Illness & Brazil

Ship Time: 1305
Time at Home: 7:05am

My map currently places me just underneath the "I" of "ATLANTIC OCEAN". Yesterday evening we passed over the longest and highest mountain range on earth; the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, though today we're situated about 12,000 feet above solid ground. That strikes me as ludicrous. The depth and volume of the ocean is so incomprehensibly vast that I get really annoyed and upset when I think about it, as I do when I think about the edges of the infinite universe. Things so uncomfortably huge frustrate me. Even the Grand Canyon gets on my nerves.

My last update has been delayed again due to illness. When I thought I was recuperating, my body was apparently in fact preparing to succumb entirely to whatever virus is plaguing much of the shipboard community. This had me annoyed for several reasons, not the least of which was because I was repeatedly suppressing urges to vomit. Mostly I was irate because I had something like 5 vaccinations before I got on this ship, including an influenza inoculation, and excluding the malaria medication that I'll be starting before I head out on a safari. With so many shots, I was bragging to my friends about how I was essentially indestructible. And I don't even tend to get sick often normally. I guess pride got the best of me. So the last few days have been extremely unpleasant, though I am now currently feeling rather fit and slim. Fit, because excessive deep, bronchial coughing has my abs feeling tighter than ever before, and slim because I went nearly 48 hours without eating any solid food.

The other health issue I've been dealing with is irregular sleeping patterns. This illness, in conjunction with being repeatedly robbed of an hour of my day as we cross the Atlantic has me napping longer and longer during the day, and less and less at night. Yesterday, for instance, I napped for 4 hours, and slept for maybe 3 or 4 hours at night.

Anyway, Brazil.



My first impression of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, was one that filled me with apprehension. To make what could be a tediously long story a casual reference, a kindly local who was helping us find a restaurant showed one of the members of our group his knife and informed that he'd, "give big problems" if we didn't each pay him for helping us find the restaurant. Fortunately, by the time the knife was out, the other dozen of us had successfully ignored the man and entered the restaurant. That incident, in conjunction with several other stories of students who had knives pulled on them and cameras and such stolen had me feeling more unsafe and uncomfortable than I ever remember feeling in a foreign place, except for maybe that one time in Germany when we were harassed by neo-Nazis.

But, actually, after that night everything went pretty smoothly, though I never brought my cameras with me in the city, which constantly bothered me, because there would have been some great shots.

The thing about Salvador, while we were there, is that the city was in the throes of Carnaval, which is kind of like Madison's Halloween celebrations, except multiplied by infinity and including parades. There's also great food, cheap beer, and people urinating in all sorts of places that weren't meant for urinating. We once asked some locals where restrooms were, and they had a good laugh at that.

Carnaval was where I experienced what may have been the most intense laughing fit of my life. A bunch of us were watching Fatboy Slim parade down the streets on one of dozens of mobile stages, that are basically 18 wheelers with lots of lights and speakers that play music so loud your ears bleed with bass so heavy you wouldn't know it if you had a heart attack. Anyway, I don't know exactly what triggered this laughing fit, I think somebody said something about postage stamps. Mostly, though, I think it was just a culmination of being on Semester at Sea, being in Brazil, being with the people I was with, having several cans of the local ale (which are almost half a liter in size), and being in the midst of 2 million other Carnaval celebrators. I laughed so hard I felt it for hours afterwards. I laughed so hard the people I was with were getting genuinely concerned that I was going to either pass out of vomit, because I couldn't inhale anymore. It would actually be incredibly embarrassing if it hadn't felt so damn good.

I'm happy to say that not all of my Brazilian adventures were tired to Carnaval, though. Actually, the highlight of Brazil for me was an SAS trip I took to a township, a cacao plantation, and Cachoeira, a town which has been declared by UNESCO as a World Monument.



The cacao plantation is part of something called the Landless Peasants Movement, which is political movement (sort of against the government, sort of with help from it), which aims to provide people with sustainable farmland and a way of making money. The place we saw was a very small community, but the people there seemed rather happy, especially the children. We got to taste some real homemade chocolate, which tastes considerably different than Hershey's. It's quite good, but rather overpowering. I could scarcely do more than lick it.



Cachoeira itself wasn't much different than the first town we visited that day. Both were very old and colorful, and relatively dead due to Carnaval happening in all of the major Brazilian cities. Still, it was great to get out Salvador and see what "real life" is like in much of Brazil; that is rather simple and straightforward.

Of course, as in all places, life differs from place to place. I was talking to a kindly old couple from England from a cruise ship next to ours and they pointed out to me that, you know, there's pickpockets and thieves here, and people looking to scam you to make a buck, but they have those in London too. And it was a good point; those people are in all urban areas. Perhaps there's just more of them in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro than most places, but it is still nothing new. And, honestly, most of those people need the money more than we do.



This picture I took from the bow of the ship in port. In the local tongue of Portuguese they're called "favelas", though we'd callously refer to them as "slums". And they're everywhere. There's seas of shanties on the outskirts of the cities; entire mountainsides are covered in them. If you've seen City of God you have some idea of how life operates in many of these sorts of neighborhoods. I don't really know, we were told very clearly not go there. It's much more difficult to ignore poverty in Brazil, which has the largest separation of the rich from the poor than any country in the world. In America you see the homeless and you walk by. In Brazil, you see the shacks, and you can't walk by, because they've everywhere. There's no ignoring them.

And these favelas have me beginning to understand how this voyage tends to change students.