Third time

Whilst in Salvador, after the wedding in Rio, I met up with a Canadian who had lived in Aberdeen and now works off shore on the oil platforms of Brazil. He was sitting at the bar of a small youth hostel waiting for the computor to become free, I was looking for another hotel as the first one that I found was in need of restoration ( the electrics were hanging off the wall and the cock-roaches seemed to be hungry).
My bad Portuguese captured his attention and we chatted about Scotland and our reasons for both being in the same bar at the same time, Phil asked if I had seen the centre of the city and then offered to show me the sights and the shows that where on that night, he was due to leave the following day for Sáo Paulo but had the time that evening to act as guide, I agreed. It was in fact a fatal decision as we arrived at one bar in Pelourinho (in the historic centre) at around 2 in the morning, sat down and, for all of us that have hindsight, we were accompanied by a Rastafarian, a drug dealer and two young ladies as well as a host of children that constantly beg from tourists. The one girl was Edneide who was to become my wife in the year 2000 and to introduce me to a mixture of Brazilian etiquete that can only be discribed as base level ehics, the sort that allows you to rob your mother and kill your brother. During 2000 i helped build and finance a small bar for Edneide's family in Salvador, thinkiing that they had no money and had difficulty in making ends meet, the bar is the pink number in the photos and was origionally going to be my home (the location of Sete Abril is in fact notorious for bandits) and so I built an appartment over the bar, it simply never entered my mind that the location was suspect and that Edneide too was to be suspect. I have had some interesting times over the last 8 years of living in Brazil, the best so far was my divorce on the 12 January 2007 ( the day before my birthday) and the worst was two years ago on the 21 August 2005 when I had been back in Brazil for two weeks, having had my usual visit to Scotland, I went to leave the house at 6.30 in the morning only to have two men with pistols force me back into the house and hold me at gun point for 5 hours.
I certainly never expected to be alive after the 5 hours and that seems to me to be an example of the luck that I get.