Recife/Olinda

I seem to have no luck with the weather. When I arrived in Olinda it rained tropical downpour for two days solid, and now I am in Joao Pessoa, and it is raining again! It seems that the rain is following me...

Olinda the second time round was great. I left Porto de Galinhas hoping that I would meet more people in Olinda and I did. The hostel there was lovely, with a great outdoor area: terrace called the terrace of laziness, with hammocks all around it and a swimming pool, and nice bedrooms. The only problem with my room was that it had a bit of a bad smell, probably a problem due to the drains, as well as a slight bed bug problem. Other than that all was fine, and I met loads of people. On the first day there I met a bunch of Brazilian boys whom I had actually seen walking in the street in Porto de Galinhas hours before I myself left. There were 5 of them, all from Sao Paulo and all travelling together. We had a nice chat around the Terraço da preguisa and we also met two Danish girls there who were travelling together and so we all had dinner together and then sat around drinking. The Danish girls were very young: 19 and 20 and were at the start of their trip. They were all really nice. On the same evening I met a french guy who was also staying at the hostel. He was with a bunch of other french people there and it turned out the hostel was full of frenchies! The guy I met on the first night was travelling with a group of french people who were all here on an exchange. They were part of a band/group of Maracatu in France which is associated with a band there in Olinda, and every year a bunch of them go over on an exchange to study the music and dance, and rehearse with the locals. It was really cool meeting them, because a lot of them were making their own instruments in order to play them later in the band. They were making instruments they called abé, though I have no idea how it is spelt. It is basically a type of maracas, built from a cabassa/dried out fruit, the same that is used for building the berimbau actually. Then they put a sort of net around it on which they tie beads, and the beads are what make the noise of the instrument when shaken. It was really good because essentially I got to watch quite a few of them make these instruments from beginning to end: sanding down the fruit, emptying out the inside, washing it, cutting off the bottom, and then varnishing it whilst all the time constructing the bead netting for it. It was almost like a small workshop going on as every day they would get out their instruments and sit around the terrace making them.

On my first day I had decided to go to Recife in order to visit the older part of the city which is supposed to be nice, but it was chucking it down with rain so much that I gave up. I saw the central part of Recife, a main shopping road, and saw Recife from afar and that was about it. Instead of walking around Recife centre I got the tube to the bus station in order to sort out my bus ticket to Joao Pessoa. It was so freezing cold in the tube though, due to the aircon which noone had thought to turn down in the rain, and so everyone, Brazilians included, was shivering in the tube! Then I just managed to get some "admin" stuff sorted out as it were, and headed back to the hostel. I wasn't too disappointed about not seeing Recife as I had been told that it was horrible anyway, and it is also a dangerous city, being the city in Brazil with the highest murder rate. Well, of course this doesn't really concern tourists, but it also doesn't particularly make you want to hang around. That being said, I survived Nottingham called Shottingham, so why not Recife? Instead, I hung out in the hostel in Olinda with the Frenchies. It was nice because through them and their passion for music, I felt like I got to discover a lot more about Maracatu and the local musical traditions. For a start I got a small insight into how to play the instrument they were making, but also it was just nice to hear them talk about maracatu and see their passion for it. I still prefer the rythms of the south of Brazil, but it remained interesting nonetheless. On one of the nights, a few of us went out to a forro night down the road which was fun. It was a small bar and was packed full of people and had a live band playing forro. One of the guys who was with us, whom incredibly enough I had actually met once before on my first night in Rio, said the music reminded him of Irish music, and I suppose he was right to some extent, as it does have a rather celtic resonance to it. The night after that we just wandered around the historical part of the city in search for music, and there was loads of it everywhere. We found a club that was playing a sort of mixture of funk music with latin music and maracatu beats which was great. Not only was the music good, but the club opened up at the back and had a terrace overlooking the whole of the bay of Olinda and Recife which was quite impressive!

Most of my time during the day was spent hanging out with the Frenchies, as on my second day I had planned to go and look around Olinda, but then I found out they were all taking part in a dance class and so I asked if I could crash the class. I was really interested in taking a dance class in Maracatu as all these rythms of the Northeast are completely new to me and so I thought it would be a good idea to go and see what it was like. The class was given by a guy called Anderson who was lovely and definitely knew what he was doing, warmup starting with some extremely difficult leg stretches similar to the splits which he did with a lot of ease. Actually the first part of the dance class consisted of us doing moves which were more related to Afro dance, all of us in lines of three going up and down the hall. This page may explain a bit about afro dance...Towards the end of that we started doing moves that were more related to the dance of the Orixas, and in particular the dance of Oshun. I found that fascinating as I had seen the dance in Salvador at the show of the Bale Folklorico, and was really intersted to do some of it myself. I think that the culture of the Orixas here is a really interesting and integral part of Brazilian culture and that it is important to learn more about it. In the evening we were going to watch the rehearsal of the dancers who dance during the parade in carnival but because we were torn between going to a concert in Recife and staying in Olinda, we actually missed the rehearsal. Still, staying in Olinda was still nice and worth it as there was a lot of music going on that night and we ended up in the club I mentioned before.

On the last day which was a Sunday I went out early in the morning to finally take some pictures of Olinda. It is a truly charming old colonial town, and is very calm and safe. The town was getting ready for it's small carnival that it holds every Sunday in anticipation of the real thing, and that I was at last week. I was a bit disappointed to go as the frenchies were playing with their band that day, and it would have been nice to watch them, but at the same time I had already witnessed the carnival the week before and it was time for me to move on to Joao Pessoa. All in all the stay in Olinda was great though, and I really enjoyed meeting all the people I did! Now I am in Joao Pessoa under the rain once again, and will write more about that next. Here is a link to a map which shows more or less where I have been so far, though it is not all that accurate, it's mainly just to give an idea. More soon!