Tuesday's Tours

During my time here, Cross Cultural Solutions Brazil offers us optional cultural actvities including city tours. So after lunch on Tuesdays we've been on tours of the Open Market, the Bomfim Church, Favalas and Parks.
Salvador has a large open air market. This market had absolutely everything- food, hardware, clothes, jewelery, live animals (either for food, pets or sacrifice), gifts, toys, vodo dolls etc. About 20,000 visit this market everyday, although luckily it was not too crowded when we were there(just hot!). The most interesting things that I saw were a large variety of different fruits, some of which are only grown here in this area and there is no English name for them. I also saw alot of palm oil (in old pop bottles), seafood and herbs.
A famous site here is the Bonfim Church. This is a beuatiful old Catholic Chruch that sits on the top of a hill and overlooks Salvador. It has very old statues of Mary and Jesus that made it over from Portugal during colonization. I think they are from the 1600´s. People from all over come to see this church, give thanks and pray. Ther is a whole room of gifts, photos and letters of thanks from people who have been sick, prayed for recovery, and recovered.
We also took a tour through a Favala. Favala is the name for an unofficial poor community that sets up homes on city property. The city has three years to evacuate them and if they don´t succeed, it becomes the person´s land and they become a community. People have been working together and building homes as a group, making it harder for the city to fight, which is good as more people will have permanent homes.From what I understood, the favalas all have electricity and running water.
This city also has a number of parks (pronounced park-ees here). They are quite pretty and it is hard to believe that you are in the middle of a city of 3.5 million. I spent most of my time in the parks looking for monkeys. I have seen 4 since I have arrived, but not in the parks-just near our Home Base.
Next week we get a tour of the historical district call Pelouhrino. I have been there a few times and love walking around it is very lively; I am looking forward to going there with our Tour Guide, Bruno, to learn more about it.