… kill me with feijoada!  After the wonderful meal the previous Saturday Marçal invited us to their weekend house a couple of hours away in the hills for a home made version prepared by his brother-in law. It was just as good.  There were eight of us for the weekend and Saturday was spent eating, drinking, sleeping it off and then eating and drinking again. Marçal and Lourdes are very generous hosts.

On Sunday morning we drove around the area. Their house is on a secluded hill on a large estate similar to a Spanish  urbanisación. Eventually there will be around 120 houses. The neighbours seem to be exclusively bankers and senior judges.  Somehow the President of the Appeal Court loses some of his majesty when you meet him on a weekend morning wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else.  It is a very natural wooded area full of wildlife and plants. Lourdes is a keen gardener and has a magnificent collection including a black orchid.

We stopped for lunch in the shadow of the Pedra Azul which is a rock with a sheer face of 600 metres.  The whole area is a State Park and is well developed for tourism.  They promote all sorts of local food and agricultural products and handicrafts as well as the environment. We had an excellent lunch in an Italian restaurant.

After lunch we returned home for a week of penance, eating lettuce and painting the kitchen.

Bossa Nova This year is the 50th anniversary of the Bossa Nova and the City of Vitória held a free four day festival in celebration.  On the final night we listened to Roberto Menescal and  his partner of 20 years Wanda Sá. Menescal, along with people such as Tom Jobim, Carlos Lyra, Herbie Mann, Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz did much to popularise João Gilberto’s new style of music in the 1960s.  We really enjoyed the concert in spite of the appalling acoustics in a converted warehouse theatre in the middle of the docks. There was a ship moored 20 metres away where the crew were also enjoying the music.

Rio de Janeiro

The next report will be from Rio where we will spend a long weekend with Flavia’s Uncle.  His suggestion for an exciting tourist activity is to fill an old camera case with rocks and hang it off your shoulder, then stuff a wallet with Monopoly money and put it in your back pocket. Now go for a stroll along the beachfront and then tell the world how you were mugged.

Delay in Posting new reports

It has been a bit erratic recently. I was trying to organise some more photos but they do take a lot of time to get right. I have published the last two or three reports without any photos but will soon add some so keep watching.

It is too easy to look at things through rose-tinted spectacles and there are things which are not good here. These are some of them:

Mosquitoes and the diseases they cause. Malaria in the North and dengue fever are a major problem here. The authorities are fighting them but the battle is far from won. I am preparing an article on this subject.

Inter-city highways Some are very good, others are terrible! We have been thinking about driving to Bahía but have been put off by a friend describing badly pot-holed roads and traffic zig-zagging in every direction trying to find a safe path. There was a truck driver on the TV proudly showing his 50 year old truck with almost no suspension, bald tires and all sorts of other problems. He claimed he did a 4000 km round trip in 4 days driving 20 hours a day and used amphetimines to stay wake.

Crime and the fear of crime.  So far I have not had any problems at all but the constant warnings and TV reports of violence are depressing.

Pavements Even in the nice areas the pavements are often non-existent or in very poor condition in a way very similar to Spain. It must make life for mothers with young children and the handicapped very difficult.

Beggars They are not as bad as in India and Indochina and are rarely aggressive.  At most red traffic lights a beggar will approach and remind you that Brazil has not completely left the third world behind.

Street advertising Loudspeaker vans tour the streets shouting about the wonderful things for sale in the supermarket. I have even seen a shopkeeper stand outside his shop with a microphone haranguing the passers by.

Slow broadband internet The connection here is about 10% of what I get in Spain and is nearly double the price. Of course we complain about it in Spain as well.

Bumpy cycle track There is a cycle track along the beach and when it is finished will be 7.5km long. Brilliant! The snag is that the surface is a bumpy brick which slows you down and rattles your teeth. Many cyclists prefer to use the road or the pavement.

Unreliable tradesmen Flavia has a number of jobs recently completed or in progress involving an electrician, new curtains, some tiling, a carpenter, a water leak from a neighbouring apartment  and the apartment block telephone system. In every case appointments have been broken and quite simple jobs take several weeks, numerous visits and phone calls and a lot of frustration.

Food They sell many of the cheeses you find in Europe but the only interesting one I have tasted was in a  good Italian restaurant. There is what they call cheddar which is orange and bears little relationship to the original English product. Other cheeses I have tried have been a bit dry and chalky with not much flavour. Maybe they should import some Stinking Bishop They don’t sell Marmite, loose tea, ginger nuts, mint sauce, custard and many other things necessary in the life of an Englishman.

You can tell from the last couple of items that I was struggling to find ten things that I do not like here.

I have mentioned them before without going into too much detail.  I have been to three types: self-service, churrascaria and a normal a la carte restaurant.  There are lots of snack bars (a snack is called lunch whatever the time of day) and a few MacDonalds.

There are not many bars in the conventional sense. Most of the self-service places are midday only. In the evening they open as a cross between bars and restaurants. Flavia says that Brazilians do not drink while they eat. They certainly eat while they drink! There is always a food menu and quite substantial portions of food available; these are put in the middle of the table and everyone shares the meal. The food is often fried and is the sort of thing you can easily stab with a fork. It is mostly a bit unhealthy for my taste.

Serving a customer

The other sort of restaurant is churrasco which is the Brazilian barbecue. Their appetite for meat in general and beef in particular is only challenged by the Argentinian asado. The film clip of the home churrasco below gives you an idea of the scale.

In a churrasco restaurant you usually pay a fixed amount to eat. There will be a generous salad bar and fruits and sweet things for dessert. Mostly the customers eat meat, lots of it! The waiters will bring a selection of chicken hearts, sausages, chicken wings to stimulate your appetite. Later he will bring a large skewer about a metre long on which half a dozen joints will have been impaled and roasted. You point to the joint that takes your fancy and he will cut a few thin slices which you take with a pair of tongs. The meat is usually very good quality with no seasoning or marinade apart from salt.
There is a sort of unofficial rationing in that the waiters with skewers work their way around the room so you eat at the speed they serve you. They are very generous so it is only the Homer Simpsons of this world that will worry about it. Very often there is a self-service section of the restaurant and the remainders of the joints which are less than perfect will be served there.

Like feijoada and the beach, churrasco is part of the heart and soul of Brazilians.  I am still trying to work out how most of them look remarkably fit and slim!

Hmm … I seem to becoming fixated on food

Sorry everyone, there have been a few problems recently and the connection has been very slow and sometimes totally dead.  My friend Roland and I are working on it but at the moment are a bit mystified. We will sort it out as soon as we can.

I have finally done some work with pictures and have added them to many of the previous articles.

For those interested in the technical side this site is hosted on a “virtual computer” supplied by Bitfolk All the software used is totally free in the financial sense but also in the context of liberty. There are many factions and anyone interested could start by looking at the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative Those who know me will understand the pain I have been going through having to use Flavia’s computer with Windows Vista.  They will also be wondering why it took me so long to use the word Linux.This is why Linux is better

The Linux logo

The operating system bringing you this page is GNU/Linux and the distribution is CentOS version 5 The web server is Apache The blog software is is Wordpress using a theme by Txanny My thanks to all who help with those projects.

On Sundays the English eat roast beef and yorkshire pudding. On Saturdays Brazilians eat feijoada.

Feijoada is prepared with black turtle beans, with a variety of salted pork and beef products such as salted pork trimmings (ears, tail, feet), bacon, smoked pork ribs, at least two types of smoked sausage and jerked beef (loin and tongue). It is prepared over slow fire in a thick clay pot. The final dish has the beans and meat pieces barely covered by a dark purplish-brown broth.

The taste is strong, moderately salty but not spicy, dominated by the flavors of black bean and meat stew. The dish is served with rice, collard greens and slices of orange. It is very good indeed. Typically in restaurants they will serve six or eight different pots each with a different type of meat so that each person can ensure his favourite and avoid his dislikes. At home a single pot with a selection of the varieties of meat is usually prepared.

On Saturday we were invited to lunch at the Novotel Hotel which has the reputation of doing the best feijoada in town. Our hosts were Lourdes, a colleague of Flavia and her husband Marçal who is a prosecutor in the Appeal Court.

The other guests were Lourdes´ sister and brother-in-law. We started with drinks and tapas in the lounge and then moved into the restaurant for the serious eating.

As usual I disgraced myself in the “eat until you drop” fixed price buffet. There was a lot of salad and healthy stuff which I ignored in favour of calories and cholestrol. After my second helping there was no room for the fruit and deserts. I had managed to lose a second kilo this week but I am afraid all the good work was undone. Fortunately Flavia was nearly as bad so my edge in our competitive weight loss campaign was not too badly damaged. Feijoada is a wonderful dish but not to be eaten too often!

One of the highlights of the restaurant was a trio of guitar, bandolin and tambourine who were playng delightful soft Brazilian music. It was a perfect background in a busy room.

After lunch we wandered up the coast for around 100km. It is much more the Brazil I was expecting. Miles of beaches, beach bars, surfers, para-surfing, beach football and general fun. There were plenty of much poorer people than in Vitória but not much sign of real povery. We found a cheap hotel, had a very light supper and plenty of beer and then bed.

In the morning it was cold (around 22C) and windy with patches of rain, it was not busy on the beaches but the restuarants were thriving. We tried to get a cruise around the bay but the afternoon cruise was cancelled. it was the captain’s birthday and he was having a party on board. He was already a bit tipsy and offered to include us in the party with no promises about when we would return. Regretfully we watched them sail off with a mountain of beer and churrasco.

We stopped in Nova Almeida on the way back. It is a nice beach resort with a beautiful colonial church dating back to 1580.

It was a great weekend and now we must spend the week eating lettuce