Salvador, Day 12
We had an unstructured day in Salvador before us -- the only specific plan was a very posh dinner at 7 -- so fortified with a full pot of tea and many notes, tips and recommendations from Sayuri, we set out. (Amarelindo was the one place we stayed with British tea on offer. I drank a full pot each morning despite knowing that I would be in a desperate situation an hour later -- Salvador is not replete with appealing public bathroom options. But at least in Salvador, you were not constantly reminded not to flush your toilet paper -- the toilet paper you had just used. To do whatever it was you had just used the toilet paper to do. You were not supposed to flush it. You were supposed to put it in a little flip top can. Seriously. That was a Rio thing.)
Everyone had their own ideas for the day. Because we genuinely are inexhaustibly nerdy, Dave and I started at the Afro-Brazilian Museum, which was just around the corner from our hotel. The small museum is nested in one corner of a spectacular colonial government building, directly across a foyer from the City Museum. But the two museums are not related and you very adamantly cannot purchase tickets to both at the same time. Rather, two desks sit in the doorways of the two museums, each occupied by a person who appears to be assiduously ignoring the other person doing exactly the same job 20 feet away. For reasons which remain obscure, we were not able to visit the City Museum. But we quite liked the collection of African art, tools and religious objects in the Afro-Brazilian Museum, most especially the large wood reliefs of many of the same African gods we’d seen the day before swanning about on the lake.
We returned to a store we’d sprinted through the previous day with the aim of buying Jack some comically ornate shorts, but apparently this particular store is an enterprise of a sort of Brazilian Kanye so the shorts were shockingly expensive. And not as fun as they’d appeared at a sprint.
We went next to Museu Tempostal (the postcard museum), which Sayuri had insisted was worth a longer visit (we’d made a flying stop to check out a small collection of vintage airline posters the day before). It turned out to have a much larger and completely mesmerizing lower floor housing a collection of postcards from Pelourinho, Salvador and Brazil covering the last 150 years. Hundreds of little pictures of the scenes people were proud of -- families with their slaves, scenes of industry (including large scale land clearing), municipal buildings, Pelhourinho during the 70’s recalling the photographs we’d seen at Inhotim. The postcards are a single collection, so the interests of the collector make for almost a narrative history of the neighborhood and the city. And the building is a strange bit of ancient Europe dropped in the tropics -- spectacular stone walls and archways that you wind through to find all the clean, well lit cases of postcards. And it was cool in there -- the sun that day felt like exactly what it is: a giant ball of deadly radiation trying to kill you.
We’d made it back to the plaza in front of the blue church, which under that bright sun, was ridiculously colorful and gorgeous -- the architectural version of the colored ribbons fluttering at Bom Fin. We took a more leisurely look at the interior of the church -- it was similar in all details to the carved, gilded, many-shrined and overdone churches we’d been visiting all week, but with just enough restraint, just enough delicacy, that it felt utterly sincere and moving. Maybe it was because it was the only church where we’d seen an actual service taking place, but even more than Bom Fin, this church feels like a beloved place.
We met up with Mary and Glenn at Senac -- the restaurant of the Bahian cooking school. For a tiny per-pound price, you can choose from an array of salads and other dishes almost as colorful as the streetscape outside. Beer is extra. And they have awesome, huge, clean bathrooms! While we ate all sorts of refreshing fruits and veg, we shared some recommendations -- Glenn encouraged us to check out the other church of St. Francis next door to the one we’d visited with Sayuri. We all agreed the postcard museum was awesome. Then back out into the massive tanning bed of the Pelourinho.
Dave and I walked into the Centro Cultural Solar Ferrao, a long, white building with arched doorways that turned out to house (among other things) and absolutely AMAZING collection of musical instruments from Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Polynesia and (most interesting) the Amazon. The technologies -- even the instrument designs -- were the same from place to far flung place and across hundreds of years of time. Things to blow into, strings to pluck or set droning, drums, rattles, bells. Simple little instruments people would have carried with them were displayed with spectacularly decorated and complex instruments that seemed made for professionals. The museum groups some instruments by region, some by era, and others by type -- we were only sometimes able to predict where a given object was from, or when. It was kind of encouraging to see that the impulse to make things to play music with seems as ancient and integral to humanity as the impulse to make things to smash each other’s heads with.
We shopped our way down toward the two Sao Franciscos, starting with the gold church we’d visited the day before for a more leisurely read of the tilework. The big courtyard is ringed in tiles depicting the epigrams of Horace, and it’s an exercise in philosophical lane changing. Here a few Horace epigrams:
Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
To flee vice is the beginning of virtue.
Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.
He who feared that he would not succeed sat still.
It is your concern when your neighbor's wall is on fire.
Now is the time for drinking.
We took Glenn’s advice and visited the other San Francisco. The church itself -- aside from a spectacular facade -- is a shabbier version of the same overly-ornate churches we were getting used to, but it’s attached to what appears to have been a rectory or convent full of interesting stuff, in a Catholic horror movie kind of way. The wax museum of martyred saints, for example (which I had to leave -- there’s only so much poorly done sado-erotic religious pseudo-art a person can take. Dave, though, thought maybe he should make a video. I’m not even thinking about for what purpose.) A series of impressive rooms held collections of church belongings, from prosaic things like furniture and candelabra, to extremely weird wax body parts used as prayer objects (make a model of what hurts and bring it to church because, hey, that’s a thing. Go ahead and bring a beer, too).
Texts had started flying. Andy had claimed a table at a bar around the corner called Zulu and was receiving visitors. After a failed attempt to find a door into a building that was emitting amazing drumming and singing (apparently it was a rehearsal, not a performance), we found her, along with Holly and Jeremy and ordered a couple of caipirinhas. Mary and Glenn had come and gone, and Jeremy and Holly departed as well, but we kept Andy company for her third hour in this perfect, shady little bar smack in the middle of the street.
The day sufficiently carpe-ed, we headed back to clean up, start the packing, and generally chill before our extravagant dinner. The Uber ride across town once again drove home the illusion of ancientness you get staying in Pelourinho -- Salvador is huge and a lot of it is extremely modern and stylish. (A lot of it is old and bedraggled and very poor, too, but Sayuri pushed back hard on the idea of the favelas as defined by poverty and misery. We’d learned that “favela” really just means not regulated. And while some favela neighborhoods are absolutely poor and miserable, it’s a misapprehension verging on bigotry to assume everyone living in a favela is poor and miserable.)
Origem, our destination for the evening, is a sleek but welcoming restaurant with stylish details and a cozy dining room centered on a show kitchen. We had organized the tasting menu with wine so there was no ordering to fret about. To assist our (unusual) group of English speakers, one of the kitchen managers (whose English was up to the task) was enlisted to help explain the unfamiliar ingredients in each Instagramable course as it arrived like a small work of art. A little plank of bamboo looked like a lollipop with its perfectly composed bite of something colorful and delicious on one end. A small, brightly colored ceramic jug contained a mouthful of insanely flavorful broth. We’d have 5 minutes of cooing over the presentation, admiring interplays of colors and textures, not just of the food, but the dishes and the decorative touches like flower blossoms or edible “dirt.” (And not to go all crass here, we paid $85 each. Pineapple and Pearls in DC charges $280 to $325 for its paired tasting menu. Not that I’ve been there -- cheaper to fly to Brazil.)
