Festa Brasileira

The party explodes from the darkness like a joyous firework filled with food and music.

Dark dirt roads had stretched for miles. Suddenly, this.

Hats and dresses. Lights and colors. Twirling and dancing and singing.

A twelve string. An accordion. Voices singing harmonies with words everyone knows but I never will.

Smiling faces hand me food with names I can’t pronounce and flavors I’ve never tasted. Massive palm fronds cover tables with meat-filled pastries, chicken and meat in rice, on sticks, in soups.

Hot wine and cold beer.

I am wonderfully, gloriously, overwhelmed.

It’s a party that seems to exist outside of time. It would be the same in the past. It would be the same in the future.

There’s a legitimate realism here no tour, no tourist, could possibly experience.

I am a spectator, yet I feel warmly included and enthusiastically welcomed.

I don’t ask what’s being celebrated. In a way, I don’t want to know. In my mind, this perfect oasis in the Brazilian countryside just exists. And always will. Perhaps this is a special event, but in my mind, it isn’t. It is just Sábado.

It is unlike anything I have ever experienced. I feel alive.

I go for more cake.