open canals that run to the ocean that can be smelled from within the bus, even if the bus is a block away.

In pop sociology mode, I would think of Maceió as a microcosm of inequality, in Brazil and in general. The rich in Maceió all drive their own cars, and live in gated communities protected by private security and shards of glass in Ponta Verde and northward. They only escape their hygienic bubble for a bit, when necessary. The poor live in the rest of the city, and wait for infrequent buses in the hot sun. They walk around trash on the streets and open sewage drains. (This situation also describes Delhi and perhaps Los Angeles.)

But yes, Maceió does have astounding beaches.

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I did get the chance to escape the loneliness of individual travel and meet up with Daniel’s cousin and her future husband. We went to a cachaça bar Água Doce up in Ponta Verde, where the loveliest of Maceienses drink and chat. (And they were indeed all lovely.) I later had a chance to interview Bernardo’s uncle, and have perhaps the most interesting informal conversation of the trip thus far.

I was given directions to this last office as the following: near the rodoviária, on a viaduto that goes to the beach, there’s a tall tower that has a Banco do Brasil agency on the ground floor. The office is on the sixth floor. I was impressed that the taxi driver thought these directions no problem, and when I later read the address, I understood why. The address itself, given that the building is tucked back between a freeway and a Sam’s Club, is probably of no use.

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On my first Thursday there, I started to have shooting headaches on the left side of my head, and a swelling under my throat. I soldiered on, but spent more time in bed and more time taking naps. I drank more water, and finally gave in and bought ibuprofen and Claritin. The ibuprofen seemed to keep the sharpest pains at bay.

Thus I didn’t get out to see much. And this undoubtedly colored my impression of Maceió, probably not for the better.

Upon my return to Salvador, today, I was taken to see a doctor. The diagnosis from the blood tests: mononucleosis. We’ll see what happens next.