Backtracking to the interior

Things are a bit out of order here because I was so excited about my paradise island. However, as part of our many cultural experiences here, we went to the interior, around the bay, Bahia de Todos os Santos. You can see on the map where Salvador is, and then we drove up and around the bay to a place called Cachoeira and Santa Amaro.

The interior areas around the bay suffer from lack of development because Salvador´s size and promise of opportunity draw all the young people out of these towns. The people who remains tend to be older and poorer or families with children who will almost inevitably leave, who maintain a more traditional way of life. Cachoeira is still beautiful.
São João is a Bahian holiday, celebrated namely in the Northeast, that causes more of an uproar than Christmas. The interior towns are where most of the people go to celebrate (I didn´t--you all know where I was!)

São João decorations.

This is the view from the quaint restaurant where we ate a fantastic lunch.

...speaking of lunch, we also went to a very traditional market in I think Santo Amado. EVERYTHING is available for sale here. This may look gross (yes, it´s disgusting) but I´d rather eat the meat from these animals than some of the processed crap we get back in the States, animals which were fed processed food, probably mixed with their own feces, pumped up with growth horomes and then with antibiotics to keep them from falling ill from eating their own feces, living in sub-par conditions, and suffering from the growth horomes, then slaughtered, refrigerated for god knows how many days, processed, packaged, shipped all over the country to sit in our grocery stores for another god knows how many days, dyed and treated with more chemicals to fool us into thinking the meat is...fresh?? I´ll choose grass-fed cows allowed to grow up on a pasture at their own rate, slaughtered in the morning, hung on a hook an hour later, bought and cooked and served up in steaming plate of feijoada. Yummy.

(ok, still gross)

No, this is not poop from the previous animals. This is fresh tobacco pressed together with local honey. We smoked a cigar of it...sweet!

The seafood was super fresh, still moving and crawling in the bowls. And the little boy couldn´t help but pose (his mom pulled him away a few seconds later).

And these are the chickens slated for sacrifice...no, I´m not kidding.

Gostei. It was definitely a cultural experience.