Sunset in Salvador

Today, as many times before, I stayed at Sheila´s after the end of class. She dug out a bunch of Brazilian records which she played for me, while devotedly translating the texts. Similtanously, her body language expressed the often duplicate inverted messages in the music. "Fazer jogo de palavras" - to play with words to invert messages - is abundant in much of the samba, MPB (Brazilian popular music) and tropicalissimo that Brazil still moves to. The need of refining the word-play techniques sprung out of the limited freedom of expression during the dictatorship.

There´s a ten-minute walk from Portuguese class to home. The nature changes from edifice-scape to city-scape to sun-and-sea-scape in Porto, where the city meets the sea. When walking home today, I picked up some groceries at the supermarket in the middle of the above mentioned city-scape. Coming down to the waterfront, I entered sunset-scape. The red, glowing ball in the sky - in Swedish called "sol"- seemed bigger than ever before and there wasn´t even a cloud there to stop it from having it´s fire turned out in the sea. I just had to throw my clothes off and go for a quick swim. I left a few bags of groceries, an old school-bag with books and every single peace of sorrow in my life on the beach. After the sunset, I simply slipped my feet into my flip-flops, picked up my bags and left - behind - my sorrows.

I´m just about to leave the house behind, too, even if just for a few hours of drinking beer with new acquintances. I´ve been informed that one can´t comment my blog entries without being a member. So? Send me an e-mail ;-)

Truly yours,

Joakim