I made a day trip into Olinda, a small cultural town located about 20 minutes from Recife. And my first impression is that it felt like Malacca! Portuguese style buildings were everywhere, although Olinda felt a little more colourful and vibrant as compared to Malacca.
One can easily cover most of the main sights within 3 hours. Many of the attractions are churches – there are 40 just within this small town!
Some interesting and really colourful shops that is nice just walking around and taking pictures with the decor and standees. There are also a lot of shops selling handicrafts and fine embroidery items.
There’s also good spots to get very good views of the skyline of Recife. Came across a small little alley offering a wonderful view of the skyline in the backdrop, and with Olinda slums in the foreground.
On one instance, I had accidentally walked into the slums area while walking around Olinda. A sense of unsafeness overcome me, and I quickly walked back into the tourist area.
While I was in Olinda, I also found out that there was a MIMO festival taking place. MIMO is a 1 week long music festival, and on that night, they had Gotan Project playing live at the square.
It was also of good timing that my old friend, Alex, from Sao Paulo happened to be arriving into Recife in the evening for a business trip, and so both of us met up and headed back to Olinda to catch Gotan Project live.
Gotan Project had just started playing when we reached, and there was already a huge crowd in the square, over-spilling into the hillside.
I have heard of Gotan Project previously, and it was just of good fortune that I managed to catch them playing live and what’s more, it is for free! Their performance lasted for about 1.5 hours before they ended the show, and the music was really good!
I also found out that Gotan is a play on the word Tango (Tan-go and Go-tan), which is rather interesting, considering that they are an Argentinian group.
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