Monday, the Tour!

Greetings, Reader! I see you are back again and I’m quite glad you are. You might have missed a lot had you closed this blog and never looked back again. You would have never seen what we did on Monday, the day after we flew into the country. I tell you it was quite fascinating. It was a tour! A tour of what, you say? Oh, it was grand!
We made many stops around the city. The first that stood out to me was St. Francis' Church. It was a huge church built during the baroque period. The sanctuary was covered in gold--and by covered, I mean, almost every inch. What I found truly fascinating about it were the pictures on the walls lining the courtyard. On one wall, there were images and Latin phrases that spoke of death. On another, they spoke of virtue. The death images were incredibly interesting. One image depicted a man in a crown lying dead in his bed. Nearby, there was a pauper lying dead in his shack. The Latin phrase that was above the picture said "Death shatters all ranks." I was reminded how no one is too good to die and it is only in love and death that the classes are one.
We also visited a huge market, which looked very much like the markets in Russia--especially the one called "Targovi Complex" (but just a bit smaller). We walked around for quite a while, looking and buying. After a while, I'd become bored. However, not too long after my boredom had come one of our guides, Surgio, asked if we would like to see something interesting. Obviously, we did. So, Rachel, Surgio, and I headed down a long spiral staircase to a dark floor below. The floor was made up of large slabs of cement, sitting in a murky water. The walls were rounded like a tunnel and there were arches everywhere. I told Rachel that it would be an awesome Bat-cave if there were, say, a few crocodiles. Surgio explained to us that it had been a place where slaves were kept. There was no way out at that time. The water there came from the ocean and, at times, the water would rise and some of the slaves drowned because there was no way to escape the water in the dungeon. We were definitely saddened and it was a very eye-opening experience. Ironically, two seconds after that, we walked back up to a world of color and light and freedom, where people are shopping for things they want because they actually have the freedom to own them.
We visited a lot of other place including another church, a place where Michael Jackson filmed a video here in Salvador, and a restaurant where the waitress tried in vain to get us to buy soda, however the only word we knew was "agua."
All in all, Salvador is a fascinating place and I can't wait to see more!