No real World Cup excitement in Salvador

The 2014 Fifa World Cup in Brazil has reached the most exciting stage where there is no room for errors, no second chances, no sharing of points and only one winner prevails. Yet, with only eight out of the 32 teams left in the competition, Brazilians don’t think their team is good enough to win the Cup despite having home advantage. The streets of Salvador, where I will be based until after the quarterfinal match between hosts Brazil and Colombia on Saturday, are relatively calm and you can hardly realize the city is one of the 12 hosting the biggest football competition on the planet. After spending almost 18 hours in the skies from Kigali to Salvador, the first day was always going to be tough mentally and physically. Nonetheless, as someone on duty, I only slept for about four hours and so early on Tuesday morning Brazilian time, which is five hours behind Rwanda, I hit the streets to gauge the mood, and honestly, I fell just short of being disappointed. The first match I was going to watch was Argentina vs Switzerland in the Round of 16 at the “Arena Fonta Nova”, but apart from the huge billboards and images of Brazil players that you see everywhere at Sao Paulo and Salvador airports, theres is no real excitement among locals. The few people I managed to talk to, who are able to speak English (because here Portuguese is the first language), were really not bothered about the World Cup, they are more concerned about their welfare. They are not happy that their government is spending so much on the event. Four years ago in South Africa, everywhere, there were signs of World Cup yet here, or at least in Salvador, there is relatively so little to to show that something so big is taking place. The streets I have managed to reach in the first few hours here are quiet and not so clean or fancy as you would expect to find in a developed country like Brazil. You could see that the authorities tried to put a new face on things like installing new streetlights and painting pavements, but other than that, everything appears so normal. Even at the hotel where I am staying, which is located less than 1000m off the beach shores of Salvador and 1hr and 30 minutes from the airport, there is nothing to show there is a World Cup taking place, yet the stadium is just a couple of kilometers away. Before, I left someone told me Salvador is a stress-free city and one of the most popular holiday destinations in Brazil and after just a couple of hours here, I realized what I had been told was indeed true. There are more tourists here than any other city in Brazil, and maybe, its the reason for the streets to be so calm and stress-free even during the World Cup. The weather here is relatively comfortable, June and July are Salvador’s coolest months but sometimes temperatures still peak at 26C. But anyway, by the time of filing this story, I was still just a few hours old in Brazil and I am going to need a few more days to learn and know more about the place, then i will be in a better position to give a more clear picture of the 2014 Fifa World Cup.

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No real World Cup excitement in Salvador