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Maceio is great. What a difference it makes to Salvador. Its a lot calmer, cleaner and the people are 100 times more friendly. The guys at the hostel I´m staying at all joke with me because I cant speak Portuguese. They cant believe I´ve come all the way from Africa to see Brazil and cant speak any of their language. But I have gotten by quite fine. Maybe a lack of company to chat to over the past 2 days but I´ll survive.

I went on a tour at the Historical and Folk Lore Museum. It was just me and a middle aged milf as my guide. She too was bemused that I couldn´t speak any Portugase. None the less she still insisted I take the tour with her even though I didn´t understand a word. All credit to her she did try and teach me some of the language. Not sure how good a student I was but I must have impressed her some how. I landed up having ´cafe´ and ´busketa´ with her and all her amiga´s in the staff kitchen. We went through a list of everyday words and I´d give them the English equivalent. I cant understand why they laughed so much because most of the words were fairly similar to each other. I must admit, if they gave a word I didn´t understand I´d make one up for the English equivalent and blag my way through.

From the Museum I made my way to the Cathedral. It was closed so was stumped for ideas when all of a sudden I could hear the sounds of protest. "Not again!" I thought (I had to hi tale from a protest in Salvador when I tried to get an Entry/Exit card - another story. That was in the doc area so thought it not a good place to get caught. Plus they were all wearing read t-shirts. These guys were in white - assuming that's a lot safer). Apparently the student medical doctors to the local public hospital were protesting about something. Not sure what but I got a flier which I´ve included below (can anyone that reads Portuguese interpret for me please?).





I followed the parade for a while then got bored of it once I realised there was not much chance of any danger or violance (the sadistic side in me after being in Salvador for to long). I thought I´d wonder through the streets and see what they offered me. I found an open air shopping mall. It was great. Instead of being begged from I was offered a credit card (from citibank) even though I am not a Brazilian citizen. On hind sight I should have taken the offer. From there I found some magical buildings that must be several hundred years old, took a nap in a church (back to the good old days, just like Europe!) and got told off for not being careful about the non-existent dangerous and violent street kids. The guy had obviously never been to Salvador.

That afternoon I crossed to the other side of town. A stark difference. This is obviously where all the money is. There´s about a 8 km stretch of coasline being developed with high rise appartments. The beaches are good but polluted in the way of to much litter.