Well, what can I say about yesterday?

I thought I was going to have an interview in the morning and one in the afternoon, but one of the musicians wasn´t home and the other one never showed up (or maybe he did eventually, but I waited for over an hour). So, by the evening I was not feeling the best and reluctantly made my way out to see what was going on in town and see if I could find a forró.
I talked to a guy hanging out in the main plaza of historic Olinda and he told me about a forró happening at a bodega not far away. I made my way up the cobblestoned hills of the city, past rows of colourfully painted colonial houses, stopping along the way to check out a frevo band practice in a hall with its windows open to let out the enormous sound of twenty brass instruments and a scattering of percussion thumps and cracks. I found the little bodega that was spilling over with people drinking and conversing in the streets. I bought a cold bottle of beer and scanned the crowd and saw the familiar face of a French woman also doing anthropological research here that I had met a couple days before. She was talking with a group of people and I got introduced around. One of them was a French music producer who worked with music from Pernambuco so we ended up having a good conversation about music and Brazil.
After a while we decided to walk over to a local place that had live music. Our group had enlarged to include a couple Brazilians and two Italian girls. We arrived at the place and there was a crowd of about 40 people in front, laughing, conversing animatidly, kissing, and drinking in front of the bar. From inside came the sounds of the rabeca fiddle, the steel clank of the triangle, and the thump of the zabumba drum and the crisp rattle of the pandeiro. The forró was mingling with the sounds of the crowd outside and causing people to sway to the beat and make the little side steps typical to forró dancing.
After a beer outside we made our way into the small bar which had a four piece band in full swing and couples dancing close together, everyone sweating in the heat of the room. The band played mostly instrumental forró of the pé de serra variety. Within an hour the little bar was packed with people, watching from the wooden tables on the side and dancing rapidly to the strong upbeat music. One of the Italian girls said to me in a mixture of broken Portuguese and English "Este es musica bem country!"We stayed for a couple hours switching couples and dancing until we had to take beer breaks because of the heat. I wanted to get a chance to talk to the musicians, but they only took one break and were busy talking with a group of people near the far end of the bar and adjusting the sound board behind the amps. After 2 am the crowd began to disperse a bit and we went back outside where a large crowd remained listening to the
music drift into the night air. I stayed for a while talking with some of the local guys about the forró scene and sharing a last drink. I made my way back home with the music still ringing in my ears.....