Salvador da Bahia, tía Rejane e na escola de Português

Wow - I´ve been in Brazil for almost a week and it seems so much longer, all these new impressions...! Salvador is a beautifully derelict town and rather relaxed for a metropolis of 3 million inhabitants. I am especially lucky because I am staying with a local family - aunt Rejane (the aunt of Neida, my former work-collegue, but now she is my aunt also :) and her 3 nephews. They welcomed me as if I was part of their family even though we never met before.

They picked me up from the airport and we went directly to their beach house (yay!), so this is where I got my first sunburn:



Monday I started my Portuguese course in the highly recommendable language school IDIOMA. We are 2 students in class and Rosângela, our teacher, is challenging us every minute of the class. It is great, I´m learning so fast I feel as if there must be smoke coming out of my head with all the new words (or maybe it is my imagination and I´m just speaking "Portuñhol" and people are too polite to tell me that half of my Portuguese is in fact Spanish :)

The weather is usually nice and warm but at the moment it is also raining season and we had 2 rather rainy days so far (as long as I´m in school I don´t mind, but this weekend I´m moving on to Morro de São Paulo, a beach paradise so I'm told).

Saturday is going to be a highlight: our language school invites us to see Caetano Veloso apparently the greatest singer from Brazil. I don't really know his music, but I heard that he has contributed music to films by Almodovar, so I guess he must be interesting. This is what I found online about him:

"...Music critics struggle to find an Anglo-American equivalent to Veloso. According to one, Gerard Marzorati, he has "the poetical and political allusiveness of Bob Dylan, the melodic seductiveness of Burt Bacharach, the good looks of a French New Wave actor, the hip thinkingness of Susan Sontag in her Partisan Review days, and the sheer pop weirdness of Captain Beefheart". He is adored by the artier end of pop from Beck to David Byrne, with whom he appeared last month at the Carnegie Hall in New York."

So, now I'm going to try the "Torta de Linz" that I just made with my new brasilian family because - pst - amanhã é meu aniversário :)

Here a few more pictures from Salvador:

Brazil April - June 2007

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