Salvador, Brazil

Our first real port call (multiple days, not just a few hours) is Salvador, Brazil. It’s a huge city. Salvador, like much of Brazil, has a large range of cultural influences. Salvador itself is broken up into different unofficial sectors. There are British, French, and Portuguese sectors, all with various influences from those countries. However, 80% of the population has African ancestry from slaves that were shipped here and sold. Unfortunately, much of the city is impoverished. Slums predominate the suburbs, and it’s amazing to see beautiful European architecture that’s been abandoned for years. You walk around and see one thriving building, followed by another that has huge holes in the walls, crumbling to the ground.
I didn’t know this, but Brazil itself is divided up into states, similar to America. Salvador is the capital of the state, “Bahia.” We went on a cool historical tour (hence my knowledge of the city) on Sunday, and got to walk around all the different city sectors. (I wish I had better pictures, but we can’t hook up personal cameras to the ship computers, because you could steal data or put viruses on the computers.) The tour guide talked about Carnival for half of the tour. The city revolves around it. They have a reputation for being very low-key and relaxed, and Carnival embodies that. The city shuts down for an entire week, and everybody takes to the streets to party. They showed us video of the event—it was very cool.
The city is over 80% Roman Catholic and the city itself has churches sprinkled all over the crowded city streets. One church, the most famous in the country, is atop a hill in a poor section of town. It’s thought to have mystical powers. People go and pray there for physical miracles—wounds healing, sicknesses overcome, etc. There is a room in there called the Miracle Room. When people pray there and their prayers come true, they put mementos in the room. The walls were covered with pictures and stories of people’s lives changing. Molds of peoples hands, feet, heads, etc. hang from the ceiling. If, for example, somebody needs surgery on their hand, the person will pray there and if the surgery is successful, then make a cast of the hand to hang on the ceiling. It was a very somber experience to see all of these human stories woven together in one central point.
In general, it was a fun port to visit and explore a bit. Lots of different people and cultures, as well as some good food and beer. As I write this, we should be getting underway to go to exercises with the Brazilian Navy, but there was an issue with the fuel barge, so we’re still waiting on fuel. Rumor has it that we won’t be leaving until tomorrow, which would mean another day of liberty, which is never a bad thing. Our real mission will really begin when we get underway. We have some Brazilian ship riders on our ship, and we sent some to the Brazilian ship. We’ll be doing some interesting war games out in the ocean before the highlight of our trip, Rio De Janiero, in less than a week.