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American Spirit II - Day 404; We Go to Carnival in the Upper City & Join a Group of Revelers; Saturday, February 14, 2015



Joel is first up at 10:00 AM. I get up at 10:45 AM. Sleep in day. A rare event. The air conditioner cut off during the night. We have two on board the boat. One in the main cabin and v-berth; and the other in the aft cabin. I always turn my AC off when I go to bed because the room is cool enough by then.

A late breakfast at 11:50 AM. Bacon, eggs, potato, chilled mandarin oranges and brown bread.

From 12:05 PM to 3:30 PM I typed 2 logs while Joel uploads pictures and video to his computer and then to his web site. A laborious process as the internet, when it works, is slow.

During the day Jeanine gets an offer from Civetta II to travel with them from Brazil to Grenada, as we'll be picking up Joel's youngest daughter, Heidi, March 1 in Fortaleza, Brazil. Jeanine will rejoin our boat in Grenada for the short, but long, trip to St. Lucia. Fortaleza is our last stop in Brazil and where a Rally rendezvous party will be held on March 4th. Unfortunately, many of the rally boats are skipping this stop and heading on to Grenada or other islands before Grenada.

At 4:06 PM the power to our boat shut off. A daily occurrence. We turn the generator on at 4:40 PM and run it until 5:32 PM, when the dock power to our boat comes back on. There is a breaker panel for each boat in a cabinet protected by a security guard; but he won't let us check it anymore when the breaker trips. So unless a marina worker some time during the day or night checks it, we're out of luck.

At 6:00 PM Joel and I head off to the electrified shower stalls; then at 6:40 PM Jeanine, Joel and I head up to the upper city. As we did the night before, we're not carrying our American cell phones; no credit and debit cards (except for Jeanine who carries one credit card); and only a limited amount of Real, the Brazilian currency. To get there we have to walk a quarter mile; cross a busy street where running red lights is a sport; and then take the 'elevator' up to the upper city. During Carnival the elevator is free, instead of costing .15 Real to use. The reason it is free is to speed up access and increase the speedy flow of people thru it. When we walk into the entrance of the elevator, we pass thru a cordon of 10 - 15 military police. They pull some persons aside to run a magnometer over their bodies; or hand search a back pack. Joel and I are each carrying our boat knives, but luckily we're not searched. How do you say 'bail' in Portuguese? Then we walk thru the narrow cobble stone streets and two squares to the restaurant (Cuco Bistro) where other Rally people are meeting before dinner; at 7:00 PM. As we sit in an outside table next to the multi-hundred year old stone cobble street, groups of carnival revelers march by. I say 'march by' because they are organized groups all wearing the same colored T-Shirts with their group's name on them. Some have colored markings on their faces; and some are wearing head ornaments. In these groups there are always lead dancers in the front, maybe 1-2 dozen; followed by the horn instruments (tuba, French horn, clarinet, trombone, and a couple other horn instruments); then come the drums, those beat with the hands and those with drum sticks; and finally the majority of the group contingent follows behind, dancing all the time. Maybe up to a hundred of them. Part of the dancing includes throwing their arms up in the air, left, right, straight up. And oftentimes, in unison. Its quite a spectacle. Following an organized group are non-uniformed people like us who follow to be part of the contingent. Either walking or dancing along with the organized revelers. They even have pull carts with water, beer and what appears to be some sort of drink or liquor tagging along with them. But no motorized vehicles.

There are many family units out in the upper city, with children as young as 1 or 2; in costumes and walking with their parents. There is no real fear of criminal activity like we felt Friday night when walking from the Othon Palace Hotel to the taxi stand at midnight. Again, family units and couples. Like last night, there are military police and regular police everywhere,sitting in elevated 'stands', for lack of a better word. These stands or viewing platforms seat 5 police. Also walking throughout the streets are half size squads of police. By 'half size squads' I mean 5 to a unit; instead of a normal military squad of 10 or 11. They are armed to the teeth with automatic pistols, all wearing bullet proof military quality vests, and some carrying so many clips of ammo on their opposite gun leg that I'm surprised they don't fall over. Some have tasers. The regular police wear military style blue helmets; and the military police wear white helmets. They look like the troopers on Star Wars, except that they don't have on face masks. Some of the regular police have what appear to be 4 foot long batons. Hopefully, no one in the Rally watched Joel, Jeanine and me following behind the revelers because if they shot video of us it might look like we were dancing behind the group we were following. Obviously, that's not likely,but it might have looked like that. You know, walking on cobble stone streets looks like your dancing sometimes. Very delicate footing. The stones being so uneven.

During our following of the revelers, they stopped at one stage area off a square where they spent 15-20 minutes performing, then off again winding their way thru the narrow, steep cobble stone streets. One of the streets they walked down was made famous by Michael Jackson, who shot a video there. He was in Rio, and heard about a special musical beat unique to Salvador, so he headed here to hear it and use it in his music video. Getting back to the revelers, as they walked and danced down the narrow streets, the non-revelers or 'watchers,' were outside of the narrow curb areas, elevated 6 inches from the street level. What was nice is that they ultimately following our route back to the elevator. Once they got to the square where the elevator was, we peeled off and headed back to the boat, arriving around 10:30 PM.

After that Joel went right to bed; Jeanine got on her phone doing email (Jeanine's favorite pastime); and I grabbed a bottle of port wine and headed down to Nexus to have a drink with Russ and Laurie. I was back on American Spirit and in bed by 12:30 AM. The air conditioner and power to our batteries was still working when I returned. The loud music was still reverberating across the marina area from the upper city; and it would continue to do so until just before sunrise.

Brian Fox


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