A Trip to Brasil

I just got back on Monday night from a trip to Brasil, visiting my sweetie's family. She grew up in Sao Paolo which--from what I hear--is big, crowded, and dirty, but many of her family members now live in Belem, which is on the edge of the Amazon, virtually on the equator.

My first experience of Brazil was a 9 hour layover in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, in a tiny airport where we noshed on pao de quiejo, or cheese bread, warm dough nuggets the size of unshelled walnuts with melted cheese inside. How can you go wrong?

In Belem the first night we had pizza with the family. I reached for mine and my sweetie muttered under her breath, "Knife and fork!" They're very formal there, about some things, at least. The pizza had shrimp and a leafy green called jambu, which numbs your tongue. For lunch the next day we had--among many other things--a dish called tucupi, whose base is the greens of the manioc plant, which need to be processed and fermented for an entire week to make them digestible. Very tasty stuff.

We visited the Vero Peso open air market, which was probably the highlight for me. They wouldn't let me bring my camera because they said it would disappear, so the photo above is from Parqueamazonia.org, which also has some other great pictures of the area. The fish market had piranhas and sting rays, among many, many other fish. There were many familiar vegetables, and many unfamiliar ones. Greens, herbs, mangos, coconuts, cashews, acai berries, okra, pumpkins, chiles (pimentas), fresh black-eyed peas and so much more.

At some point this century someone had the lovely idea of planting mango trees along the major avenues. They're quite pretty but I hear that, during mango season, they fall and dent your car. I'm not much of a fruit person, but I tasted everything in my path. Graviolas, acerolas, guavas, cashew fruit. Three different kinds of fresh-squeezed juice with each meal.

I've never had much of an urge to travel because I'm fortunate enough to find my day to day environment consistently interesting. But this trip made me realize that, even though my day to day world may be big enough to keep me entertained, I should never lose sight of the fact that there's so much out there to experience.