BRAZIL 2006: Brazil Final Days (Part 1). July 2006

Well last night’s dinner turned into more of an adventure than planned. We went to a place called Grimpa… a  barbecue place (more like what we call a steak house) which was close by… (this is a very very carnivorous country) Turns out Grimpa is much fancier than we thought (but being in jeans didn’t seem to matter)… The restaurant was unbelievable.. but it took us a while to understand the “system” … several waiters came  to explain it — all in Portuguese. Eventually we “got” it. First you go to an appetizer table with an amazing array of choices.. and then when you are ready you turn this little cardboard disk that you have at your place setting to “green”… This means that the entourage of waiters who are walking around the restaurant will stop at your table with any one of 17 different cuts of meats (and also chicken and salmon).. They have the meats on “spits” and they walk around with huge knives… They stop at your table and you decide what you want.. They keep coming until you turn your card to the red side.. then you can flip it back to green whenever you want them to start coming back… It was quite a feast… They also come by with unreal other treats like roasted pineapple with cinnamon.,… and potatoes, and veggies, etc. We also got a royal tour of the barbecue area… and the kitchen… (Since we were always asking for our meat to be very rare… when they showed us the freezers.. they said the meat there was very much like what we like to eat! Oh it turns out that Gimpa is opening its second restaurant… in Miami .. and now we are invited to the opening! …We told them we go to Florida about once a year.. We tried to walk the meal off a bit…. but I think that will take a marathon.

Today, was fairly calm… we left Curitiba with TAM — a local airline — given that our Varig flight was canceled… and arrived in Sao Paolo mid-afternoon…  It’s a huge (more than 20 million population) and sprawling city and much like other large Latin American capitals… polluted and lots of traffic disasters.. It’s also very easy to see class differences..  with unbelievably new and expensive high-rises practically adjacent (not quite.. but certainly close by) to the favellas (squatter settlements)… There are some very very wealthy districts that are more removed from this.. Our hotel is in a section of town called “Brooklin” so we feel right at home.. and there is another neighborhood called Bella Vista (just like where we live in Oakland!)… We’ve sort of figured out a plan for our limited time here in Sao Paolo.. but the wedding will also be time consuming, but that is the reason we are really here in Brazil..

Tonight we met all the Americans who are here for the wedding and had a giant sushi feast in the Japanese section of the city called Liberdade… It turns out that Sao Paolo has the largest Japanese community anywhere outside of Japan..  There are about 21 of us from the US (including the groom’s whole family)… and we come from California, NY, New Mexico, and Washington.. Everyone had a lot of fun telling where they’ve been and where they are headed within Brazil. Everyone seems to have taken different routes during their stays here in Brazil.

On the way to the restaurant, in the taxi, you could see some very entrepreneurial homeless on the major streets… when the cars stopped (about 4 lanes in each direction) they’d jump out in front of the stopped cars and juggle… then as the light begins to change they ask for money from the drivers… then the cars whiz by… A new take on the window washing you get (or used to get) on the Bowery in NY.

Tomorrow we head out to see Sao Paolo — starting with the old section… then it’s off to the wedding.. The events are fairly nonstop… so we won’t have too much time to really see much… and given the scale of Sao Paolo we won’t see much at all… so I guess another trip to Brazil will have to be in the works at some time. .

That’s it.. . Bon Nuite….

Fern