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.

Being the Adventures of Albertus Pinguinus Lacinus

Bethany came to visit for a few days, and for a few days I didn't have to feel so alone or stay quiet. (Bethany is a good listener. I had many, many things to share.)

We split our time between Curitiba and Florianópolis, which warrants a longer post to come. Thanksgiving was in Florianópolis with Chris, a friend from Rio - who now lives in Porto Alegre but is moving northward soon - and at a local bar for chicken, beans, rice, salad, and farofa.

For now, some pictures of Albert, the intrepid world traveler. For example, here's Albert in Defence Colony, Delhi, India. Albert is Bethany's companion for the moments that I'm not around. He was born in a toy store on College Avenue in Berkeley back in 2007, though how he got there from the Antarctica has never been fully explained.

In Curitiba, Albert accompanied us on a visit to the Oscar Neiermeyer Museum, which is named for and was built by the famous architect. I had passed the museum earlier on a trip to interview the head of the state sanitation company board, who has a fantastic office in a ritzy neighborhood that reminds one of Torrance, CA. We took the same bus route, transferring for free through a system of tube-shaped stations. The focus of the museum is contemporary art, but it didn't appear when we got there that the exhibitions warranted the entry fee. It was much more interesting to watch the crowds of college kids, families, teenagers, couples, dog walkers, and tightrope walkers that lounged around the museum on a quiet Sunday afternoon.





The Museum closed at six, but the sun is now setting much later this far South, so we walked back through the Centro Cívico, which is a pleasant part of town. We stopped to walk through the Passeio Público, which houses a zoo-in-miniature. This public zoo, located in the center of town with free admission and cool shade, is one of the luxuries that the city of Curitiba offers its residents. There is another, larger, zoo somewhere else in town.

However, recalling Hobbes's advice to Calvin that one might as well visit a prison after visiting a zoo, we had an angry penguin on our hands.

Albert and I know why the caged bird sings.


The pigeons and cranes that flew freely about the park did seem to taunt the caged exotic parrots and toucans.

The next day we visited the Jardim Botânico (Botanical Garden) of the city, which was nice but lacked two things: better labeling for the plants, and more shade. It was a warm, sunny day, and the sun wearied us. The plant names were given in Portuguese with their Latin names below, but neither were very helpful for understanding more about the plants. At the Passeio Público, the signs for the birds listed what they ate (e.g., seeds, fruits, leaves, small animals) and had a darkened area on a map describing where they could be found. The Jardim Botânico would do better to add something like this. It is a lovely space, capped by a greenhouse that seems to be a symbol of the city. (An interviewee has corrected my assertion that the greenhouse is the symbol of the city; the stately columned facade of the Federal University is the symbol of Curitiba.)

In any case, Albert posed in front of the greenhouse.



The next day, we left for Florianópolis, a town of 700,000 that is the capital of the state of Santa Catarina. Santa Catarina (SC) is wedged between the breadbasket state of Paraná (PR) and the southernmost, cattle-raising state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS). It features the most luscious coastline this side of Rio de Janeiro.

The state and city also have a history of settlement by German, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, which is reflected in local architecture. On Thanksgiving Day, we all took turns sitting on the steps of the metropolitan cathedral. Identifying various influences on the cathedral is left as an exercise for the reader.





We stayed in Florianópolis until Saturday, and returned to Curitiba for Bethany's flight out. After a few relaxing days of sun, sand, and relaxation, we both have to return to work. Albert asked for a last photo with Curitiba's fascinating and fun tube bus stations, which are located at multiple points around town. The tube system and the interconnection of bus lines around five central trunk lines were the pioneering work of urbanist Jaime Lerner when he was mayor here. I hope to interview him this week about his two terms as governor. See him talk about urban design and Curitiba here (in English).

Albert is depicted here with the bus tube at the airport, right before he caught his flight to São Paulo, Houston, and finally San Francisco as a stowaway in Bethany's luggage. Traveling as a stowaway comes with a qualified endorsement; the space is tight but the price can't be beat.




Postscript: Photos of Albert at the cathedral were taken exactly two years after he was denied entry to the Taj Mahal.