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.