Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
After traipsing around the continent for more than two months it was delightful to be welcomed into a home….
We spent the week with Gisele and Eduardo, Brazilian friends of ours met through the KPMG London connection. It was great to just hang out and Gisele and Eduardo are excellent hosts. They introduced us to some of the finer points of Brazilian life:
- Guarana has become an addiction. I've never really liked soft drinks, but I'm thinking it's a good thing that this drink is only available in Brazil! I couldn't get enough of it! Its made from a fruit in the Amazon Rainforest and is a bubbly, brown concoction of pure heaven.
- Brazilian BBQs. If you're looking for a flat in Brazil and it doesn't have a BBQ built into the balcony, its pretty much straight off the list. The Brazilians love to BBQ and they do it well (with proper charcoal, not those mangy heat bead things you get in England!). Eduardo cooked two fabulous BBQs for us and we dined like kings.
- Chocolate. Gisele works for a company that produces lots of chocolate. Good stuff and there was pretty much a constant supply readily available during our stay. Fantastic!
Our first day in Curitiba was spent touring the city on one of those hop-on, hop-off busses. It was a great way to see the city with some hidden gems we wouldn't have found on our own. My favourtie was the University of the Environment. The bus dropped us off on a suburban street and we were a little confused. We wondered how on Earth, in this suburban environment, they'd managed to make a world class Environmental University. But just off the roadside a track led us through a cool rainforest with a stream running alongside it. At the end of the path, the rainforest opened up to reveal a huge lake at the bottom of a sheer cliff, with plenty of fish, ducks and swans. The building was cleverly built off to the side, nestled into the rainforest overlooking the lake. The only problem is that with such a lovely view out the window, how do the students concentrate!?
On our second day in Curitiba we caught the train to Morretes. The train line carves through the mountain rainforest to the coast below and was originally used to transport gold to the port for shipping out of Brazil. The views are meant to be spectacular - I say 'meant' because unfortunately the rainforest valleys were mostly shrouded in misty fog! It gave them an eerie, primeval feel. Though we didn't see the spectacular views, the rainforest was beautiful all the same.
In Morretes we had our first proper Caiparinha. I didn't realise before arriving in Brazil that they should actually be made with cachasa rather than vodka. Cachasa is a Brazilian spirit made from sugar cane that smells like tequila and makes you think of rocket fuel. I'm not sure what we'd said to the waiter to make him our friend, but I'm pretty sure the man was trying his best to make his new friends as drunk as possible, in the shortest space of time. I have never felt so intoxicated from one drink!
Much of the remainder of the week was spent doing the things we hadn't been able to do for a couple of months. Watch TV, do some washing, cook, bake cakes, read and sleep, basically have some normalcy for a few days. We are very grateful to Gisele and Eduardo for allowing us to slouch around! Batteries certainly recharged!
- comments