The wedding vows

On Sunday we went to the wedding of Heliana (Flavia’s cousin) and David an Englishman.  They are both PhDs from Reading University where they met.  This explained a table full of Brazilians who had also studied at Reading.  It is tough to get any PhD but it must be very hard to do it in a second language.

The ceremony took place at 11am which is unusual in Brazil, they are usually held on Saturday evenings. The church is on the Vitoria military base probably because Heliana’s late father was a General.  The officiating priest was the bride’s brother which made it all much more personal.  There was no organ so the music was by a trio of flute, guitar and violin who also played at the reception which was in a local hotel.

As so often happens when I look at people around the world I was struck by the similarities rather than the differences.  Most of what happened would be very familiar to anyone who has attended a middle class wedding in England or Spain.  The best about a Brazilian wedding  are that there are no speeches, the clothing is less formal and there was no heavy drinking.  In fact it was very similar to a wedding in Spain but without the noise and excitement.

It is Holy Week at the moment and as Brazil is a very Catholic country I was expecting a lot more activity.  Around here it is very much business as usual apart from the the very religious who go to church every day. Friday is a holiday and the beaches were full and Saõ Paulo had 248km of traffic jams.  I was expecting processions, penitents carrying statues and passion plays.  There are some of those reported on the television but it seems to be very local.  Not like Spain where the smallest village will have some sort of demonstration of their faith.  In fact it seems as low key as the British Easter.

We went to the cinema twice last week and I was not impressed with the quality of staff at the ticket desk.  I had my passport ready each time and was ready to prove that I was entitled to my over 60s 50% discount. Each time they issued to ticket without comment.  Ridiculous!  Anyone would think that I look 60 years old.

As usual I am a bit rushed and will add the pictures later.  We are off early tomorrow morning for our second Torta Capixaba A traditional Easter fish dish. It is delicious.  One of the ingredients is heart of palm. Rather than coming in small cans you buy a tree trunk around one metre long.  I have not seen how this is prepared yet.  At this time of year street sellers have mounds of palms stacked up and plenty of customers buying them,

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So I am back in Brazil again, this time for six months. On my last visit the blog petered out – partly because it was becoming a chore and partly because some people thought it was unreasonably critical of Brazil. In fact others thought that it was an advert by the Brazilian Tourist Authority so I reckon that the balance was about right.

This time I will try to add to the blog at least once a week rather than twice. There will be some personal stuff but I will try to keep it all fairly general. The plan is to comment on anything in Brazil that strikes my fancy. The country’s affairs are not well reported in Europe and I hope to give a view from a European perspective. As this is my first week I will be more personal than usual while I find my feet in the Brazilian way of life.

Back together

The journey was about as good as you can hope for. I flew TAM because they had the best deal.  My previous journey with them was full of problems but this time everything worked perfectly.  My luggage was a few kilos over the limit but the checkin at Heathrow did not mention it. In São Paulo they tried to charge me R$72 extra which they finally waived.  It took 21 hours door to door which was very tiring.
It was very good to see Flavia again after three months apart. Skype is very good but but no substitute.

My first impression was the weather.  It is fairly humid which intensifies the feeling of heat. The actual temperature is around 28/32C which is much less than in Málaga in the summer. In short the heat is not a problem for me so far and it is going to get a bit cooler as the summer is now over.  Of course the rain is another thing. It has often been quite cloudy and most evenings there has been heavy rain, often accompanied by thunder and lightning.

Some of the guests

The Sunday after I arrived was Flavia’s birthday and she held a churrasco (barbecue) in the grounds of her apartment. There were twenty people most of whom I already knew and it was good to see old friends. It was very nice to have a maid and a cook to do the hard stuff on the day. We will be eating the left over food for the next month. Sadly we have finished all the beer.

My proxy server in the UK was running well but is suffering from some sort of glitch which needs sorting out.  It allows me to access BBC iPlayer which only admits people who connect via a UK computer. It can also access all sorts of other UK sites which have the same policy. This is another plus for Linux as it is very easy to do and is free.  Talking of computers (again) I have spent a couple of days re-installing Windows Vista Home Edition on Flavia’s computer. It is my first good look at Vista and it really is as bad as its reputation. I will also add Ubuntu Linux in the hope that she might be tempted to see how a proper operating system works.

Only three candles?

On Sunday we attend the wedding of Flavia’s cousin who is marrying an Englishman so there will be an unusual concentration of Brits in Vila Velha. It will be interesting to see how Brazilians celebrate weddings.  The first good thing is that the male guests are not required to dress like waiters.

To close here is a nice thing about life in Brazil. Since my last visit I had my 60th birthday; this gives me all sorts of concessions here. Post offices, banks, lottery shops, chemists etc must either allow me to go to the front of the queue or have a separate queue. Also people who are handicapped, pregnant or with very young children have the same rights.  Another bonus is that I receive half price entry to cinemas, museums and various other tickets. All I need is someone who gives half price hair transplants.

On a technical note I have been forced to make people log in if they want to add a comment.  This is because I was receiving over 20 spam comments every day all of which have to be manually deleted. If you want to add a comment please register a name and email address. You can fake both and remain 100% anonymous if you want.

The first few times I went shopping here I was rather puzzled by the price labels for items like shoes, clothing, electrical goods etc. Often they seemed very cheap and sometimes extraordinarily cheap. Finally I realised that the amount was not the actual price but the monthly installments.

A pair of shoes might be marked as costing R$30. Closer inspection showed that this was to be paid over three months. Sometimes a cash price of R$90 might be displayed in smaller letters. A TV might be priced at R$100 and a much nicer one priced at R$110. You have to work out that the first one has six installments totaling R$600 while the other has 10 installments making the cost R$1100.

It is all a bit confusing. I was amazed that things like medicines and quite ordinary clothing could be bought like this. Probably some items are discarded or consumed before they are paid for. The payment is usually by credit/debit card and the monthly statements will say something like “this is the third of six payments”. I guess that the trader can receive a lessor full payment quite quickly and the credit card company provides the finance. Strangely the traders rarely offer a discount or advertise a lower price for cash. Often they will take a series of post-dated cheques – the only security for these seems to be that you write a phone number on the back.

Credit cards are accepted far more widely than in Europe and are used extensively. Quite small restaurants, market traders and other small businesses routinely have wireless card verification systems. Supermarkets all accept credit cards. Unlike any card I have ever had the cards are both credit and debit. When you offer the card they always ask which you want to use. The answer is always credit.

It is only in recent years that personal credit has been easily available in Brazil and there has been spectacular growth. This has fueled the growth in the economy and is part of reason for such a successful economy. I cannot help wondering how Brazil will cope with the next down cycle in the economy. Everything is wonderful now with commodity prices breaking all records, exports of minerals and agricultural products booming and production of oil and ethanol gasoline substitutes making the country almost self sufficient for energy. I am not the only one wondering about this.

There will come a time when the markets realise that the banks have vast sums invested in consumer credit that are not likely to be repaid. The story of “The Emperer’s New Clothes is repeated endlessly around the world. The US savings and loans crisis of the late 1980s and the current American banking crisis which is badly affecting the British banks which bought their mortgage books were both due to insane lending policies. The Spanish banks rather cleverly avoided them only because they were busy digging their own hole in which to collapse.

There is no reason to believe that Brazilian banks are any less blinkered that their overseas cousins when it comes to favouring short term profits at the expense of the long term. There is still plenty of scope to make money investing in Brazilian banking shares. Reality has never mattered when investing, it is only the perception that counts. At some stage someone will be heard shouting that the emperor has no clothes, the market will instantly realise it is true and the share prices will collapse.

The trick, of course, is to to have sold out the day before the collapse. By then it might even be a good idea to invest in an American or European bank.

Manioc in the market

It is also called cassava, mandioca, cassava or, in Brazil aipim. It is a staple food here and is incredibly versatile. In London is is available in the areas where there are people of West Indian or African descent. I have often seen it but not did know what it was or how to cook it. Maybe i can start a new foodie fashion in the UK.

The British eat cassava without knowing it as it is used to make both arrowroot (for thickening sauces) and the milk pudding tapioca.

The manioc plant

Manioc has a very high starch and calorie content but is not rich in vitamins. It is gluten free which is a major advantage as so many people seem to have allergies. In Brazil every food label is marked as either containing gluten or not containing gluten. It is very easily digestible. Depending on the country it is grown and the particular strain of the plant there can be high levels of cyanide in manioc and then it needs careful handling. The leaves cannot be eaten raw due to the presence of cyanide but they are a good source of protein. I have not heard of Brazilians eating the leaves.

Fried The boiled chunks are dropped into hot fat for a couple of minutes.
There are many ways of preparing manioc and these are some of the ways I have eaten it here:

Boiled After peeling and cutting into chunks around five to ten centimeters long it is boiled for around 20 minutes and served much like boiled potato. Tough internal strands running the length of the root must be removed.

Mashed Take the boiled potato above and mash it. It is very good combined with mashed potato.

Manioc cake

Farofa Is lightly roasted coarse flour. It is sold already prepared and looks similar to bread crumbs. It is added to all sorts of meat and bean dishes. As street food, cooked kebabs are dipped in a yoghourt dressing and then farofa sprinkled over.

Flour It is used as as a thickener for soups and sauces.

Bread I have not tasted it yet but it looks good.

Bolos de Aipim are cakes and are guaranteed to send Flavia into ecstasy.

So if anyone reading this has any recipes or favourite dishes please tell us about it.

The trip to Minas Gerais was excellent and I will add something to the blog about it in a few days.

In the mean time the subject for today is the mosquito.

A mosquito eating lunch

One evening, shortly after arriving in brazil there was a diabolical noise in the road outside the apartment.  I looked out and saw a small truck belching black smoke and making the sort of noise that would really impress Spanish teenager motorcyclists. Flavia explained that this was the fumacê which burns oil to create black smoke to prevent mosquitos. A few days later a man from the town hall mosquito man arrived for his annual visit and put tablets in the u-bends of the water outlets in the floors of the bathrooms.

A fumacê truck

This is part of a very big scheme to try to control malaria and dengue in Brazil. This also explained whey there are not many mosquitos around the town.

The word mosquito derives from Latin via Spanish and Portuguese and means little fly. It is the female of the species that is dangerous – she can survive on a diet of nectar but needs the minerals and vitamins in blood to produce eggs. In Europe mosquitos are little more than a nuisance but in parts of the world they are dangerous killers. If Europe gets any warmer they could easily become a problem in the south.

Malaria is the danger that most people know about. The malaria map for Brazil shows that it is the northern part of Brazil outside of the bigger cities that is affected. The Amazon area is hot and wet which are the perfect conditions for breeding.  It is a dangerous disease worldwide and kills a lot of people every year.  In fact malaria is not that big a problem here, in 2003 there were only 30 deaths.  Bill Gates is not a person I often refer to favourably but I do admire him for the many millions he has donated to malaria research through his foundation.

Dengue fever is a bigger problem at the moment, eapecially in the urban areas. It is a very painful disease; in my childhood in the Caribbean it was known as break-bone fever. It affects most of the country except the far South. Earlier this year just in the State if Rio de Janeiro there were 23,555 cases of dengue, including 30 deaths,  in less than three months. Similar statistics apply to most areas of the country and Espirito Santo had 703 cases in a few weeks this January.

There is no cure or vaccine for dengue fever, all you can do is take the usual treatments for fever and wait for it to go away. The strong and healthy will recover and the weak can die. Once you have had one of the four strains of dengue you are immune to a recurrence of that strain. Unfortunately it also means that if you have an attack by one of the other strains it is more likely to be haemorrhagic which is very dangerous.

The only weapon against dengue is to fight the mosquito itself. It breeds in still water and so old car tires, empty cans and plastic containers, flower pots, open sewage, puddles in the road and even large leaves can all be breeding grounds. Wearing long trousers and sleeves in the evening is a good idea as is using repellants and sprays. In the North visitors should take anti-malaria pills.

On a more cheerful note I will add that I have had a few mosquito bites but they are less of a nuisance here that they are in Málaga during the summer.  Brazil is remarkably free of nasty things! Apart from the jungle areas there are very few natural threats. Snakes, spiders, hornets and all other bugs seem to be pretty harmless. Apart from the occasional shark in the Northeast the sea does not hold much threat.  There are no hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis or anything else dangerous …  apart from the people, of course

For a more detailed description of haemorrhagic dengue see the WHO article.