Terça-Feira, 11 Março 2008
We slept like bricks until 1:30 AM when two, maybe three, roosters crowed for while (maybe an hour) and then shut their beaks until dawn.
I’ve been fighting a cold and a sore throat for a week so Mary wandered out into town in search of comidas for café de manha. She returned with bread, bananas, super-evaporated milk. We fixed some coffee and felt like royalty.
Mary did a little work (yay for Skype where it’s $0.02/minute to make international phone calls) and I read and relaxed. After one o’clock we strolled toward Centro Buzios in search of more comidas. The condo is one block from the praia (beach) where the women wear fio dental (a thong bikini, it literally translates to “dental floss”).
While walking the sidewalk that skirts the beach, we met Americans. On the way in was a young (30ish) couple from Colorado. The man was tall and gangly with crinkles around the eyes from squinting into the sun. His wife was lithe and pretty. She spoke with a Brazilian accent. It turned out that we may have heard her on the Rosetta Stone program we used to study Portuguese. Returning, we came across an older couple (70ish) form North Carolina. They made little effort to learn any phrases and were staying in a hotel run by some expatriate Brits.
We asked the young couple (she grew up in the area) to steer us toward a reasonably priced restaurante. Most of the restaurants have someone who speaks passable English but we try to use Portuguese as much as possible. They recommended Boom a Kilo gastronomica (the food is paid for by weight—salads are an exceptional value this way) on Rua Turibio de Farias. We ate a very satisfying meal that included feijoada—the national dish that is a stew of beans and meat. At $R30, it came to about $18US.
Depois almoça (after lunch) we shopped for a few groceries at a tiny “supermercado.” (have you ever been in a supermarket that did not carry eggs?) We pulled out our short shopping list that we had spent an hour translating English to Portuguese. Por exemplo, we needed to know that mel is honey and eggs are ovos. Our little walking tour took quatro horas.
As the sun set, the wind gusted and we watched an intense lightning storm behind the hills across the bay. We only saw the flashes. We were too far to hear the cannons in the rain.
Nullius in Verba 