Brazil – Desi Arnaz
The classic tune “Brazil”, performed in a classic style by Desi Arnaz and his Orchestra (yes, the Desi from “I Love Lucy”, he led a Band Orchestra in real life too, not just on TV). Now imagine what might happen to this classic arrangement if it got appropriated for the Oktoberfest crowd. Why, then it may sound something like this:
Brazil – Ray Coniff and his Orchestra
That’s what I would call the processed cheese version of “Brazil”. And yet, as processed cheese orchestrations go, it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been. It’s the kind of musical cheese that can still put a smile on my face, rather than make me gag or hurl. As for it being played at Oktoberfest, well, it’s probably way too classy for Oktoberfest. But we’ll get to that a little later, after we’ve been properly introduced to Oktoberfest in Brazil.
Billboard along the highway to Blumenau
Oktoberfest is the beer swilling, polka grooving party for the masses that grips Germany, especially Southern Germany, in October. The biggest Oktoberfest celebration in the world is, not surprisingly, in Munich, Germany. The second biggest Oktoberfest celebration in the world is in Blumenau, Brazil.
What? Blumenau, Brazil?
Yep, Blumenau, founded by Dr. Herrman Bruno Otto Blumenau and 17 other German immigrants 1850 in Southern Brazil and now home to about 300 000 souls, a fifth of which have German ancestry, claims the distinction of playing host to the biggest Oktoberfest celebration in the world after Munich, attracting up to a million tourists to its Bavarian bacchanal. Every other German city can just eat its Brazilian dust.
The city of Blumenau has even built a theme park specifically for Oktoberfest. Called “Vila Germânica”, it recreates a Disneyland Main Street version of an old fashioned German town, linked with a covered bridge boasting faux German half-timber (Fachwerk) architecture and roof tiling to a stadium big enough to add hundreds of thousands of revelers to the hundreds of thousands mingling in the fake German Village streets.
Oktoberfest revelers in Vila Germânica
For me, who grew up in Germany, and who, truth be told, never really warmed up to the Oktoberfest culture, with its beers in steins, its vaguely (or not so vaguely) sexist buxom-girls-in-dirndl and drunk-goofs-in-lederhosen humor, and especially its obnoxiously peppy and unrelentingly polka-dotty “Schunkel” music (Schunkeln is swaying back and forth side by side rhythmically, often with arms linked, always with much exaggerated frivolity), walking through Blumenau’s Vila Germânica and seeing this theme park version of Germany in tropical Brazil was disorienting, like having a dream that feels too real and yet also feels unsettlingly “off”.
The Brazilian/Germanic hybridization of the Blumenau Oktoberfest souvenirs knocked me slightly off balance. But my mind was perfectly blown, and not really in a good way, when I heard Brazilian versions of German Schunkel-music piped in several souvenir shops. It’s weird enough to hear this kind of peppy Bavarian bilge sung in Portuguese, even weirder to hear phrases like “Eins Zwei Drei” (One, Two Three), “Alle mit dabei” (all together now, basically) “Prosit” (Bavarian for Drink up/Cheers) and, most alarmingly “Schunkel, Schunkel Schunkel” commanded with thick Brazilian accents.
So this is what really became of the Boys of Brazil:
Ein Prosit Blumenau – Cavalinho Branco – Oktoberfest
Ed and I visited Blumenau in August, not during Oktoberfest, so we were able to take in the town and Vila Germânica theme park during the calm before the Sturm und Drang of October. So let’s take a closer less populated look, first at Vila Germânica:
Quando eu te encarei frente a frente e não vi o meu rosto
Olinda is a beautiful historic town, one of the oldest in Brazil, founded 1535 in the state of Pernambuco. The large metropolitan capitol city of Recife looms just south, contrasting modern high rises at the horizon with the quaint colorful buildings and handsome churches of historic Olinda.
Salvador, in the state of Bahia, is a Brazilian city full of highs and lows. Quite literally, at first blush, due to its topography. The historic center sits on a high plateau separated by a steep cliff from a lower section of town at the shore. Which makes parts of Salvador look like a city on top of a city, like something dreamed up by Escher or Christopher Nolan (see top photo).
For our Brazilian musical selection, it is long past due that I share one of the most famous upbeat selections Brazil has gifted the world. You may not know the title “Mas Que Nada”, but you have surely heard this track’s lively chorus. Possibly no piece of music has been used more often as a shorthand to illustrate Brazilian high spirits.
This is the little 4 seater airplane we hired (with some birthday present “mad money”) to take us on a thirty minute flyover across the whole Lençóis region. The pilot and his trainee sat upfront and Ed and I sat behind.
Around ten years ago Ed and I saw an extraordinary Brazilian movie called “The House of Sand”. It is set in a landscape of endless, blindingly white sand dunes. So unusual and otherworldly the film seemed to be taking place on another planet.
Ever since seeing “The House of Sand” I have wanted to explore this fantastical landscape in person. And this August we did it. It required flying into São Luís, the capitol of Maranhão, then taking a 4.5 hour bus to Barreirinhas, the largest town near the Lençóis Maranhenses, from where most tour excursions originate. But even once in Barreirinhas, most routes into the “Bedsheets” require a long, bumpy trek over sandy roads. On the map below, only the black dotted line represents an asphalted road. The red dotted lines are deeply sandy paths over which four wheel drives slosh and jump and jostle their way for at least an hour before you reach the white dunes. It’s like riding a bucking kangaroo.
Above and beside, these great lily pads are called Victoria Regina. Something tells me it wasn’t a Portuguese gentlemen who coined the name.
Two weeks ago Ed and I flew into Corumba, near Bolivia in Brazil’s southwestern state of Mato Grosso du Sul, the main southern access point to the vast Pantanal region. The Pantanal might be best described, to Americans at least, as Brazil’s version of the Everglades. An immense system of rivers and wetlands, with water levels that rise and inundate the land in the rainy season and fall again in the dry season, releasing some ground from a watery blanket. The Pantanal waters are separate from those that form the Amazonian system.
Harpy eagle.
To the right, that’s Ed and me and our head protection (it’s easy to bump your head making your way through and past the tight corners, low ceilings and odd protrusions of a cave system). Below is the entrance to the Santana cave. It looks rather modest for what would wind up being an elaborate, impressive 12 km cave system. Turns out this entrance was blasted open by dynamite a hundred years ago. Originally the opening was much smaller, just enough for the water to pour out and make a strange grumbling sound, which is why it initially was called the Snoring Cave.
Above and beside you can see some of the walkways we took to get through the cave system. Ed says “I love about Brazil that you can do things here that would be considered totally unsafe for tourists in America”.
There are animals that live exclusively in the caves, like this spider.
Ed is looking at a rock formation which is called the horse’s head for obvious reasons.
Today’s tour through Rio will conclude on Corcovado. And I promise you I will be sharing pictures of Cristo Redentor that are unlike the typical postcard pictures or Google Images you will find of the iconic location. Our visit there turned out to be less than typical, and that will be reflected in my photos.
The second part of this post will take us to the waters of the Urubu River, an Amazon tributary where we spent an “Adventure Weekend” after leaving Manuas (These pictures are from our Brazil trip 4 years ago).
Notes from a Composer 