A Rough Start: Salvador, Brazil

To blog, or not to blog: that has been the question. Distilling an internal adventure on to the page can be a daunting, if not experience-killing task. But when the experience gets toughest, the blog beckons.

I have been around the block and back over the past few months. Like a foreigner in America I traveled from hostel to hotel to campsite to couchsurf for about a month and have now landed myself in Salvador, Brazil.

I am here for what will potentially be an artist's residency, but, thanks to a rude arrival, is presently a hotel. I have been spoiled by America, the clean streets, my own fearlessness. When arriving, after over twenty-four hours of traveling, only to soon thereafter see a dead body in the road, my fearlessness shrank away.

It didn't seem to phase me so much, the body alone in the highway under the white cloth, the large crowd of people watching from the side, standing there with bicycles. During my summer writing program there was this weird epidemic where all of us were seeing dead and half dead animals. One guy found a bird, I found a chipmunk with a broken leg, and a bunch of other people saw things from half dead rattlesnakes to dead squirrels and birds. When that happened I learned about different interpretations of death, and was told that all of us were finding these dead things as an indication of our new beginnings to come, it was at the end of our time in school.

I kept this in mind when my cab driver and I drove past the scene. He said sorry, almost sounding ashamed, and I wanted to say, "you didn't kill him." My mind moves very fast. I entertained thoughts of the cab driver himself having hit and run this person dead in the street, his apology doubling as one for his guilty action. I thought about death as a new beginning and decided to take the shrouded form as an omen for new things to come. What else do you do when you arrive alone at midnight to a foreign place?

It made me think of the blue body they took out of the lagoon in Hawaii. It made me think of the girl who once told me a horror story about running over a body that fell from a bridge above the highway. My cab driver didn't kill the person.

He turned on music for me instead. "Hippie hoppie," as he called it, and asked if I was voting for "McCainey or Baracky Obama." I said "Baracky."

As we neared the place I was supposed to stay I started getting nervous. The streets changed every block from fancy to slumlike and back to fancy again. I was bargaining here, hoping for a fancy street, not equipped at this point for much more. We arrived at my supposed new home and the doorway was coated in trash, the hostess was not home, and there was a stray dog sleeping next to the door.

I have a lot of friends who have rescued stray dogs, one even brought one back from Mexico. I tried to determine the significance to the stray dog lying there before my new home. I do not know the symbolism of sleeping stray dogs.

The hostess came running up soon thereafter and kissed both my cheeks, opened the door, and then launched into a long ramble including questions about who I was (she was unsure despite our emails and phone calls to one another), apologies about the state of the home (which looked like a construction site), and an announcement that she had given my room away to someone else and was offering me a tent on the roof next to a sleeping topless man.

I started crying at this point, because I had been holding on to the vision of my own room, the one I had been promised, the one with the veranda and private bathroom, at the end of my long day. This room does exist, but not until Monday. Jahlyn, the person in charge of what brought me to Brazil in the first place, she took me into the room which, in three days, will hopefully be mine.

We sat on the bed and I felt brave for telling her that she let me down and she took it well and she and this Russian girl, Kselyn, and I made a plan together. I said I was not going to sleep in the tent on the roof and would like help finding a hotel. We found me one and then arranged for me to meet Kselyn for lunch, after her Copeira training, the following day. Jahlyn, scatter-brained, had no time to offer.

The cab driver waited while this all happened. He saw me crying and looked more upset than I did at the sight of me. He took me from the house to a hotel that I dreamed of as being fancy, like Four Seasons fancy, and was rudely snapped back to reality by a normal, slightly dodgy establishment. Desires for obscenely fancy and comfortable places always arise when I am traveling alone. It is like a sickness.

On the way from the airport the cab driver, Nau, he seemed to have serious trouble understanding my Spanish. When we drove from the house to hotel, and I unleashed an emphatic rant about the dead body and the room and this woman who I knew would be flaky, but not this flaky, he listened with such empathy and compassion that I wondered if suddenly, chock full of emotion, my Spanish was as good as Portuguese. Nau was an angel, would not let me pay for my second ride in his cab, and promised if I needed anything at all he would be happy to help.

Later the evening was topped off when I checked my banking online, as my credit card was denied. It said I had "-$888,000.00" in my checking account. At this I really lost it, hyperventilating, so that the Bank of America woman on the phone kept saying, "calm down ma'am, I can't help you unless you breathe." Eventually I learned that I was not actually robbed of eight-hundred thousand dollars, which I hardly have one-hundred thousandth of to begin with, but was in trouble for trying to get my pin number mailed to the wrong address, bank account in tact.

I am still in waiting; anxious to move into the room, the home, the arts center I came here for. As I explained to a friend on the phone before leaving, I am in the fold of a piece of paper. One side has the adventures that happened, the other side, the adventures to come. I am waiting in the crease to uncurl myself.