Of Street Vendors...

There is something adventurous about eating food from a street vendor.  It is one step wilder than a picnic and not quite at the level of drinking from a cattle pond (we had a friend who did this).

In Brazil, you could find everything from drinks to snacks to sweets sold by a hopeful person with a cart.  One of the most popular drinks was sugar cane juice.  I never tried any since drinking unfiltered water is an invitation to get sick, but I heard the taste described as grass-flavored, mildly sweet water.

For snack foods, one of the most popular was corn.  Now, Brazil does not have sweet corn like we were accustomed to eating.  The corn is tough and not very good tasting.  Eating an ear—even drenched in butter and salt—was exercise for the jaws and disappointment for the taste buds.

Because of our dislike of the corn there, we never tried it from a street vendor.  After boiling it, they would roast the corn over an open fire, leaving it toasted and streaked with charcoal.  Since it had already been tougher than shoe leather, I couldn't imagine what kind of exercise it would be for the jaws after the roasting. 

Our absolute favorite street vendor was the churro man. 

Every week at the feira (a vegetable street market) we would meander through the stalls checking out the fruits and vegetables.  My mother had a feira cart, basically a metal basket on wheels with a handle to pull it.

After making our purchases, we would head to the entrance of the feira, and on occasion we would stop at the churro cart.

The man would shoot the batter into the hot oil, wait for it to fry, and then flip them out into a bath of cinnamon and sugar.

The final stage was to stick a long metal tube through the middle of the churro and gradually pull it out leaving behind a filling of oozing doce-de-leite.  Doce-de-leite is a thick, very  rich caramel.

Fried batter, cinnamon and sugar, and a luscious filling made a delectable if extremely unhealthy treat.  We justified it since we had, after all, walked to the feira.  And we were there for a good purpose.  To buy healthy fruits and vegetables.

And, yes, we went for the churros too.

Of Ice Cream…

Most people like ice cream.  The few who don’t primarily dwell in mental wards.  Okay, not really, but ice cream really is a dessert loved around the world.

Every country has made the dessert their own by adding their own spin.  In Wales, I was surprised to see licorice and black current ice cream, and fell in love with honeycomb ice cream.

In Brazil, some of their different flavors were acai and cupuacu.  None of my family were particularly fond of those flavors, but we did enjoy tapioca ice cream with tapioca beads suspended in its creamy goodness.  That was in an ice cream store in Belem, which was about eight hours from our house.

Closer to home, we relied on the local markets for ice cream (as long as we took an ice chest to keep the ice cream from melting on the long trip home).  The selection of flavors was small.  Vanilla, Chocolate, Neapolitan, Flocos (chocolate shavings in vanilla) and Rum with Raisins.

We ate almost all the flavors, but our favorite was Flocos. 

The one we never tried of our own free will was the Rum and Raisin.

Mind you, I said of our own free will.  We lived in the southern part of Brazil for a year and a half, and were invited over to multiple houses shortly after our arrival. 

One house was a tiny apartment with room at the table for only the oldest four of my family.  My younger sister, Jolie, and I were put at a tiny table in the kitchen. We struggled to get though lunch, Brazilian lasagna.  Far different than its American counterpart, the lasagna was a lot richer than we were accustomed to eating.   

We were excited when we saw that dessert was ice cream and a type of fruit we’d never tasted.  Papaya.  Now, for anyone who has never tried papaya, I would describe the flavor as flowery.  I like the smell of flowers, but found the taste impossible to like. 

Jolie and I looked at each other and dutifully cut into the orange flesh of the papaya.  We would be polite if it killed us.  At least, we consoled ourselves, we had the ice cream to wash it down.

After a few bites of the papaya we rewarded ourselves with a bite of the ice cream.  We looked at each other in horror at our first experience with Rum and Raisin ice cream.

Thankful to be in the kitchen so no one could see our struggle not to laugh, we washed down the flavor of the papaya with the flavor of the ice cream, which we quickly washed away with the flavor of the papaya…and so on until we managed to empty the plates.

I never learned to like papaya.  I do still love ice cream.

Just not Rum and Raisin.

Of Roofs and Such…

After moving from southern Brazil to the North, my family was blessed to be able to live in a house belonging to an American lady while constructing our home.  While the two bedrooms were enclosed, and even had air conditioning, the rest of the house was not. 

Instead, the roof was made of rafters covered with red tiles. Each tile was arched with a raised area on the end to fit it onto the wood laid across the rafters.  Tiles were laid with the curve facing up and then tiles were laid in between those facing down. 

Made of red clay, the tiles were attractive to look at and held up to the weather well. 

There was one very big problem with them though.  When the tile met the wall of the house there was a gap left.  A gap of about two to four inches square. Or in other words, just about the proper size for a tarantula, or snake, or mouse, or other small creepy crawly you don’t want in your house. 

One creature that made its home in and out of the roof of the house was a gecko.  The gecko to show his appreciation left us a “gift” every morning in the hallway.  Sometimes, there was more than one so you didn’t walk around the house barefoot, and you cleaned up the floor first thing after leaving the safety of the bedrooms.

Of course, the safety of the bedrooms was dubious since upon arriving after a days’ long trip from the south, we were shown around the house.

In the master bedroom bathroom sink was a several inches long pior-de-cobra.  In English, that means worse-than-a-snake.  In other words, the bites of these not-so-little centipedes were worse that the bite of a snake.  Considering Brazil boasts quite a number of nasty, deadly snakes this was a bit alarming.

We were grateful for the use of the house and the refuge found in the almost enclosed bedrooms.  But we had very definite ideas about making our own house rodent, arachnid and reptile free.

Or so we hoped.

Of paint…

Some people can paint.  Some cannot.

I grew up painting.  Walls, that is.  Although I enjoy picture painting, I am by no means the next Renoir. However,  when it comes to slapping paint on walls, I manage pretty well.

One of the first things we did in Brazil was help to construct a church.  The church we were attending had been renting a building, but had recently purchased some land and began building the church.  They were in the process of prepping the tiles for the roof when we arrived. 

Cement block walls rose to meet metal rafters and the tiles were about 4x6 feet and were made of cement as well.  The tiles were wavy with about five or six waves per sheet. 

My family and I were asked to help paint and showed up at the church ready to work. 

Now, one very important aspect of painting is the paint.  Good paint in the can means good paint on the walls, and bad paint in the can—I’m sure you’ve guessed—means bad paint on the walls.

One of the men from the church had prepped the paint.  Not being of a painting mind, he assumed the following. 

1.      If adding a little water to thin the paint was good…

2.      Adding a lot of water was better…

3.      Adding even more water would stretch the paint even further.

4.      One could paint the entire ceiling with a gallon of paint.

My family and I regarded the resultant paint with dismay.  The consistency of skim milk, there was no way on earth it was going to cover the tiles.  Or stay on the rollers long enough to get to the tiles, since it ran from the rollers like water through a colander. 

We grabbed rollers with the longest nap possible and dunked it into the paint before slopping it onto the tile using the nap to push it around and create some kind of coverage. 

The results were splotchy to say the least.  We did use up all the watery paint on several coats of paint none of which did much to cover. 

In the end, the church bought a few more buckets of paint and my dad rushed to assure the man from the church that he would thin it as much as needed.

Perhaps a lesson to be learned is, like that man from the church, we think that the Gospel could be improved with maybe a few other things added to it.  And if a few things added are good, maybe a few other things to make it more appealing to a sinner would be better. 

But the only thing that can truly and abidingly cover the multitude of our sins is the pure and unaltered Gospel.  Jesus’ blood and atonement is enough.  Don’t thin down the Gospel with anything else.

And to avoid frustration, don’t thin your paint with too much water. 

Of Travel…

I flew back from Wales last week.  The trip included an hour to the airport.  A seven or eight hour flight to Newark and then around a two hour flight home, followed by an hour long drive.

Some might consider that a long trip, but after living in Brazil, any trip that last less than a day is a short trip.

When we first moved to Brazil, we lived about an hour from the airport.  After the move to Northern Brazil we lived seven or eight hours from the airport. 

A typical trip home to the west coast included the following.

1.       Drive to the airport.  This may sound easy, but with the conditions of the roads, this could last up to eight hours, and incalculable stress.  At one time, the state of Para decided to redo their roads and began by scraping off the asphalt and smoothing the dirt roads.  This was a vast improvement over the pot-holed asphalt roads.  We had particular places where the bathrooms were more or less clean and we could eat lunch.  Usually a small fried pastry called a pastel.

2.       Once we got to Belem, where the airport was located, we found a place to stay the night.  At first it was hotels, but eventually, we ended up staying at a guest house at a Christian camp. 

3.       After a very early morning we flew SOUTH to Sao Paulo.  Yes, we were actually only a few hours flight from Miami, but our flights always went through Sao Paulo. 

4.       After a five or six hour flight we had an entire day to kill until the flight to Chicago left at ten at night.  Since we usually had a lot of luggage, airport strolls weren’t really an option.

5.       The flight to Chicago was around ten hours long.  If we were fortunate there might be a movie worth watching, or better yet some empty seats where we could lay down and try to sleep.

6.       Landing in Chicago we switched over to speaking English and waited for our afternoon flight to Oregon. 

7.       The five or six hour flight to Oregon seemed interminable.  Partially because we had already read the airline magazine cover to cover on the previous flights.

We arrived in Oregon jet-lagged and exhausted after about three days of traveling.

And that is why, for me, any trip that lasts less than a day seems like a walk in the park.

Of Coffee…

Brazil is the leading producer of coffee in the world, accounting for about a third of all coffee produced.  It might be expected that Brazil is a country of excellent coffee.

It isn’t.

Mainly, because, although it does grow wonderful tasting coffee, it then exports all of those wonderful beans to be enjoyed by other countries.

The inferior coffee left behind was sometimes stretched with ground up, burnt peanut shells. 

Brazil had two main types of coffee that were popular. 

One of the most popular coffee drinks served in Brazil is Café com Leite, which as the name suggests is coffee with milk.  This was my mother’s favorite.

The second, cafézinho, was a very small cup of coffee, about the size of a shot of alcohol.  This was actually a good thing since cafézinho is very potent.  Made of very strong coffee, with a lot of sugar added, the resulting concoction more closely resembles syrup than liquid. 

What’s odder is that cafézinho is often given out for free at gas stations.  Along with coolers of water complete with a communal drinking cup.

In spite of the fact that my mother hates sugar in her coffee, she did occasionally enjoy a cafézinho.  My dad is also partial to strong coffee.  This created a bit of fun when we came home on furlough.

My wonderful grandmother and her husband always welcomed us into their home on our furloughs.  Now, my grandma’s idea of coffee was a pale amber color and seemed to have only a passing acquaintance with coffee grounds.  My parents were less than fond of the mild brew.

Their solution was to get up and make the coffee.  Unfortunately, my Grandma was used to her watery brew and eyed my parents black concoction with distaste.  After a few mornings, she gently told them that she was okay making the coffee. 

In the end, they each made a pot of coffee suited to their tastes and gave our family a fun story to tell.

But no matter how strong you like your coffee, chances are it may have been grown in Brazil.

 

 

Of Idioms…

Since I am in Wales visiting my sister (she married an Englishman), I have been thinking a lot about idioms.  Those phrases that people use that make perfect sense to people with whom they share a nationality, but which cause a lot of head scratching for those who don’t.

For instance, in England, they use the phrase “lost the plot” to say someone is out of their mind.

In Brazil, the idioms have the added ‘confusion benefit’ of being in a different language.  Americans would refer to clunker cars as lemons, whereas in Brazil, the word for a car that’s a lemon is a pineapple.   I’m not sure why people associate poorly running vehicles with yellow fruit, but apparently we do.

In America, it rains cats and dogs, but in Brazil (were idioms based in reality) you would be more likely to be clunked on the head with a knife and fork than a cat or dog.

And then there are the phrases that when translated into English make no sense whatsoever.  In a bakery we were often helped with the phrase, “Pois não” which literally means, “Because No.”  Although, it might sound rude, it was an expression used to offer help.

"Sei la" literally means, "I know there."  It's used to mean, "I don't know."  So, apparently, if you know there, you don't know here.

"Legal” has the same meaning in Portuguese that it does in English, but it can also mean that something is “cool”.  This is helpful to know so someone’s not offended when they’re told that their new car is lawful, when what they were hoping to hear is that their new car is the best thing on four wheels.  

The truth is that once you get past the confusion of a new idiom, they’re fun to add to your vocabulary. 

At the very least, you can enjoy the look of bafflement on someone’s face when they have no idea what you’re saying.

Do you have a favorite idiom?