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

The best views are for the poorest people. The favelas or slums extend up the hills of the coastal cities in the sorts of locations that would be the millionaires’ row in most countries.

Lifts or Elevators. Apartments often have two (or more) lifts of which one is for servants, tradesmen, wet and sandy people from the beach  and those carrying rubbish.

Coffee in self service restaurants is free provided free of charge from insulated containers at the exit. It is taken standing up. I guess it is a good way to move the customers from the table after they have finished eating. There are often free cups coffee in supermarkets and stores.

Self-Service restaurants charge by the weight of your plate.  Meat, fish, salad, beans, rice, chips are all weighed together. It is a much better system than the Spanish “eat until you vomit” for a fixed price or the English “all you can pile onto a single plate”  It makes calorie control much easier.

Plastic self-adhesive hooks are very hard to find and double the European price when available..

Gasoline For many years gasoline has been mixed with alcohol. Cars marked  Flex can also run on 100% alcohol and some can run on liquid gas.

Sugar Consumption is astonishingly high at 50 kilos per capita per year. See US Department of Agriculture This leads to high figures for obesity related deaths.

Monarchy It is the only South American country to have had a monarchy. In the early 19th century the Portuguese royal family fled from Napoleon and set up the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and Algarves. In 1822 independence was declared under the Emperor D. Pedro I. In 1889 the last Emperor was deposed and a republic proclaimed.

Beer here is the same Pilsener style beer that you see all over the world. It is the only country that I recall where draught beer is more exensive than canned or bottled beer. In most bars you can buy beer by the meter which does save a lot of work for the waiters. The strangest thing about the beer here is that I have seen several people add salt.

Cars I was wrong when I said there are no expensive status symbol cars. Apparently there are plenty but they mostly live in their garages while their owners drive more modest vehicles. It is inviting theft, hijacking and kidnapping to drive around in a $250,000 car. Expensive cars are used for safe trips to secure places. This type of crime is decreasing. I am preparing a piece on security and crime in Brazil

It is hard top know where to start, Portuguese is so similar to Spanish that it is quite easy to learn. On the other hand almost every word has a little trap in meaning, spelling or pronunciation that makes it different. Sometimes a word has all three differences. There are quite a few words in both languages that are not shared at all.

Brazilian pronunciation is quite different from Portuguese Portuguese and several people have told me that they do not understand much when a Portuguese person talks. The reverse is not true, there is a lot of Brazilian culture in Portugal, mainly cinema and TV and so they are used to the accents of their former colony. It is much the same but less extreme with American and British English. When I get stuck here I talk in Spanish with varying degrees of success.

Flavia’s friends and family mostly speak at least fairly good English – I am not sure that it is a good thing for me to expect them to speak it much.

Flavia´s daughter Jana

Outside of the professional and educated classes very little English is spoken and they tend to look a bit blank when I try my European style Spanish with an English accent.

My studies were going quite well until Flavia arrived in Europe in late April. Since then there has not been much time for reading or the iPod lessons – and I have been a bit lazy. I had hoped to find a Portuguese class for foreigners here but there do not appear to be any. There are few foreigners here and they are mostly working for multi-national organisations who have their own in-house training. There are individual tutors but that is a very expensive way of learning a language. I need to find someone learning English and spend an hour or two helping each other a couple of mornings each week.

I can get the gist of most conversations, read a newspaper and understand a lot of TV programs like news broadcasts and documentaries. I am totally lost with soap operas, jokes, slang, complicated language structures and different accents. It is getting a bit easier each day. I am not talking much yet.

The victim will be my Spanish. I don’t think that I will be able to speak both languages and the two will slowly merge and I will talk something called Portañol in both countries. The important thing is to be able to communicate.

Brazilian Portuguese can sound very strange to an English speaker. Take my name: like the Spanish they do not start a word with a ST sound so it is Esteve. Except that most of their T sounds are pronounced TCH so now it is Estcheve. But they do not end a word with a V so finally my name is Estchevey.  Welcome to the Internetch. The Formula 1 racing driver Emerson Fittipaldi sounds much less glamorous when he is called Fitchipaldgi.