A while ago I promised to write about Carnival. It deserves being written about and explained.

The word Carnival comes from the Latin Carne Vale or "goodbye meat". It has it's origin in various pagan spring festivals and now marks the beginning of the 40 day Lent, hence goodbye to the meat. Dates vary wildly, but most historians believe Carnival was introduced to Brazil in 1723, with the immigration from the island of Madeira, Azores and Cabo Verde. It gradually changed along the years, assimilating local elements, especially from African culture.

Carnival is celebrated in different ways across Brazil. In the northeastern city of Salvador de Bahia, revelers dress up in costumes or normal, if quite revealing, clothes and crowd the streets to dance behind giant sound trucks with bands on top playing axe music, a samba style with a heavy Caribbean influence. In Recife and Olinda further north, revelers dance to super-fast frevo rhythms and the heavily African maracatu.


From a street parade in Ipanema

In Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo Carnival is also celebrated in the streets, but the main excitement is focused on competition between the best samba schools. The samba parades take place in the Sambodromo, a tiered street purposefully designed for this.


Naomi Campbell paraded with Portela

I was in Rio for Carnival, so this is how things are done there. On Friday and Saturday the younger schools, the B division, parade. On Sunday and Monday the top 14 schools parade, 7 each night, beginning at 9 p.m. (Brazilian time, which means anytime from 9 to 11, time is not a big concern here) and going on until bright daylight next morning. The whole procession is an elaborate competition. A handpicked set of judges chooses the best school on the basis of many components, such as percussion, theme song, story line, song and dance, costumes, flag bearer, choreography, floats and decoration. Each school offers some sort of unifying message - social commentary, economic criticism or political statement - but it usually gets lost in the glitz. The schools get 70-85 minutes to perform, 3500-5000 people parade for each school, including 200-400 drummers in the percussion group. The championship is hotly contested, the winner becoming the pride of Rio. The music is the loudest you'll ever hear, I hardly heard when helicopters with TV crews hovered above my head.



After the performance of each school garbage trucks parade down the runway, clearing it for the next school. The sanitation workers were great to watch too, they shimmied, danced and wiggled while picking up trash, bowed gracefully and took spins with their brooms. It's everybody's carnival.


From the parade of Salgueiro, their's was my favourite performance

Most of the samba schools are born and raised in favelas, their roots are there and the rehearsals take place in the poor areas that lace the hills of Rio's hinterland. The annual carnival parades cost the samba schools enormous amounts of money. They raise much of it from ticket sales, television broadcasting rights, and dance events. Additional funds come in the form of gifts from members and sponsorships from the business community — and it is an open secret that some of the money comes from illegal gambling. Needless to say some of the funding comes from druglords. This year one of the schools (their's was my favourite performance) paid homeage to their former sponsors, kingpins of an illegal numbers game, which died last year. One was killed in an execution-style slaying outside a health club and the other died of an illness. The government of Denmark was embarrassed to learn of the close ties between the numbers game and the Imperatriz Leopoldinense samba group, which Denmark gave $189,000 to help finance this year's parade theme celebrating the bicentennial of Hans Christian Andersen. The funding reeks of dirty money.

But what more can I say? It's the most spectacular show I've ever seen, the music, the dancing and the magical atmosphere is indescribable. Just try it yourselves.


P.s. No, unfortunately I did not take these photos

I am afraid my beloved stepson won't know me when I get to Costa Rica.

I had a haircut today and since my hairdresser only spoke Portuguese and my vocabulary contains about 300 words, and most of them I pronounce horribly wrong, my hair is at least 2 inches shorter than I had in mind. And I look at least 10 years younger. And I look like a boy. Like a chubby choirboy. I look like Neville Longbottom, or the boy on the jacket of Angela's Ashes, only with shorter hair and breasts. My god. But I'm sure it will be OK by the time I get married. Actually my hair will most likely reach my knees by the time I get married. If I stop flirting with hairdressers in Latin America.

Brasilíubúar eru sannarlega komnir upp á lagið með að nota raðgreiðslur til að kaupa allt það sem hugurinn girnist. Í dag keypti ég mér buxur og borgaði með kreditkorti, sem er svo sem ekki í frásögur færandi - nema ég var spurð hvað ég ætlaði að dreifa greiðslunni á marga mánuði. Eehhh... ég ætlaði mér nú bara að borga þær í einu lagi... þar sem þetta voru bara buxur en ekki einhver meiriháttar fjárfesting. Sá ég mér til undrunar, og jafnvel hneykslunar, að hinn ágæti afgreiðslumaður var búinn ad skipta upphæðinni í fimm hluta áður en hann spurði mig, eins og það væri venjulegur verslunarmáti. Ég greiddi tölvuna mína með fimm greiðslum, en hún kostaði líka talsvert meira en buxurnar sem ég var að fjárfesta í. Mikið held ég að höfuðpaurar kreditkortafyrirtækjanna sofi vel á nóttunni - talsvert betur en skuldum vafinn almenningur sem hefur þarna fengið enn eitt tækið til að sökkva sér dýpra í fenið.

São Paulo is a big city. Actually it's a very big city, a vast megalopolis with 17 million inhabitants. And São Paulo state is South America's richest state, the industrial engine that powers Brazilian economy. Which is the ninth largest economy in the world.

And still I'm unable to find a Fuji photo lab that will develope my photos and get them on CDs in less than five days! I am not a happy camper! *growl, grumble, hiss*

I am not the least interested in soccer and have never been.

The only thing I know about soccer is that there are 2 teams playing, 11 persons on each team, the object being to gain possession of the ball and get it across the opponent's goal line. And sometimes when the ball hits the net it's offside and the goal is not valid, but why that is I have never understood. I do know the names of a few soccer players though, but that's only because of their good looks and fine bodies, it has nothing to do with the sport they are known for playing. And the only thing I know about Brazilians and soccer is that Pelé and Ronaldo are from Brazil and when Brazil unexpectedly lost to France in the 1998 World Cup final, millions cried on the streets. I remember seeing footage of that on TV.

So on Sunday I did something atypical: I went to a soccer match. And that was a highly enjoyable experience.

The match I went to was at the Maracanã stadium in Rio. Officially the capacity is 120.000 but on occasions, such as the World cup final of 1950 (when Brazil lost to Uruguay) and when Pelé scored his 1000th goal, close to 200.000 fans have been squeezed in.

On Sunday Volta Redonda and Americano played the final for the City cup, Taça Guanabara 2005. The winner later plays the winner of Taça Rio for the state championship. I went there with lots of other travellers and we took seats among the crazed fans of Volta, and we won! 3:2 in shoot-outs! I wrung my hands in agitation, screamed with exhilaration and joined the rumbustious crowd in samba frenzy afterwards. I didn't know this could be so much fun. Although admittedly I enjoyed the singing and dancing afterwards more than watching the game itself, but fun was had and in good company.

I've just arrived in São Paulo and checked in at the hostel. And boy, am I happy! I share the room with ONLY THREE OTHERS, not five or seven like usually, the shower has HOT WATER, there is a TV and a FRIDGE in the room and, wait... there's more... LOCKERS, AIRCONDITIONING and my bed is NOT A BUNK BED!

How much more can a traveller ask for?!

I've bought my flight ticket home, hurrah! On the 28th of March I leave Costa Rica and my route is San José - New York - London - Reykjavík.

Tomorrow I leave Rio de Janeiro and go to São Paulo and on Saturday I go from São Paulo to San José via Atlanta. Costa Rica, I'm on my way.

Happy happy, joy joy!

The city where I'm staying at the moment, Salvador de Bahia, is a fascinating place rich of history and loaded with colonial relics. It was Brazil's first capital, from 1549 to 1763, then the capital was moved to Rio de Janeiro and later to Brasilía.

The first black slaves were brought here from Guinea in 1538. The number of blacks eventually increased to constitute half of the population in Salvador and they reserved their African culture better than anywhere else in the new world.

The historic center in Salvador has winding, narrow cobblestone streets, richly decorated churches and music blasting from every other building. One of the areas in the old center bears the name Pelourinho, or whipping post. Little doubt what took place there.

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One of the places I visited today was the church Igreja São Francisco. Far from the teachings of Saint Francis, who chose to live in poverty, the church is crammed with displays of wealth and splendour. Gold leaf is used as wallpaper, an 80 kg silver chandelier and imported Portuguese ceramic tiles adorn the church.

African slave artisans were forced to build their master's church while prohibited to practice their own religion. They responded through their work and cherubs with destorted faces, angels with huge sex organs and bare-chested four-breasted and pregnant angels can be seen if attention is given to details. Some of the cherubs are not merely chubby but billowing with fat, some have the body proportions of midgets and some are crosseyed. One of the artists suffered from tuberculosis and so did one of his statues, of São Pedro de Alcântara, who has an ashen face and looks very ill.
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Tonight (if it ever stops raining) I intend to enjoy some of the great Bahian cuisine, a spicy blend of Brazilian and African cooking. Then follow it with tasty Capirinhas, made of cachaça (sugarcane liquor), sugar and lime. Yummie.

Á bernskuheimilinu er stundum notað hið sallafína og afar gegnsæja lýsingarorð kjötsvangur. Algengast er að verða kjötsvangur eftir langan vinnudag utanhúss eða eftir langt tímabil án þess ad hafa snætt kjöt.

Um þessar mundir samanstendur mataræði mitt af ávöxtum; ávaxtasöfum, ávaxtasalötum, jógúrt með ávöxtum og einstaka brauðsneið með osti. Og ég hélt að ég gæti með bros á vör borðað ferskan ananas í öll mál, án þess að finna til löngunar í neitt annað. En í gærkvöldi greip mig skyndilega gífurleg kjötsvengd (hugsanlega vegna próteinskorts, afar lítið um prótein í ávöxtum). Svo ég skunda út í nálægan stórmarkað, leita uppi kjötborðið og vel mér væna flís. Set svo eina kartöflu og skringilegan framandlegan ávöxt, sem ég hef ekki hugmynd hvað heitir á nokkru tungumáli, í körfuna svona til að draga aðeins úr villimennskunni. Væri ég örlítið ódannaðri hefði ég eflaust steyft bitann minn úr hnefa.

Eftir eldamennskuna og átið lagðist ég svo á meltuna í hengirúm í bakgarðinum, horfði á stjörnurnar og hugsaði um ekki neitt. Stundum þarf afar lítið til að gleðja mig. Ætli sé fylgni milli próteininntöku og framleiðslu dópamíns? Svei mér þá, það kæmi mér ekki á óvart :)

I'm becoming a mad blogger, always posting entries. But when there are rainshowers in the afternoon it's ideal to seek shelter at the nearest internet café and wait there until it stops raining.

I called home yesterday and I think my Icelandic vocabulary has narrowed down to about 500 words. I couldn't for the life of me remember some words. I was, for a reason I'm not listing here, talking about my backpack and searched for the word for "the thingy... the gizmo... you know, the thing you put over your shoulders... the thingummy..." "You mean the strap?" "Yes, strap!" That's the word. And strap in Icelandic is ól. Words don't get more simple than that. But this always happens when I'm away from home for a while, when I come home it takes a few days of wrong declension and conjugation, anwering in English or switching over to English in the middle of a sentence and then I get back to normal.

Similar thing happened to me when in Tilcara, in northwest Argentina. An Argentine guy spoke to me in Spanish and asked where I was from. When I told him I was from Iceland he started speaking to me in Swedish and I understood everything he said and should have been able to answer in Danish, or at least some amateurish Scandinavian mix of languages, but I couldn't. My filing system froze and I answered in English, which didn't make any sense, the guy hardly spoke any English. Which is why he picked up Swdish pretty quickly when he lived there. This was not one of my Mensa moments.

And speaking of Mensa; a three year old kid from Leeds joined the UK branch of Mensa recently. What kind of life will it be if you join Mensa at the age of three? Goodbye to toycars and teddybears, hello to very mentally stimulating tricky toys only? I'd like to meet the kid in 30 years or so and see how he's turned out. Interesting indeed.

It has stopped raining.

My Portuguese is somewhat coming along, I've reached my goal of learning the numbers, colours, days of the week, some greetings and civilities and handy phrases like "Can you tell me where I can find..." and "Is it to the right or to the left?". My pronounciation is not great though and often I meet questioning baffled faces when I'm trying to communicate in Portuguese.

Portuguese ranks eighth among the most spoken languages in the world (third among the western languages, after English and Castilian), learning a few words certainly wont hurt me.

The pronounciation is tricky and although a word looks similar in writing as the Spanish word it may sound completely different. There is also some distinction between Portuguese spoken in Brazil and Portugal (and probably in Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe too). The Brazilian Portuguese is enriched with many words from Indian and African languages, mainly from Nigeria and Angola.

Now this is fun... r is generally pronounced like h, j like sh, h is silent except when combined with l, d or t followed by a vowel like ch, ç like s, lh like ly, nh like ñ, x can be pronounced like ks, ss or ch, the list goes on. And then there are regional variations.

But my effort is normally appreciated and it's fun. And sometimes funny; e.g. condoms are camisas de Venus or venus-shirts, and skimpy bikinis are called fio dental or dental floss. And then there are idioms like Viajando na maionese, literally translated as I'm travelling through the mayonnaise, a colloqualism for I'm totally wasted/knackered/spaced out.

It's raining so I have gladly been spending time writing emails I should have written eons ago, reading other people's blogs and just idling the afternoon away.
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When in Rio I went with a guide to one of the favelas. If I'd gone there without the guidance of a local I would hardly being writing this, or anything else for that matter. Except maybe inventory of sins for my application for housing in heaven.

We went to Rocinha, which is the largest slum in South America. Nobody knows how many people live there. A common number to hear is 250.000. Other sources say at least 500.000, probably closer to 1.000.000. The inhabitants are packed together on an area of 800.000 sq meters (compare that to the nearly 300.000 inhabitants in Iceland spread over an area of 103.000 sq km. But then again that is very spacious).

Rocinha is sprawled over a hillside in the south part of Rio, down to São Conrado which is an upper class area where people live in airconditioned forts with high fences and fierce guard dogs.

What was most surprising to me was the infrastructure, but Rocinha is sometimes referred to as the "First World of the Favelas", with shops, daycare centers, schools and two banks, two radio-stations, two bus-routes, two supermarkets, three nightclubs, three of its own newspapers and even a McDonald branch in the nicest area. Most of the people are trying to make an honest living, many of the women work as maids in the ritzy parts of the city or at hotels close by. The houses are multistorey buildings made of concrete and bricks, not mud or cardboard boxes and plywood. Petty crimes are rare in the favelas, there you respect the unwritten laws of the community.

That said life in the favelas can be very bleak. It's the turf of drug lords and crime gangs and about $500.000 worth of drugs go in and out Rocinha every week. It's normal to see armed men in narcotrafficking with walkie-talkies around and they use fireworks to signal each others. The police doesn't enter the favelas too often, just leave business there alone. About 3 weeks ago 200 policemen raided Rocinha for 24 hours, arrested 7 people and killed 2. That's like a drop in the ocean. Last month a war broke out between the ruling drug dealers in Rocinha and a neighbourhood favela. The government is content to sit back and watch. And still the favelas are squatter cities, on state land. Nobody pays taxes and few pay electricity or water, just tap into power lines and watermains that crisscross the slum, filthy water runs in open sewers. The problems are so big, no one knows how to start tackling them.
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A traveller in Rio bought a bunch of disposable cameras, took them to Rocinha and handed out to the kids in the favela and let them take whatever photos they wanted. You can see the results here: http://nat.org/rocinha/, scroll to the bottom of the page and there you can see the photos. A similar project was carried out in Rwanda a few years ago, you can read about it here: http://www.rwandaproject.org/.

For me, a little girl from a small village in small Iceland, Brazil is very... big. In every aspect. Incomprehensibly big.

Geographically, at 8,5 million sq km, it's roughly the size of the US (Alaska excluded), encompassing nearly half of South America. Brazil shares borders with most countries in South America, Chile and Ecuador being the exceptions. The distance from one side of Brazil to the other is greater than the distance between Brazil and Africa.

No wonder I feel like I can barely scratch the surface by spending only 3 weeks here. But on the other hand that gives me ample reason to return, right?

The coastline is 7400 km, much of it pristine tropical beaches. The Amazon jungles are the world's largest tropical rainforests, fed by the world's largest river and home to the richest and most diverse ecosystem on earth. Pantanal is the world's largest wetlands. New rivers and new tribes are being discovered. And unfortunately, as new animal species are getting discovered all the time, others are becoming extinct. More than a hundred birds and mnore than 70 mammals are considered endangered.

Brazilians are estimated to be about 182 millions. And it spite of all the spaciousness 80% of them live in cities and only a small proportion of the land is cultivated.

Brazil has amazing resources. It's the world's biggest producer of coffee, the world's largest exporter of sugar and orange juice, has a wealth of mineral resources and a great workforce.

But that's not enough. Social conditions are one of the extremeties in Brazil. The richest 10% receive 50% of the nation's income while the poorest 10% receive less than 1%. A large number of farmers live at subsistance level and millions have no land at all. According to a definition used by many Brazilian analysts one of every three Brazilians live in poverty.

I love statistics, they often make it easier to understand things, but these numbers and these facts are just so difficult to grasp.

I just arrived in Salvador de Bahia in the northeast of Brazil, after a 28 hours busdrive along the beautiful green coastline. It's a lot cheaper than to fly. The vegetation here is so lush and the soil so rich that you get the feeling that a piece of plywood left lying around would root and leaf within a week.

I won't have the time nor do I have the budget to go to the Amazon this time, the distances are so great, but I'm getting the taste of what it might be like.
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When you go to a country you haven't been to before there's always something you have to get used to, or give up a habit you had before.

I'm still getting used to the fact that in Brazil you don't great everyone with a kiss on the cheek or two, like in Argentina and Uruguay. And Chile, but to a less extent. A handshake now seems so cold and formal after I got used to all the kissing.
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Rio de Janeiro is a great city in beautiful surroundings and it's inhabitants, the Cariocas, are warm and welcoming. That said, the city has it's problems. Rio has approx. 7 million inhabitants and is one of the world's most densely populated areas and the gap between the rich and the poor is enormous. But the love of life and the city is strong and it shows.

The numerous beaches in the city are crammed with people, carpeted with glistening, tanned skin. Copacabana is probably the best known and I'm sure the girls from Ipamena have inspired more than Tom Jobim.

The favelas, or slums, crawl up the hills and above it all Cristo Redentor blesses the mess from the top of Corcovado.

At the moment I'm feeling worldweary and can't be bothered to do a thing. And why? Because I went shopping. I not only dislike shopping, it's one of the worst things I can imagine doing, a notch above kicking pets and torturing infants. I went to a mall with a not-so-long list of things I needed but after hours and hours of my mood darkening I gave up and left. And the only thing I bought was a pair of socks. Grrrr. Next time I'll just buy safety pins to pin together my trousers when they start falling apart. Which will happen shortly. And my other trousers are now much too big, but I have a sneaking suspision that it's because of being handwashed and wrung by an Icelandic valkyrie rather than the valkyrie in question loosing weight and becoming nymphlike.

But Carnaval was great, promise to write about that soon.

Eftir að hafa varla gert ærlegt handtak síðan í byrjun nóvember, að undanskildum nokkrum tímum hér og þar, var ég loks matvinnungur í dag. Og með heiðarlegri vinnu í þokkabót, sem túlkur. Samt ekki mikið um handtök í dag - en þeim mun meira um handabönd.

Hef ég nú bætt við minn sívaxandi orðaforða í spænsku allskyns skemmtilegum, ef dálítið sértækum, orðum svo sem reykskynjari, brunatrygging, heilbrigðiseftirlit og klósettpappírshaldari. Spennandi, eh? Það skemmtilega við þetta túlkastarf var samt að ég mátti gjarnan koma með tillögur og athugasemdir, var ekki dæmigerður hlutlaus túlkur heldur þátttakandi í umræðunum. Enda klósettpappírshaldarar og staðlar í ferðaþjónustu mínar ær og kýr.

Og nú held ég til Brasilíu með langferðabíl, til Rio de Janiero fyrir Carnaval. Það dugar sko engin rúta fyrir 36 tíma ferð á brasilískum vegum. So danço samba, so danço samba...

First and foremost: I've uploaded some more photos.

I have agreed to be an interpreter tomorrow between an English speaking Israeli and a Spanish speaking Uruguayan who are going to talk business. Now that should be interesting.

I have worked some more on my Portuguese and should now be able to tell the time and order at a restaurant in, admittedly poor, Portuguese. Understanding when I'm asked the time or if I'd like fries with that is another thing.

For people who are steadfast in not learning a word of the language spoken where they are travelling this could be useful;


I'll buy it the next time I go to Rwanda. Then I won't have to learn Kinyarwanda or French. Last time I got by with Kiswahili but I think I've lost it in the filing system, it doesn't seem to be there anymore.

Oh, and my darlings, a humble reminder; the guestbook is still looking kinda sad. You know if you don't sign karma is going to hunt you down, don't you?