Running the risk of sounding wanky, I am finding myself frequently struck by the thought these days that some things don’t actually mean anything until you’ve seen them in much closer proximity than is actually comfortable.
So, A and I decided, after our visit to see the Morrinho in Favela Pereira da Silva, that we’d really like to spend more time in the neighbourhood. The favela is a safe one, and they are fairly used to visitors coming in to see the Morrinho. There’s even a pousada there – Favelinha – run by a formidable Brazilian woman and her German partner.
As always we left everything to the last moment and there were no rooms in the Favelinha, and so we asked our friend Daniella who had originally introduced us to the Morrinho, whether she thought there might be anyone who’d be willing to rent us a room for a bit. A few phonecalls later and she’d set us up to stay with Maristella, the girlfriend of Nelcirlan, one of the boys who started the Morrinho. “It’s a simple place” she told us “Maristhella’s only been there a couple of months and she doesn’t have much stuff.” Is there a bed, a shower and a toilet, we asked – turns out there is – so yeah, we’re in.
Favela Pereira Da Silva is a wicked little community. It’s actually a pretty tiny favela, just off the edge of the artsy, decadent Santa Teresa, where by this point we’d spent a fair bit of time. Santa Teresa by all agreement has retained its charm – and is populated mainly by bohemians – because its hilly streets are surrounded on pretty much all sides by favelas and as a result the developers haven’t had the balls to fuck it up yet. Whilst some of the other favelas just hundreds of metres away are still pretty dodge, Pereira Da Silva has had trafficking eradicated six or so years ago, and remains fairly problem-free as a result.
I’ve written a bit before about what the word ‘favela’ conjures up in the mind – a no-go zone of violence and anarchy controlled by drug-lords, criminals and gangsters. When the term favela is translated, it is most often as ‘slum’ or ‘shanty town’. Like with most things in life, what you perceive depends on the angle you look at it from.
The way I’m coming to see it, a favela is a community which has been built by people who have no legal claim to the land that they live on. For the most part, favelas are situated on land that was perceived as valueless – in Rio, the steep sides of the hills. As a result of being settlements that grow outside of State recognition, the communities are not provided with the amenities that the rest of the city would assume as rights. There has been a shift in attitude towards the favelas since the sixties – when popular/government opinion was that they were ghettos that should be expunged – towards their recognition as communities that are here to stay, and which Brazilian government and society needs to develop a policy of properly recognising and living with – a process which is in some ways happening. As a result, favelas have running water, sewage systems, electricity. Some have cash points.
A favela looks like many of the poor (but legally recognised) towns and villages that I saw in Central America when I was there, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras. Buildings are basic, electricity and water supply are shambolic but functional, roads are not always paved. The difference in Brazil being that these communities exist right slap bang up against the rich parts of the city, where people live a lifestyle that differs little in terms of quality to major European cities.
To understand the existence of favelas one has to take into consideration the fact that Brazil is a colonial country which was built on slavery, the last country to abolish it, in 1876 – only a few generations back. Without going into a rant about the not-wholly-ideological reasons for abolition, the country’s legal and power structures, designed by (and to protect the rights of) those with money and power, at their foundation took negligible account of those without either. Favelas are a remnant of the two tier colonial hierarchy which Brazil grew from. These communities remain outside the law because the law was never designed with them in mind, and does not serve them. The weight of time and history, not any conscious, current choice, keeps favela communites and the people who live in them outside the boundaries of State jurisdiction. The ongoing struggle between the state, those who are employed to protect it, and those who fall outside of that equation is one of the most striking things for me about Brazil.
In reality nowadays, in some ways favelas are not too different from housing estates in the UK. People inside them work outside of them, go to school, university, the supermarket, get a taxi back with their shopping and go home. It’s normal life, ongoing. The lives of the people who live in favelas are impeded by their unrecognised status which means that the communities are never afforded the developments that progress provides. And, obviously, favela life is often affected massively by the drug trafficking, the police attempts to prevent it, and the ensuing war which persistently invades these communities.
I’m not going to get into the trafficking/gang/police situation in this post, as aside from what I’ve read about it I don’t think at this point I understand it well enough to have anything valuable to say. Pereira Da Silva isn’t your average favela (if there is such a thing), partly due, as I’ve explained in a previous post, to the Morrinho and the NGO working there, and the fact that partly as a result the drug-trafficking industry has no hold there, and as a result life is pretty peaceful.
We were adopted on our first evening by Ingrid, the young wife of Junior, one of the Morrinho boys. (We didn’t realise how young she was until we’d been in her company a few hours, and she told us she was 16 – and married a year already). Ingrid took us up to see the Morrinho at night – the boys were working/playing on it, its tiny streets lit up by fairy lights. One of the guys was conducting what looked like an audit of a battalion – his tiny lego soldiers with camoflauge hats standing in regiments, their weapons laid out in rows on the ground.
Ingrid took us into her home,
where she lives with Junior’s mother. We asked her about her own family. She doesn’t have parents, she told us, simply. Eager to introduce her new friends, she then took us next door to meet her neighbours, where we sat in the kitchen and had guarana and home-made icecream with X, his wife Lisa and their elderly Siamese cat. He has to keep the cat on a leash, Ingrid’s neighbour explained, because otherwise it climbs into people’s bags and gets lost. The couple had a huge affection for Ingrid. “Ela e minha filha maravilliosa” he told us, giving her a squeeze. Ingrid was desperate for us to come and stay with her in her house, but we’d already made an agreement, we explained. She was more than a little disappointed, and we wished we were able to take her up on her offer.
We found ourselves rapidly being adopted by new friends. Maristhella, the girl whose room we were staying in, took us to the beach the next day. We really liked Maristhella – she didn’t say much, at least to us – but her unique brand of defiant independence was awe-inspiring. She’d only been in the favela a couple of months, having moved down from Salvador, and was working hard to establish a life for herself in Rio. On Saturdays, she explained, she went to college, studying nursing. A truly beautiful girl, the streets crackled with male attention as she walked past in tiny clothes we’d never dare wearing – her handling it with an untouchable expertise we knew we’d never be able to pull off.
On our last night there, we met a Finnish bloke, Matti, who was about our age, in the local bar at the bottom entrance to the favela. Like us, Matti had initially come to stay in the favela, ended up staying way longer than he intended, and was now building a house there with his East German friend. Over a couple of beers with him, we began to see the combination of human qualities that were enabling him to ride such a unique situation. An amazing guy – we just thought he was brilliant. A real free-thinker, and endowed with an unwavering determination, he was also incredibly socially adept, polite but firm, obviously well-liked for his utterly genuine friendliness, but able to quietly hold the line when it mattered. He was having a couple of beers at the end of a day’s hard work with his builder, Peri (the father, as it turned out, of the guy who started the Morrinho who’s girlfriend’s house we’d stayed in). Peri was a right character – a muscular Rastafarian in perpetual motion, he seemed to be constantly off-balance, swaying and weaving, interjecting into the conversation loudly whenever he had a thought for us, at which point the assembled company stopped obligingly to listen to him. He was obviously a guy who holds a fair amount of sway there (having seemingly built half the town) and on the way up to the top of the favela with them both, he gave us a little tour, stopping at the top of each set of steps to catch his breath, knock on a door to introduce us, or to regale us with a story about something. At one point he proudly pointed out the shrine which overlooks the main square. “This is my best piece of work” he told us “the thing I’m most proud of building”. We said goodbye to him at his front door and he told us he liked us. “You can stay here” he announced. “I’ll build a house for you.”
Once Peri had taken himself home, Matti was able to explain a few things to us. How do you get permission to build here, we asked. Apparently, you have to put in a request (which in his case, was done on his behalf by friends he’s made here) with a guy who takes on the role of a kind of town mayor. It’s not just one powerful man, he explained, the role is rotated through some kind of system. Anyway, you put forward a case to him, and he yay- or nay- says it. Clearly, you have to earn your stripes to be tolerated there, and if you’re not welcome then there’s a kind of committee system that makes sure you don’t stay. Justice works in a similar way. As we were talking to him the conversation suddenly stopped as a young bloke sauntered past, Matti giving him an uncompromising stare. “He robbed my phone” explained Matti. “I left my stuff on the floor over there while I was building and he took it – 100% it was him.” He shifted uncomfortably before continuing “The thing is here, if someone steals something, people will kill him for it, that’s the punishment. Even if it’s just a phone. It’s not tolerated.” It was clearly a difficult situation for Matti to negotiate. It struck me that this is why, outside in the big cities, houses have 12 foot fences with barbed wire and about four locks to get in the front door, and inside the favelas, everybody’s door is open.
On our way home that night, having said goodbye to Matti far sooner than we would have liked, we talked about how much we admired what he was managing to achieve – but also, how much it appeared to be costing him. A naturally gentle and sensitive guy, the hardness he was having to learn to live in this environment was clearly etched in his wiry body.
By the end of our stay it was hard to leave. We’d started to work out whose door you needed to knock at to get homemade ice cream, or some fried cheese balls, or to use the internet. And our last night, we did the weekly Sunday night party, held on the football square – an unforgettably fun affair with a live band followed by a DJ playing forro, hip hop and baile-funk, everyone out, kids, parents, teenagers. The atmosphere was something like a bizarre mix between a church-hall wedding and a Peckham bump n grind night. Everyone round the outside of the square, kids running around in flocks, teenage girls in tiny shorts standing in a line at the edge, proudly weaving complicated patterns with their arses, gaggles of boys sharing bottles of beer, amorous couples in dark corners, the local drunk-uncle (Be Careful Trev, we’d named him, based on the gist of his oft-repeated monologue to us) commandeering the centre of the dance floor and demonstrating quite how astonishingly low an old man can grind it.
All this positivity aside, we came to understand how hard it is to live like this. Physically, it’s not comfortable. The town clings to the side of the hill. It’s really, really fucking hard work getting from the bottom to the top – maybe a 200m distance as the crow flies, it can take an hour to wind your way up the pathways in the 35 degree heat. You can’t buy fresh food there, or indeed, buy anything without cash (and it’s a long long walk to the cash point, if you’re fortunate enough to have a bank account with money in it). It’s hot, and often damp, all the time, day and night. And that’s before you even start on the psychological reality of living in place where you’re essentially exiled from the benefits enjoyed by the other half of the city which you can see stretched out before you, the shopping malls, the yachts in the harbour. Where what you can hope for for your children is massively restricted, because public education is abysmal unless you can afford the private sector (the average Brazilian, as a result, has only 5.5 years of education, we have since been told). And where the real possibility of your community being overtaken once again by the ongoing drug wars, and once again being controlled by ruthlessly powerful traffickers with AK47s, is ever-present. That’s how it works in the favela a couple of hundred metres away, on the other side of the road.
We did a lot of examining our consciences while we were there, and it made me realise the limits of my idealism. Let’s go and live in a favela, we had decided, let’s experience it properly…but then when it smells funny and the water doesn’t work and the fan is so loud you have to stuff your ears to sleep, and there’s an insect smashing around in the room that’s so big it sounds like a human being breaking in, then when your posh antique dealer middle-aged-ex-pat friend rings it’s very tempting to jump ship and go and have dinner in a nice restaurant with air con. And no matter how good our intentions, and how much we wanted to understand it, we never really can. Cos, as Jarvis Cocker so wryly puts it: You can never understand, cos even when you’re trying to get it right, when you’re lying in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall*, then you can call your dad and he’ll stop it all yeah.
(*Just to clarify, there weren’t any roaches. Well, we didn’t see any.)
We met some wicked people in Pereira da Silva, though. And if the Morrinho comes to London, which we really hope it does, we would take a lot of pleasure in returning the hospitality that we were shown.
So, A and I decided, after our visit to see the Morrinho in Favela Pereira da Silva, that we’d really like to spend more time in the neighbourhood. The favela is a safe one, and they are fairly used to visitors coming in to see the Morrinho. There’s even a pousada there – Favelinha – run by a formidable Brazilian woman and her German partner.
As always we left everything to the last moment and there were no rooms in the Favelinha, and so we asked our friend Daniella who had originally introduced us to the Morrinho, whether she thought there might be anyone who’d be willing to rent us a room for a bit. A few phonecalls later and she’d set us up to stay with Maristella, the girlfriend of Nelcirlan, one of the boys who started the Morrinho. “It’s a simple place” she told us “Maristhella’s only been there a couple of months and she doesn’t have much stuff.” Is there a bed, a shower and a toilet, we asked – turns out there is – so yeah, we’re in.
Favela Pereira Da Silva is a wicked little community. It’s actually a pretty tiny favela, just off the edge of the artsy, decadent Santa Teresa, where by this point we’d spent a fair bit of time. Santa Teresa by all agreement has retained its charm – and is populated mainly by bohemians – because its hilly streets are surrounded on pretty much all sides by favelas and as a result the developers haven’t had the balls to fuck it up yet. Whilst some of the other favelas just hundreds of metres away are still pretty dodge, Pereira Da Silva has had trafficking eradicated six or so years ago, and remains fairly problem-free as a result.
I’ve written a bit before about what the word ‘favela’ conjures up in the mind – a no-go zone of violence and anarchy controlled by drug-lords, criminals and gangsters. When the term favela is translated, it is most often as ‘slum’ or ‘shanty town’. Like with most things in life, what you perceive depends on the angle you look at it from.The way I’m coming to see it, a favela is a community which has been built by people who have no legal claim to the land that they live on. For the most part, favelas are situated on land that was perceived as valueless – in Rio, the steep sides of the hills. As a result of being settlements that grow outside of State recognition, the communities are not provided with the amenities that the rest of the city would assume as rights. There has been a shift in attitude towards the favelas since the sixties – when popular/government opinion was that they were ghettos that should be expunged – towards their recognition as communities that are here to stay, and which Brazilian government and society needs to develop a policy of properly recognising and living with – a process which is in some ways happening. As a result, favelas have running water, sewage systems, electricity. Some have cash points.
A favela looks like many of the poor (but legally recognised) towns and villages that I saw in Central America when I was there, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras. Buildings are basic, electricity and water supply are shambolic but functional, roads are not always paved. The difference in Brazil being that these communities exist right slap bang up against the rich parts of the city, where people live a lifestyle that differs little in terms of quality to major European cities.To understand the existence of favelas one has to take into consideration the fact that Brazil is a colonial country which was built on slavery, the last country to abolish it, in 1876 – only a few generations back. Without going into a rant about the not-wholly-ideological reasons for abolition, the country’s legal and power structures, designed by (and to protect the rights of) those with money and power, at their foundation took negligible account of those without either. Favelas are a remnant of the two tier colonial hierarchy which Brazil grew from. These communities remain outside the law because the law was never designed with them in mind, and does not serve them. The weight of time and history, not any conscious, current choice, keeps favela communites and the people who live in them outside the boundaries of State jurisdiction. The ongoing struggle between the state, those who are employed to protect it, and those who fall outside of that equation is one of the most striking things for me about Brazil.
In reality nowadays, in some ways favelas are not too different from housing estates in the UK. People inside them work outside of them, go to school, university, the supermarket, get a taxi back with their shopping and go home. It’s normal life, ongoing. The lives of the people who live in favelas are impeded by their unrecognised status which means that the communities are never afforded the developments that progress provides. And, obviously, favela life is often affected massively by the drug trafficking, the police attempts to prevent it, and the ensuing war which persistently invades these communities.
I’m not going to get into the trafficking/gang/police situation in this post, as aside from what I’ve read about it I don’t think at this point I understand it well enough to have anything valuable to say. Pereira Da Silva isn’t your average favela (if there is such a thing), partly due, as I’ve explained in a previous post, to the Morrinho and the NGO working there, and the fact that partly as a result the drug-trafficking industry has no hold there, and as a result life is pretty peaceful.So, having got a bit closer and stepped away again and had a think, what did we take away from the whole shebang? A lot of stuff – it’s proving incredibly difficult to write about, particularly as I’m aware at times of sounding a bit like a bad anthropologist, the thought of which horrifies me. I’m also realising the impossibility of stating my position on any of this, as my thinking changes by the day as I come to understand more and more about the complexity of it all. That futility acknowledged, I’ll crack on.
Pereira da Silva, from my first impressions,
was one of the friendliest communities I’ve had the pleasure to be part of. On your way up and down and around the twisting streets, everybody greets each other, stops and says hello, has a chat. We realised after a day or so – once we’d got over the fact that we had to leave all our expensive technological equipment in a room with a door lock that you could get through in about 20 seconds – that we felt safer inside the favela than we had done pretty much anywhere else in Rio. If you’re part of the community, people look after each other. It became clearer and clearer while we were there, however, quite how complex this balance is.
There is (I would say, has to be) a kind of entrance policy for favelas, which we came to understand better while we were there. In a community that’s policing itself, and which as a result requires the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium of mutual trust, strangers are noticed immediately. We felt a massive responsibility not to muck up this equilibrium. In order for the fragile and incredibly complicated trust system which exists there to be maintained, people, quite rightly, want to know why you’re there. We made it as clear as we could that were in Pereira da Silva to spend more time checking out the Morrinho (of which the whole community seems rightly to be very proud), and as such, we felt, we were welcomed.
Pereira da Silva, from my first impressions,
was one of the friendliest communities I’ve had the pleasure to be part of. On your way up and down and around the twisting streets, everybody greets each other, stops and says hello, has a chat. We realised after a day or so – once we’d got over the fact that we had to leave all our expensive technological equipment in a room with a door lock that you could get through in about 20 seconds – that we felt safer inside the favela than we had done pretty much anywhere else in Rio. If you’re part of the community, people look after each other. It became clearer and clearer while we were there, however, quite how complex this balance is.There is (I would say, has to be) a kind of entrance policy for favelas, which we came to understand better while we were there. In a community that’s policing itself, and which as a result requires the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium of mutual trust, strangers are noticed immediately. We felt a massive responsibility not to muck up this equilibrium. In order for the fragile and incredibly complicated trust system which exists there to be maintained, people, quite rightly, want to know why you’re there. We made it as clear as we could that were in Pereira da Silva to spend more time checking out the Morrinho (of which the whole community seems rightly to be very proud), and as such, we felt, we were welcomed.
We were adopted on our first evening by Ingrid, the young wife of Junior, one of the Morrinho boys. (We didn’t realise how young she was until we’d been in her company a few hours, and she told us she was 16 – and married a year already). Ingrid took us up to see the Morrinho at night – the boys were working/playing on it, its tiny streets lit up by fairy lights. One of the guys was conducting what looked like an audit of a battalion – his tiny lego soldiers with camoflauge hats standing in regiments, their weapons laid out in rows on the ground. Ingrid took us into her home,
where she lives with Junior’s mother. We asked her about her own family. She doesn’t have parents, she told us, simply. Eager to introduce her new friends, she then took us next door to meet her neighbours, where we sat in the kitchen and had guarana and home-made icecream with X, his wife Lisa and their elderly Siamese cat. He has to keep the cat on a leash, Ingrid’s neighbour explained, because otherwise it climbs into people’s bags and gets lost. The couple had a huge affection for Ingrid. “Ela e minha filha maravilliosa” he told us, giving her a squeeze. Ingrid was desperate for us to come and stay with her in her house, but we’d already made an agreement, we explained. She was more than a little disappointed, and we wished we were able to take her up on her offer.We found ourselves rapidly being adopted by new friends. Maristhella, the girl whose room we were staying in, took us to the beach the next day. We really liked Maristhella – she didn’t say much, at least to us – but her unique brand of defiant independence was awe-inspiring. She’d only been in the favela a couple of months, having moved down from Salvador, and was working hard to establish a life for herself in Rio. On Saturdays, she explained, she went to college, studying nursing. A truly beautiful girl, the streets crackled with male attention as she walked past in tiny clothes we’d never dare wearing – her handling it with an untouchable expertise we knew we’d never be able to pull off.
On our last night there, we met a Finnish bloke, Matti, who was about our age, in the local bar at the bottom entrance to the favela. Like us, Matti had initially come to stay in the favela, ended up staying way longer than he intended, and was now building a house there with his East German friend. Over a couple of beers with him, we began to see the combination of human qualities that were enabling him to ride such a unique situation. An amazing guy – we just thought he was brilliant. A real free-thinker, and endowed with an unwavering determination, he was also incredibly socially adept, polite but firm, obviously well-liked for his utterly genuine friendliness, but able to quietly hold the line when it mattered. He was having a couple of beers at the end of a day’s hard work with his builder, Peri (the father, as it turned out, of the guy who started the Morrinho who’s girlfriend’s house we’d stayed in). Peri was a right character – a muscular Rastafarian in perpetual motion, he seemed to be constantly off-balance, swaying and weaving, interjecting into the conversation loudly whenever he had a thought for us, at which point the assembled company stopped obligingly to listen to him. He was obviously a guy who holds a fair amount of sway there (having seemingly built half the town) and on the way up to the top of the favela with them both, he gave us a little tour, stopping at the top of each set of steps to catch his breath, knock on a door to introduce us, or to regale us with a story about something. At one point he proudly pointed out the shrine which overlooks the main square. “This is my best piece of work” he told us “the thing I’m most proud of building”. We said goodbye to him at his front door and he told us he liked us. “You can stay here” he announced. “I’ll build a house for you.”
Once Peri had taken himself home, Matti was able to explain a few things to us. How do you get permission to build here, we asked. Apparently, you have to put in a request (which in his case, was done on his behalf by friends he’s made here) with a guy who takes on the role of a kind of town mayor. It’s not just one powerful man, he explained, the role is rotated through some kind of system. Anyway, you put forward a case to him, and he yay- or nay- says it. Clearly, you have to earn your stripes to be tolerated there, and if you’re not welcome then there’s a kind of committee system that makes sure you don’t stay. Justice works in a similar way. As we were talking to him the conversation suddenly stopped as a young bloke sauntered past, Matti giving him an uncompromising stare. “He robbed my phone” explained Matti. “I left my stuff on the floor over there while I was building and he took it – 100% it was him.” He shifted uncomfortably before continuing “The thing is here, if someone steals something, people will kill him for it, that’s the punishment. Even if it’s just a phone. It’s not tolerated.” It was clearly a difficult situation for Matti to negotiate. It struck me that this is why, outside in the big cities, houses have 12 foot fences with barbed wire and about four locks to get in the front door, and inside the favelas, everybody’s door is open.On our way home that night, having said goodbye to Matti far sooner than we would have liked, we talked about how much we admired what he was managing to achieve – but also, how much it appeared to be costing him. A naturally gentle and sensitive guy, the hardness he was having to learn to live in this environment was clearly etched in his wiry body.
By the end of our stay it was hard to leave. We’d started to work out whose door you needed to knock at to get homemade ice cream, or some fried cheese balls, or to use the internet. And our last night, we did the weekly Sunday night party, held on the football square – an unforgettably fun affair with a live band followed by a DJ playing forro, hip hop and baile-funk, everyone out, kids, parents, teenagers. The atmosphere was something like a bizarre mix between a church-hall wedding and a Peckham bump n grind night. Everyone round the outside of the square, kids running around in flocks, teenage girls in tiny shorts standing in a line at the edge, proudly weaving complicated patterns with their arses, gaggles of boys sharing bottles of beer, amorous couples in dark corners, the local drunk-uncle (Be Careful Trev, we’d named him, based on the gist of his oft-repeated monologue to us) commandeering the centre of the dance floor and demonstrating quite how astonishingly low an old man can grind it.
All this positivity aside, we came to understand how hard it is to live like this. Physically, it’s not comfortable. The town clings to the side of the hill. It’s really, really fucking hard work getting from the bottom to the top – maybe a 200m distance as the crow flies, it can take an hour to wind your way up the pathways in the 35 degree heat. You can’t buy fresh food there, or indeed, buy anything without cash (and it’s a long long walk to the cash point, if you’re fortunate enough to have a bank account with money in it). It’s hot, and often damp, all the time, day and night. And that’s before you even start on the psychological reality of living in place where you’re essentially exiled from the benefits enjoyed by the other half of the city which you can see stretched out before you, the shopping malls, the yachts in the harbour. Where what you can hope for for your children is massively restricted, because public education is abysmal unless you can afford the private sector (the average Brazilian, as a result, has only 5.5 years of education, we have since been told). And where the real possibility of your community being overtaken once again by the ongoing drug wars, and once again being controlled by ruthlessly powerful traffickers with AK47s, is ever-present. That’s how it works in the favela a couple of hundred metres away, on the other side of the road.
We did a lot of examining our consciences while we were there, and it made me realise the limits of my idealism. Let’s go and live in a favela, we had decided, let’s experience it properly…but then when it smells funny and the water doesn’t work and the fan is so loud you have to stuff your ears to sleep, and there’s an insect smashing around in the room that’s so big it sounds like a human being breaking in, then when your posh antique dealer middle-aged-ex-pat friend rings it’s very tempting to jump ship and go and have dinner in a nice restaurant with air con. And no matter how good our intentions, and how much we wanted to understand it, we never really can. Cos, as Jarvis Cocker so wryly puts it: You can never understand, cos even when you’re trying to get it right, when you’re lying in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall*, then you can call your dad and he’ll stop it all yeah. (*Just to clarify, there weren’t any roaches. Well, we didn’t see any.)
We met some wicked people in Pereira da Silva, though. And if the Morrinho comes to London, which we really hope it does, we would take a lot of pleasure in returning the hospitality that we were shown.
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