Sunday, 5 September 2010

Olinda & Recife

Twelve hours along the coast by bus from Fortaleza is Recife. I arrived in Recife on Friday morning, and immediately caught a local bus out to Olinda, which is Recife's much smaller and more peaceful sister city. Olinda is a colonial town with picturesque streets and grand churches, and I've spent a couple of afternoons wandering around seeing the sights, and trying to avoid the annoying guides who keep offering me guided tours and won't take no for an answer.

I went to see several of the churches including Igreja da Sé (which is Olinda's cathedral), Mosteiro de São Bento, the derelict Igreja do Carmo, and Igreja da Misericórdia, together with its nuns. Igreja da Sé is located at the top of Alto da Sé, which is a hill that offers a good view of the old part of Olinda, with the sea behind it. Looking towards the south-west, you also get a great view of Recife's skyline in the distance.

Olinda is full of cobbled streets and colourful houses, some more colourful than others. The town is also known for its Carnaval, during which giant dolls are paraded through the streets. While the dolls aren't being paraded, a lot of them are kept on display, and you see figures like these throughout the town.

On Saturday morning I went into Recife, the main reason being that I'd completely run out of books, and I'd read in Lonely Planet that there was a big bookstore in Recife called Livraria Cultura, which had an impressive range of foreign-language titles. And this time Lonely Planet wasn't wrong, because Livraria Cultura did have a good selection of English-language books, and I bought a couple that should keep me going for a week or two at least.

While I was in Recife I took the opportunity to see the sights, such as the Paço Alfândega (originally a convent, then a customs house, and now a smart shopping centre) and the colourful houses on Rua Bom Jesus (Good Jesus Road). I wasn't particularly impressed by Recife - the centre is dominated by ugly 1960's tower blocks, while the old part of town, Recife Antigo, is small, and most of the buildings range in condition from merely crumbling to completely derelict. However, there is work going on to renovate some of the historic buildings (see the photo below), so maybe Recife will look a lot smarter in a few years' time.

You may have noticed in a couple of the Olinda photos that there are signs advertising something called MIMO. That stands for Mostra Internacional de Música em Olinda (International Exhibition of Music in Olinda), and this has been going on while I've been here. There are several musical performances every day, as well as showings of films. I skipped the films because I thought I probably wouldn't understand them, but I did go to one of the concerts in Igreja da Sé yesterday afternoon. It was given by the Symphony Orchestra of the Federal University of the Rio Grande do Norte, and they were really good, but the concert was spoiled for me by the noise of the fans that had been set up along one side of the church. They were obviously meant to keep us cool, which they did, but they also drowned out the music except during the loudest parts of the concert.

I considered going to Porto de Galinhas today with a couple of people I met in my hostel, but I decided against it as it would have involved spending several hours sitting on a bus just to go and sit on a beach, even if it is considered to be the best beach in Brazil. Instead I spent the morning writing this blog post, and now I'm going to relax and enjoy the sun until late afternoon, when I have to head back into Recife to catch my bus to Salvador.

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