On this morning I woke to a non-rocking ship and ran upstairs to get my first glimpse of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, and South America all in one. I was not at all expecting what I saw... not that I knew at all what to expect. It's difficult growing up in a first-world country with money and privilege and then trying to imagine what it’s like to walk into a very different third-world country. But looking out from the seventh deck, I saw what all the professors and books have attempted to describe to us and failed—a completely different world than that which we have lived our entire lives.
How can you describe something that is so vastly different than anything you have ever imagined? There’s no basis for comparison or words that can possibly tell you what it’s like to be an American walking though the streets of Salvador. It’s not simply a continent away; it’s a world away. People don’t watch you as though you are an alien in New York; like you are from a completely different world than them. As much as we don’t understand them, they understand us even less. Every time we walked by all the heads were turned and comments made in flowing Portuguese about us. Words like ‘American’ and ‘Bush’ were the only understandable utterances from their lips.
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