Carnival in Recife

Carnival is a big thing in Brazil. It literally means "the going away of meat" as it celebrates the start of the forty days of Lent during which people aren't supposed to eat meat. Nowadays it often seems like just a big party, but there's still a lot more to it than that.

This past week we headed to the state capital of Recife, a city famous for heat, mosquitoes, and carnival. While we all enjoyed carnival, we were somewhat less enthusiastic about heat and mosquitoes. Different cities in Brazil celebrate carnival very differently. In Rio and Sao Paulo there are big processions of elaborately dressed samba dancers. In Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, carnival is a bit more chaotic. People don't go to watch carnival, they go to be part of carnival. Maya’s friend Margarida found us a little house to rent for the week in the area known as Bode, an ex-shantytown. Although we grumbled a bit about the lack of luxury items such as beds and mirrors, staying in Bode allowed us to see how people celebrate carnival locally. There were big parties on every street corner, huge soundsystems blasting out pretty much every kind of music in existence.


Here's Willa in her carnival garb:

On Sunday we all took the bus to Old Recife, the beautiful but rather dilapidated centre of the city. Its decadent grandeur seemed a very appropriate setting for carnival. As we walked over the bridge into the city the smells, sights, and sounds of carnaval hit us. While Maya and Willa enjoyed the music, Ezra and Magnus investigated melted cheese wrapped in steak, a culinary classic not to be missed. A few drinks later and we were enjoying the constant stream of musicians and performers. Carnival in Recife isn’t “organized” as it is in Rio or Sao Paulo; it’s a bit more chaotic and organic. Different groups, wearing different costumes and playing different kinds of music, bump into each other, merge together, then break apart. Around each corner lies something new. While the most popular music in the Recife carnaval is frevo, there’s also lots of maracatu, a kind of African-derived music linked to Candomble. We were all pretty exhausted, but Maya led us on a quest to find acaraje, a kind of fried bean patty filled with chilli and shrimps; a great way to follow up steak-wrapped cheese!

Here's Ezzie with a maracatu dancer. Many people in Recife are the descendants of slaves brought to Brazil from Africa. The maracatu dance started hundreds of years ago in the time of slavery and celebrates the coronation of a slave king and queen. Slavery ended in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, but people still dance maracatu so as to not forget what happened to their ancestors. The man has a flower in his mouth to stop evil spirits getting in.

Beans, Beans, Beans

Brazil is a very big country. Bigger, in fact, than the whole of Europe put together. As such, one bit of Brazil can be very different from the next. In fact, each state in Brazil is a bit like a separate country with its own kinds of food, its own kinds of music and dancing, and even its own kind of religion. However, one thing that all Brazilians love is beans! Here in the state of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil, where we are staying, people like black beans the best. The beans look like this:

But before you can start cooking the beans, you have to go through them by hand and pick out any bad ones. This is where Ezra and Willa come in handy:

Beans are very important here and people like to eat them everyday. To understand why people care about beans so much, you probably need to understand a little bit more about Northeast Brazil. While the coastal areas of Northeast Brazil are very fertile and lots of nice things like sugar cane grow there, the interior of Northeast Brazil is very hot and dry. It's called the sertao in Portuguese and it used to be a bit like the Wild West, with cowboys, Indians, and runaway slaves all fighting with each other. The worst thing about the sertao are the droughts which happen every ten years or so. This means that people can't grow anything, not even beans. All the people in the sertao have to flee to the coast or they will starve to death. Nowadays, there are better roads, and the government is better at helping people out when times are hard, but lots of older people remember the olden days when droughts meant that lots of people died. This is why beans mean so much to people!

We're about to go off to Recife for a week to spend carnaval there, so our next post will be about that.