Salvador

Sorry for another late post... Here is our blog from our days in Salvador February 2-February4


Our host from Maceio dropped us off at the bus station, and we were on our way to Salvador. This bus ride was a bit tricky. At 5am, we stopped in Aracaju. We thought that we were supposed to get off the bus and get on another one. So we got off, grabbed our bags and went walking around the bus station driving to decide where to go. We finally decided to use our broken portuguese to spit out "onde vamos agora?" (where do we go now?). The man directed us back to the same bus that we had just gotten off! ugh.. When we finally arrived in Salvador, we took a taxi to our hosts house.



After a bit of time to get freshened up, we headed out to the celebration of yemanja. Yemanja is the goddess of the sea. This street party was like nothing we had seen before. Thousands upon thousands of people crowded onto the beach front street to dance behind bands playing on top of trucks. The girls that we were with pushed us right into the middle of it. At times, it felt like we were in a mosh pit as people pushed up against us and we hardly had room to even breathe. Britt and I hung onto our pockets for dear life as people blatantly tried to pick pocket us all over the place. About an hour into the festival, I felt a guy slip my phone out of my pocket. We both started yelling and the guy frantically tried to pass it to a friend who dropped it onto the ground into a dozen pieces. We picked them up and somehow our piece of crap phone still worked! Hooray! Hahahaha so we made it out of the celebration alive and with all of our stuff..

The next day, our host took us to see some of the sights of salvador. We went to praia da barra and the lighthouse. We watched the sun set over the ocean for the first time since we have been in Brasil (Salvador is on the tip of a large bay). That night, we went out to Pelourinho.. one of the more popular night spots in the city. Our host took us to a reggae concert and tried to convince us that Salvador was not all bad and show us that there was more to the huge city than pick pocketers and people looking to take advantage of tourists. Even with a fun day and night under our belts, we were ready to leave Salvador bright and early the next morning. Our next stop, Itacare, was guaranteed to be better.. small touristy safe surf city..