Sleepless in Olinda

I just staggered through one of the all-time sleepiest days I´ve ever had. I was up all night in Rio - and after that extremely busy, no-food day, too. Packing for Recife, dealing with lots of sudden job-related crises back in the US, and backing up all my bazillion gigs of video and sound files. Next thing I knew it was 6am and time to head to the airport.... no sleep at all. I did, however, finally eat: 3 bowls of Brazilian Froot Loops. They taste different from American Froot Loops....I had to eat 3 bowls to decide whether I liked them or not.

I had the first of a series of exhausted hallucinatory naps on the plane (I´m dreaming I´m on a plane, no, I AM on a plane, I´m dreaming I´m sailing on water, no, I´m FLYING over water, I´m in Rio, no, I´m in a PLANE! I´m dreaming that - Hey! Did I miss the peanuts and juice? Stewardess!) Once I got to Olinda, every time I returned to my pousada I would accidentally lie down and then jerk awake a bit later out of a hazy, foggy sleep, always in one of that type of confused half-dreams that is so similar to reality that you´re not exactly sure whether you´ve woken up or not. The urge to just sink into sleep was nearly overwhelming but I kept jerking awake thinking "I´m missing some maracatu somewhere!"

Olinda is a lovely little town - very vintage colonial (a World Heritage Site). Winding rows of peaceful, pretty little buildings in a maze of cobblestone streets, all the little storefronts painted different bright colors. Every little hill has a cute old church sitting on top. Tons of little artists´ shops full of all kinds of paintings. I went into one shop and was enchanted with lots of cute little pottery. Reminded me of my favorite kind of Peruvian pottery: funny scenes of village life, little scenes of people doing their professions (everything from pot-maker to proctologist). I especially loved a tiny little 1" high pottery woman at her 1/2" high corn-on-the-cob food stand, complete with infinitesimal ears of corn and the tiniest little pot. Then fell in love with a magnificently sculpted tiny Amazonian lungish, two inches long. Lungfish art is a small, misunderstood genre, but this one was really beautiful.

Olinda was baking under a flawless blue sky, and a hot, hot sun, which I loved. (I´m really used to the heat now - I almost froze on the plane and had to wrap my towel around my legs to stay warm.) Carnival celebrations here start the Sunday before actual Carnaval. That´s this Sunday! There´ll be huge parades of frevo and maracatu, and several other mysterious musical genres that I don´t quite know. I passed a frevo/marcha brass band that was rehearsing quite seriously in a little house on a corner. All the windows were wide open and everybody from the street was leaning in the windows, watching the rehearsal. There was one snare drummer, who was doing... he was playing... HEY! It´s the MARCHA 3! (my nemesis caixa pattern) Aha, so it really IS a real marcha pattern, from the old Carnival tradition of brass bands.

It´s really nice atmosphere here right now because it´s quite quiet, people just trickling into town, but everybody´s getting ready and there´s a sort of buzz of excitement in the air. At the Recife airport there was a full frevo dance troupe and brass band, plus 2 of those mysterious men in the large colorful capes and gigantic 3-feet-wide wigs, plus an incongruous cigar and a big bell (who are those guys? This is something I don´t know about.) All waiting to greet our plane. They did a full performance right by baggage claim.

In Olinda today there were trucks working their way down the little cobblestone streets, full of crews of men standing in large piles of colored fluff, which turned out to be long strings of colorful fluttering paper that they are stringing from all the telephone poles. And the whole staff of my pousada, and the pousada next door, spent all day making piles of decorations - great big cardboard cutouts of frevo umbrellas, dancers, Carnival masks, and those famous bull costumes that I see everywhere (something else I don´t quite understand... I´ve gotta catch up on my Pernambuco Carnival traditions) which they were painstakingly painting and covering with colored glitter.

Ohh.... I might have to stay for Friday! Olinda´s famous Carnival has an especially famous Friday parade, when giant mannequin-like dolls are carried through the old streets. Of course there are ten zillion things I also want to do in Rio. Another dilemma, but this one seems much more fun.

Note to the last-minute planners: Olinda specializes in the last-minute Carnival market. Things are cheaper here and book much later than in Rio and Salvador. So there are still plane tickets and plenty of rooms available.