Rosie in Recife

Welcome to Carnaval 101: The basics. Here you will get a brief rundown on the history and workings of Carnaval in Recife and Olinda, along with a few case studies. This will prepare you for the next lesson Carnaval 201: Carnaval in practice.

Carnaval. How to describe Carnaval? How to describe the colours and the sounds, the music, the food, the drink, the costumes, the atmosphere the emotions? It’s totally impossible actually, but never mind…

Carnaval is a three day festival (officially, although here in the Northeast it lasts a lot longer – starts earlier, finishes later) that takes part in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday. It’s the first day of lent, but here they don’t ‘do’ lent, instead, they don’t eat meat every Friday for four weeks. Because of this, the name is Carnaval – latin for ”festival of meat”. Although in the Northeast, I think people take it more literally – festival of flesh – as there’s a hell of a lot of flesh on show.

For a country of christianity – about 95% are catholic – and high, almost prude, morals, Carnaval is completely the opposite. No morals, no inihibitions, and over a million free condoms passed out on the streets.

Here, Carnaval takes place in Olinda and Recife – Olinda during the day, and Recife during the night. Although, for some strange reason, on the first official day of Carnaval, the opening ceremony of Recife is during the day – Galo de Madrugada, or Rooster of the Early Morning Hours - and Olinda at midnight – Homem da Meio-noite, or Man of Midnight.

The Galo de Madrugada I watched on T.V. at Jaqueline’s house in Olinda, as Neno’s mum made us fantasy costumes. It is officially the largest carnaval parade in the world, according to the Guiness World Record, and almost every year they break the record. Although this year the crowd was only 2 million strong, so they didn’t break it. This particular part of the Carnaval centered around a HUGE rooster constucted on one of the bridges of Recife Antigo. As we watched on TV (way too many people you couldn’t even move, and way too hot - temperature of 30degrees but with 2 million people more like an oven - to actually go in person) I tried to explain to Neno’s family about the Ohakune festival in NZ – the carrot festival. And they laughed and laughed cos it sounds so strange. How can a festival of a carrot harvest be any stranger than a festival of a corn harvest (São João) or a festival of a giant rooster?? Although in their defense, it may have something to do with carrots being synnonamous (man, I’m dying here without English spellcheck) with something else of the same general shape…

Anyway, we then went to Olinda which was a completely different city to during non-Carnaval time. Olinda is an old colourful city of winding cobbled roads climbing to the top of the hill, but almost as soon as we left the house I was lost. The streets were so crowded I couldn’t recognise anything or anywhere. The colours of the city were intensified a thousand times, as buildings had been re-painted especially for Carnaval, and fantasy costumes were strange, colourful, loud and crazy. See Neno’s for a case in point. Neno showed me one point in the city, where, a few Carnavals ago, he had been standing against a wall as a bloco group went by followed by millions of people, and he was lifted off the ground almost a metre, and, trapped against the wall, carried along by the crowd, without his feet even touching the ground.

Cerveja was cheaper now, as was the street food, and we eventually (after a painfully long trek through the “gay” street of Olinda which would usually take less than two minutes, and took almost an hour of shufflinh, pushing, and protecting Neno’s crotch – which was successful, but unfortunately left his arse in the open) found a spot to drink cerveja and watch the people.

We made friends with Monica and her family, who were selling drinks and street food. Her and her husband and mother were there, along with two little girls. It was pouring with rain and the two little girls were wet-through and crying, trying to hide under the shelter of the stall. This is proper poor. So poor that the whole family has to spend all day and all night away from home selling cheap drink and food. It was really sad, but I spent some time trying to cheer the two girls up, while Neno talked politics with their dad (which almost reduced us girls to tears again).

The main part of Carnaval (apart from the drnking) is watching the different Bloco and Frevo groups. Bloco groups are huge groups – sometimes up to 200 people – playing maracatu. It’s a traditional kind of percussion music here in the Northeast, with drums of all types – some you’ve never even seen before - which has it’s roots in African music. It’s so beautiful – loud and rhythmic and your heart starts beating in tune. Each bloco group has a uniform and large sign-on-a-stick. Like the standard bearers Danny – everyone ask Danny if you don’t understand. The sign-on-a-stick person goes first, and everyone follows playing the drums, then thousands of followers follow on behind (funnily enough) dancing and singing.

Frevo groups on the other hand have lots of frevo dancers in the most colourful, glittery costumes, dancing the most colourful DIFFICULT dance. They are followed by their band – this time with drums and lots of trombones – who play the famous Carnaval tune, and then followed by more followers. Everytime the Carnaval tune is played, the whole surrounding street goes mad.

Basically it’s just a huge HUGE street party, where all inhibitions have disappeared and anything goes. Here are a few pictures, and remember to attend the next class: Carnaval 201: Carnaval in practice.

I hate ants. I really really hate them. They’re making me so nervous and paranoid, and I have nightmares about them. Now I’ve even started to dream up novel ways of killing them.

There’s two types of ants in Brazil (actually there are thousands, but there are only two types that go out of their way everyday to terrorize me). The first is a large, light brown ant. About five times bigger than ants in NZ. I can just about tolerate those ones…Before it rains, they all run inside and just slouch around on the walls doing nothing. You have to be careful not to brush against the walls unintentionally, or you’ll feel the creepy crawling of the ants on your skin.  Shudder. And when you disturb them, they scurry (yes that’s right – scurry) away like huge creepy monsters from some sort of futuristic sci-fi movie.

So most of the time, I can bare to live in a world that also houses these ants. However, I really cannot stand the other type of ant. It’s tiny…about half the size of NZ ants, and black to the bone (metaphorically and mostly literally, apart from the fact ants don’t have bones). They move fast, they hunt in pacts, they eat meat – I once saw them feasting on the corpse of a cockroach – and they sting humans!

I have what feels like thousands of bites from the ants, and they’re much much worse than mosquito (we’ll get to those later) bites because they are never raised, so you can’t break the skin to let out the poison as I so lovingly do with the mosquito bites. Also they sting and itch and on’t let you think of anything else for hours on end. Once, I left my dress on the floor, and ants infested it, and they bit and stung my tummy so I was inscrutiatingly uncomfortable ALL night.

Which, I think, led to my nightmares about ants, where Neno was passing me boxes that were covered in the ants, which quickly spread up and down my arms as I touched them. I woke up itching all over.

And the ants get everywhere…no matter how much I clean (and cleaning!! We’ll get to that later too…) they still return from nowhere when I turn my back. Sometimes, I like to leave a lone piece of food – an apple skin, or a piece of bacon fat – in the middle of the table or on the sink bench. Then I go back a few hours later and quickly throw the food and the offending ants out the kitchen window.

This, however, soon led to the problem of the ants returning to the house through the permanently open window. So now, I’ve come up with some novel ways of getting rid of the little bastartds. An early modification of my original plan involves throwing the food and accompanying ants into a cup of water to drown them. I sometimes daydream about throwing them into boiling water, but I think that’s just unnecessarily cruel (also, it’s too much effort to boil the water on the stove every time).

I hate killing insect and bugs and even spiders, as I’m sure everyone is familiar with, but these ants just bring out the murderous side in me.

Other unfortunate deaths include; turning on the stove at exactly the right time, leaving nothing but a tiny tiny pile of ash and an oddly satisfied feeling; leaving the blender on the sink for a few hours with left over juice in it to attract the ants, adding a bit of water and blending the hell out of it; wrapping them up in an airtight bag (not sure how successful this one was, as I don’t know enough about the anatomy of an ant’s breating apperatus); a lot of soapy drownings; and even flushed a fair few down the toilet. Actually we’ve even eaten some that got into our farofa, then burned to death in the hot fejoada. At least you know they’re dead.

And if the ants weren’t bad enough, as the night starts to fall, the mosquitos come out to play. I use about half a bottle of repellent per day, and still end up with loads and loads of bites. My legs are beginning to look like some sick game of join-the-dots. And they’re always attracted to black things, and all the chairs in Neno’s house are black, so they hang around all day too…waiting until I sit down and then waiting some more until the repellent sweats off…then they attack and within two minutes I have five itchy bites.

Anyway…it’s night time now so i better go before they start their nightly attacks again…just talking about ants has creeped me out.

The first the week just seemed to be waiting, waiting, waiting, for Saturday when Carnaval would officially start.

But then everything started going wrong…

Dun dun….

Me and Neno had only taken a small amount of money with us, so we worked out that we could only spend R$42 per day. Which would be fine, cos living isn’t very expensive in Brasil, and Neno still has the internet money coming in to pay for monthly costs like health insurance and road user chargers etc. But, while we were in NZ, Alveró was looking after Neno’s house and bike, and when we got back, everything seemed wasted. Like he’d negleted it the whole time and just come back the day before and made everything look ok. So we had to pay for a lot of new things…the chairs were ripped and broken and left in the rain, the curtains were gone, the bike needed a new battery and some other mechanical things I don’t understand, the ventilator was broken, and so were both fans (although to be fair, one of them broke on the day we arrived), the microphone didn’t work, the klickers were broken, the table was warped from the sun and rain, keys were lost…So we had to pay a lot, just to get things back into working order.

So we took Neno’s bike to the garage one morning to be fixed – which was only going to take half an hour – and I sat in the shade which was boiling hot – while the man fixed his bike, and every other man in the garage stared at me. It took almost an hour and a half before the man was done, and Neno gave him R$4 for the job. Apparently, the garage pays the workers a ridiculously tiny salary, so the only way they really get any money is with tips like that. And even R$4 isn’t much (although in true Brazilian style, the man also changed a tyre on a different motorbike, oiled the chain on a bicycle, helped a man pick out a helmet, and changed another motorbike’s battery, while he was in the middle of our job, so maybe he does make a fair bit).

The man then told us to pay at the cashier and suddenly took off for lunch. When Neno went to pay, his credit card wouldn’t work, cos Álvero had reached the limit buying alcohol for his wedding, and so he was going to pay in cash, when he realised he’d accidently given the man the R$100 note at the same time as the two R$2 notes, cos he’d been keeping them all together. Well, the man had an hour for lunch and conveniently for them, everyone in the garage seemed to have forgotten his number. Neno knew for sure thart he’d given the R$100 as well, and the man must have also realised it was a mistake, which is why he ran off so quickly. So we had no money.

First we went to the police, who (after they got back from lunch) told us we couldn’t do anything without proof, then to Neno’s son’s house, while we waited for the man to get back. His son lives in one of the most dangerous favelas, which you would never enter unless you knew someone there, and we think the people at the garage must have seen, and been a little scared, cos when we got back they treated us so much better. But the man told us we hadn’t given him the money. In the end we had to borrow some money off Neno’s mum, but it had taken us the whole flippin day.

The next day I went into Recife with Jaqueline to buy a few things. I took my card to the bank to withdraw some money, but it kept either saying “Communication problems with your bank” or would just return to the start without giving me my money. I tried to withdraw R$500, then R$400, then R$300 then R$100 then R$10. it actually let me take out R$10, so luckily I had money for the bus home. I thought maybe it was trying to take money out of my savings account (which only has abut $10) but when I checked my account online, almost $1000 had been withdrawn from muy currenrt account. It said that each of those withdrawls were “successful”.

So now we’re really poor. And too scared to re-calculate how much money we can spend per day.