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Finding ourselves in Salvador for the second time we stayed again with our couchsurfer Lucas from the first time. This time, however, he wasn't doing exams and so we got to go out for some drinks with him, and I got another forro lesson bac at his flat! We also went to the cinema in Salvador with Lucas, which was a bit of a novelty , and a wierdly ordinary life thing to do.
We caught up with Kasia and Eduardo again and tried acaraje, a typical food of Salvador, which is a sort of deep fried bread made of beans and shrimp, accompanied by a paste made of shrimp, nuts and coconut milk, and other things like salad and okra. It tasted pretty good for street food, AND didn't make us sick which is always a bonus!
We also spent a couple of days chilling on the beach, as it would be the last time we'd see the beach for a while! And as it was easter weekend I went down to the Pelourinho with Kasia and Eduardo and we saw the Easter parades of people marching to each of the churches in the centre, all wearing white and singing and chanting as they went along, an interesting sight! I also got followed by a wierd man while I was walking back from the bus, who I'm pretty sure was gonna try and rob me... he kept asking me for 2 real and touching my arm, and it was dark and there was noone else on the road, but I wasn't far from the flat so I decided to keep feigning ignorance and try and make it. Luckily just as he started getting angry I noticed Ben walking down the other side of the road, and he came over and made the guy go away! Good timing Ben!
From Salvador we went to Brasilia, where we stayed with our friend Francisco, who we met in Uruguay, and his parents. His mum was a ridiculously good host and gave us three meals a day with s***loads of food, and even an easter egg as we were there over easter.
Brasilia is a wierd city, it was designed to become the new capital of Brazil, and it is planned so from above it is in the shape of an airplane. There are groups of blocks of flats outside the city, and the inner city has all the important buildings; the museum, the theatre, the senate, the cathedral, etc. all designed by Oscar Niemeyer, which are pretty cool, but it is also wierd as all the buildings are white and the same sort of design... They also have something I've never seen before, a pigeon house. Seriously they have built a house for the pigeons to live in (also designed by Oscar Niemeyer), so unlike everyone else in the world who considers pigeons rats with wings, Brazilians seem to think they are lovely pets that need to be looked after... very odd.
A huge number of cult religions have popped up around Brasilia because of the prophecy from the late 19th century Italian saint Dom Bosco, which said that between parallels 15 and 20, around a formed lake, will be the promised land. As Brasilia lies between 15 and 20 degrees south, and has the artificial lake Paranoa, lots of people have decided that this is the promised land... We visited one of these cult churches, the templo da boa vontage, created by the legion of goodwill. It was pretty strange, we basically had to walk into the middle off a spiral along a white path, to stop ion the middle and look up at the biggest raw crystal in the world (I think you were also supposed to meditate or pray or something) then walk back along the black path, stopping to write a wish, then drink some holy water, then stop at the alter, before you leave. Underneath the church they had some kind of bizarre egyptian style meditation room for no apparent reason, and I the musuem bit they had paintings of people who supposedly endorsed the religion, which included such people as Charlie Chaplin, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, and the big JC himself! Bear in mind this religion was only created in 1989 and most of these people were no longer living... Methinks this is a load of s***!
There's pretty much no nightlfe in Brasilia, but there was a nice area along the river that we went to one night for a couple of drinks, which has a good view across the river and of the bridge. I didn't dislike Brasilia as a city, it is architectually amazing, I just think its very strange, as I guess are all artificially created capital cities!
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