Salvador

Salvador. Who says this is Salvador? It looks like Manhattan to me. 3,000,000 people. Oh, the signs are not in English so it must be Salvador, the 3rd largest city in Brazil, the original capital founded in 1549.

It was really strange when the sun came up in the west. That is what seemed to be happening. Atlantic Ocean on the right and Brazil on the left and the sun coming up over Brazil. That was very disorienting. Actually, Salvador in on a peninsula (seems about the same size as the island of Manhattan) hanging down from an east-west piece of the coast. We were docked on the west side of the peninsula with water to the west and land to the east. So that is why it looked like the sun came up in the wast.

We took the “Easy Salvador” tour. Get on the bus and ride around, take pictures out the window. That was all we wanted to do. We saw some churches and a fort and some buildings and favelas.

The favelas, or slums, are not what I expected. They are multi-story buildings made of the same clay tile bricks that most small buildings are made of. They have electricity and running water but NO streets. They hand carry everything (I mean everything – no streets) in narrow lanes with lots and lots of stairsteps. They sort of remind me of the pueblos of the Navajos or Hopi in Arizona.

After the tour I needed to get some Rials (“Hay eyes” you remember the Portugese pronunciation) so I went to the bank. Since I don't speak Portugese and Brazilians don't speak anything but Portugese, not Spanish, not English, it took a while to figure out that the banks don't do currency exchange or deal with credit cards. I tried the ATMs but these wouldn't take either of my cards. After trying 4 banks and a half dozen ATMs, I found an informal change operation that was operated by a local tour guide. I only got 2 Rials for a dollar, but I had to have the Rials for the tours in Rio on our next stop. 2.30 is the official rate, but the informal ones use 2.00 for selling and 2.75 for buying.

While I was looking for Rials, Libby was waiting in line for an hour to use the cheap dockside internet at $4 per hour, as opposed to 75 cents a minute on the ship. In Recife, one internet cafe was 1 Rial per hour.

Brazil was the last country in the west to abolish slavery in 1886. The picture of the day is a city park lake with statues of the Oreishas, the gods of the African religion which is still practiced here. The one to the left in the red dress is Chango, the variable gender god/goddess of fire.