I am finally caught up with the galleries! France is up! It was about 5 hours of work to pick pictures, resize them, write the code, build the templates, debug the code, and upload all the pictures. Whew!
I have gotten lazy lately, I apologize. I won't do it again. Really. No really. I mean it. After all, this trip isn't about relaxing and having fun, it is about work, work, work.
Now I have to go take my normal afternoon nap while the cook cleans up the lunch mess.
Tchau!
Most of the colonial houses have been preserved and are now shops or restaurants. We were lucky enough to stay in the house of a former Governor of the state of Bahia (Patrícia’s Uncle’s Grandfather) right on the main square across from the palace and the cathedral. It is a lovely spacious and high ceilinged house with courtyards and it could not have been a better base to watch the action.
News crews sporadically interviewed people, getting surplus footage and killing time along the procession route until midnight. The streets and main square started really filling up as the darkness and temperature fell. By 10:00 pm people were positioning themselves. We set up chairs in front of the house, drank beer, and watched people, and waited for the city workers to come by with a ladder and turn off the street lights. 
Then there was a kids mini-procession, which was a bizarre mix of Halloween and Easter. At this point I took my camera and headed up the now very dark street to watch the drummers signaling the start of the real procession. Fighting the masses of TV crews and photojournalists I wedged myself into position and the streets suddenly got much lighter and smokier as they handed out a few hundred torches to the crowd. The torches were black painted pop cans on sticks, filled with kerosene and a wick. I cannot imagine something this cool happening in the USA.
Then came the procession of Roman soldiers looking for Christ. Dressed in Klu Klux Klan like robes, but in much more flamboyant colors, they marched through the streets with torches, a sense of purpose, and an amazing disregard for their own ankle safety. They looked like a homosexual version of the KKK, or as I like to call them, the GayKK. I caught up with them at the church at the far side of town and watched as Christ (they found him) said something in Portuguese and then they were off again to somewhere else. It was brief, weird, and very interesting. There was a nice black and white t-shirt of the event, but it would have gotten me killed in the USA so I wisely decided to buy one with a view of the colonial streets.
I was in the busy downtown of sweltering Goiania, a couple hours from Brasilia. It was a Greek restaurant, or so the sign said. The décor of the restaurant did indeed give a slight passing impression of the Mediterranean, although, the reality was pure Brasilian. It was exactly like the many “Brasilian” restaurants I saw in Spain that had nothing to do with Brasilian food. Maybe it is an American expectation that a themed restaurant should have the corresponding food. Regardless, the selection of food was wide-ranging and amazingly high quality for a buffet. The most amazing part was the price. My loaded plate had a large assortment of seafood, meats, salads, and fruits. I grabbed a Coke and it came out to a whole $4.50, including coffee afterward. That readily explained the other hundred or so people in the restaurant. I love how cheap food is here. I can even get my fill of sushi for $12.
I had gone traveling with Patrícia’s parents for a few days while she worked. The plan was that we would go ahead, making a few stops on the way to visit relatives, and she would meet us at the family’s farm for the weekend. I knew I was in for a lot of sitting around smiling and listening to conversations I could not understand. I was right, but it was better than it sounds. When I get fatigued trying to understand the discussion, I pay attention to nonverbal cultural details and surroundings. And to be fair, a few of her relatives speak English so I was able to talk quite a bit.
The stop in the religious town of Trindade was interesting. The town is dominated by a giant box-like cathedral on a hill, replete with long, twisting, freeway-style, elevated drive ramps to the font door. It is the site of a yearly pilgrimage and was sized to accommodate the occasional surging throngs of the devoted. The rest of the year, the under-decorated, voluminous box seems ridiculously out of place with its setting in the little lower-income town. The interesting part of the cathedral was the Room of Miracles underneath. First, there was an inexplicable display of general antiques ranging from old tv’s and typewriters to farming equipment. Second, there were tens of thousands of photographs of people, in various states of health, mounted on panels throughout the room. Some were before and after photos, others were only before shots. It looked as if some represented miracles and others were prayer for them. Lastly, two walls were covered with amateur paintings of violent accidents. There were machinery accidents, landslides, horse falls, fires, dog attacks…all violent and frequently bloody. Unfortunately, no one could explain the purpose of these “works of art” to me. I especially was baffled by the mural by the door in which a man in a normal looking religious scene is unperturbed by having his leg eaten by a dog. Weird.
