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

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

This is very important in Brazil, I do not know what the violent crime rate is but I guess that it is astronomical. Wikipedia puts it as 10th in the world for the homicide rate. All the top ten, apart from South Africa, are in Central and South America and the Caribbean. It is encouraging that the rate of crime has been decreasing in recent years.

A couple of weeks ago one of Flavia’s friends mentioned that earlier that day masked gunmen burst into his brother’s house, locked everyone in a room while they stole whatever they could sell. Nobody was hurt. Three months ago the boyfriend of one of her friends was missing for a few days and a ransom paid. The method used was as reported here by the BBC It concentrates the mind wonderfully when the danger is so close.

Flavia’s apartment block has a pedestrian entrance which is guarded 24 hours a day. Nobody gets in or out without the permission of the guard who will remotely unlock the two gates as you reach them. The garage has another electric gate which is also manned. If he recognises you, the guard will open the gate. All the blocks I have seen have at least this level of security and often have video cameras as well.

Houses have high walls, alarms, sensors and are very hard to protect. Some people who could afford to live in a house prefer to live in apartment for the better security. It is very expensive indeed to properly protect a house.

Flavia constantly tells me to be careful, do not carry my iPod, do not look rich, do not look foreign (how can I do that? Or look rich ) to take care, be alert, don’t carry a camera, don’t talk to strangers and so on. To be fair I have never felt threatened and have been perfectly happy to wander around. There are areas where it would be foolish to enter but they are so obvious that it is not a problem. Rio sounds very dangerous indeed. Inland in the countryside it was very carefree and easy going.

I am not sure I would fancy walking home a few blocks in the middle of the night. Especially since when we drive home late at night I noticed that nobody stops at red lights. Flavia was very cautious about crossing green lights checking for traffic coming the ther way. I asked why and she told me that it is too dangerous to stop at night. There are few police on duty and there is a danger of being hijacked if you stop.

On a similar note it is interesting to see the precautions the shops take to protect themselves from their staff, customers and robbers. Often quite small transactions require you to deal with two or three people. An assistant will deal with you and help you choose your goods. She will pass these to a supervisor who will bag them, write out a ticket and pass the goods back to the assistant. You take the ticket to the cashier who collects the money, stamps the ticket and returns it to you to give to the assistant in exchange for the goods.

We went to several high quality kitchen utensil shops and they all had their doors locked. An assistant will let you in if she likes the look of you. This is normal in Spain for jewelers and some banks and uncommon in the UK. In the shopping mall up the road there is a bank. To get in you have to insert your credit card and enter your PIN. Other banks I have noticed have a guard at the door who unlocks it for each customer.

The supermarkets operate in a similar way to Europe but at the Walmart subsidiary a guard checks your till listing against the contents of your trolley before you are allowed to leave the store. There are lots of guards but they are not armed. Your shopping is always put in a bag for you and usually taken to your car.

There are a lot of shopping malls and many people prefer to shop in them because of the better security. They always have secure parking, plenty of guards and the obviously undesirable characters are not admitted.

All this is a complete contrast to Europe. There the most important thing is to employ as few people as possible to reduce costs; they accept relatively high losses as it is cheaper than prevention. The main security is through video surveillance but there are some security guards. Sometimes there are  extra guards behaving like ordinary shoppers and so are hard to spot. I have often left a store in the UK because there was nobody to help me or the staff are so poorly trained that they are unable to give advice.

Last weekend there was lots going on as it was St Peter’s day, the patron saint of fishermen and high season for tourism in the mountains. We attended a big Festa Junina in Vitória on Friday evening. There was a covered stage in the park built for the Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul ll in 1991.  We watched a number of bands perform some very good music. I learned about Forró – a rock music style  with  strong African roots.

There must have been a couple of thousand people there with all sorts of kiosks selling food and drink. I was struck by several things. First there was little alcohol being drunk. This may have been partly caused by the new tough drink/driving laws. The second was that  few people were dancing, mostly they listened and chatted. The only applause came from the fans who were close to the front of the stage. Another different thing is that almost all the bands I have seen include some sort of piano accordion or concertina. The sound goes very well with rock music.

On Saturday we drove up into the hills behind Vitória. It is very beautiful and extremely fertile. We saw coffee, bananas, orchids and all sorts of fruits and vegetables being grown.  The area is mainly populated by people of German, Austrian and Italian descent. There are lots of restaurants in those styles.

German traditional dancing

I must admit I was not expecting to see men in leather shorts and girls in European country dresses dancing to accordion music. They are strongly promoting rural tourism – another similarity with Andalucía.

All the hotels except one were fully booked and we took the last room available in our hotel. We were a bit reluctant as there was a big wedding that evening and the bar and restaurant would be closed. The band in the VIP room would be about 10 feet over our heads. “No problem” said the receptionist, “join the party, nobody will notice”  We did not really believe this but brought some nice clothes just in case. We arrived mid-afternoon and saw the preparations. Two sound stages, a truck load of beer, another lorry carrying three enormous barrels of wine, a dozen cooks at a giant barbecue with what must have been a ton of meat, five or six different areas of the hotel were set up with bars, tables and chairs.  It was clearly going to be a big affair.

Around 9pm we joined the party.  I guessed that there were around 600/700 people there. Some women were wearing very beautiful long dresses and their men with nicely tailored suits.

The gatecrashers

At the other extreme some young men were wearing shorts, t-shirts and baseball caps on backwards.  In between these two there was clothing of every level of formality. It made me feel at home as I like the feeling that everyone is wearing exactly what they like to wear.

We found a table and sat down and almost immediately a plate of rice, beans and barbecued meat (churrasco) arrived .  I was hungry and enjoyed this. Half way through another plate arrived, piled high with beef. We turned down several offers of more plates of meat. Not even a hint of bread, salad, chips, fruit or anything healthy. Next came a plate of sausages, chorizo black pudding and other meat delicacies. Finally great trays of cakes and other sweet sticky things arrived, not my sort of food. In between I was befriended by a waiter whose only desire in life was to make me drunk. Every time my beer glass was less than half full he magically appeared and filled it up again.  Flavia was getting the same treatment from the waiter with the whisky bottle.

Towards midnight most of the important guests had left the VIP room so we went in and danced to a lively band.  After 20 minutes the waiters came in carrying great joints of roasted beef, carved them and passed the plates around the room.  I tried to eat some, I really did, but I was defeated. We staggered off to bed when the party finished around 1AM. The resident cock started crowing at 3.30AM and the cleaners started work above us at 6.00AM. I remembered why I prefer towns.

When we went to breakfast at 10.00 there was not much evidence of the party. We have asked the hotel to call us the next time they have a wedding