Manaus

I've spent the last couple of days in Manaus, which is a big, hot, noisy city in the middle of the Amazonian jungle. It's not a particularly attractive city, but there are a few impressive old buildings dotted among the ugly majority of the city. Yesterday I went on a guided tour of the Teatro Amazonas, which is a 104-year old opera house built at the height of Manaus's rubber boom. Next to the theatre is São Sebastião church, and both of these buildings are located on São Sebastião square, below.

I'm told the tiling of the square is meant to represent the Encontro das Águas (Meeting of the Waters), in which the dark-coloured Rio Negro meets the light-coloured Rio Solimões, not far from Manaus. I also saw Manaus's Cathedral and its art-nouveau Municipal Market, which was very much under renovation. I then went for a tour of the Palacete Provincial, which houses an art gallery and a few other exhibitions.

In my spare time I've been sampling the Brazilian food, and the good news is that I don't think I'm going to go hungry. I've been eating lunch every day at the per-kilo restaurants that you find everywhere here. Unfortunately you can't really stuff yourself at these restaurants in the same way that you can at all-you-can-eat buffets, because you pay for what you eat (according to how much it weighs), but it's definitely a cheaper way of eating than ordering an à la carte dish. Also common here are churrascarias (meat barbecue restaurants), where the waiters bring unlimited skewers of meat to your table.

There are also juice bars everywhere, which serve dozens of weird fruit juices, many of which I've never heard of before, and which I don't think exist outside the Amazonian region. I've been trying them out one by one, and they've all been pretty good so far.

I've been trying to learn a bit of Portuguese, because I'm finding it a bit awkward not being able to speak the language. It seems that a lot of the vocabulary and grammar is similar or identical to Spanish, which means that I can understand written Portuguese fairly well, but the sound of the language is very different, which makes it difficult to understand what people are saying. Spanish is quite widely spoken here, so I think it's just about possible to get by with just speaking Spanish, but you can't always rely on that.

On my tour of the Teatro Amazonas yesterday the guide told me that there was a free concert that evening being given by a guitar orchestra. (In fact he told me that roughly twenty concerts per month are held at the theatre, about 80% of which are free, which seems like a pretty good deal for the people of Manaus.) So I went back to the theatre in the evening, and people were already queueing round the block when I arrived, although there were plenty of seats for everyone. I ended up in a box on the second floor of the theatre (here is the view of the very grand interior from my box). The concert was given by the Orquestra de Violões de Amazonas (Amazonian Guitar Orchestra), below.

They were pretty good, and most of the songs were obviously popular in Brazil, because a lot of the crowd were clapping, singing and even dancing along with them. However, the only song I recognised was Happy Birthday (sung in Portuguese), although I have no idea whose birthday it was.

This afternoon I'm leaving Manaus on a boat to Belém. I've bought myself a hammock, which I'll be sleeping in while on the boat (travelling in a cabin is very expensive). I'm not sure when exactly I'll arrive in Belém - Lonely Planet says the trip takes 3½ days, but I've been told it's 5 days, and I'm more inclined to believe the higher estimate, so I doubt I'll get there before Monday. I've read some horror stories about these boat trips on the web, so I'm not sure what I'm letting myself in for, but anyway I'm sure it'll be an experience.