Of Plaid Sofas...

Brazil is known for soccer, Carnaval, and uncomfortable sofas.

Okay, so maybe the whole implied worldwide knowledge of the discomfort of Brazilian sofas is a bit of an exaggeration. 

Unknown or not, the sad fact is that Brazilian sofas offer very little in the way of comfort, at least at our price point.  During our time in Brazil, we had three sets.

Our first set we bought shortly after moving into our house.  It was black and white plaid with touches of green and red.  I imagine the story of the creation of said sofa went something like this.

“Let’s make a sofa,” says first sofa maker.

“But, senhor, we only have enough foam to add a quarter of an inch over the wooden underpinnings.”

“It doesn’t matter.  Make it anyway.”

Thus came into being the sofas that inhabited our living room for a year and a half.  Lest you doubt my story, I can show you the myriad of chiropractor bills that can be traced directly back to that sofa.  Okay, I admit, that too may be a slight exaggeration.

Our second set of sofas we bought after moving to northern Brazil.  It too lacked in comfort but made up for it in quality.  We hadn’t had the sofa long before the material began to wear out eventually sprouting holes.  The foam smashed down even quicker and the wooden frame stuck out of its upholstered cover like bony ribs through a shirt four sizes too small.

Shortly before my sister’s wedding we decided to splurge and buy new sofas.   They were brown and almost—gasp—comfortable. 

We were delighted.  The wedding guests arrived and we had one very tall guest with a proportioned weight.  He decided to sit on the arm of our brand new sofa. 

The poor sofa was angry at being so used and decided to break its arm.

So, although, the eyes of the world are upon Brazil with the upcoming World Cup and Olympics, I don’t think much broadcast time will be spent belittling the country’s sofa making abilities.

But then, those reporters probably won’t be delivering their stories from the all-too-uncomfortable embrace of a Brazilian sofa.

Convenience food barely exists in Brasil.  If it does it cost an arm and a leg to buy, so it’s just all around easier to make your own food since you at least have all your limbs to do so.

One of my family’s favorite foods is Mexican.  Although one might expect that Mexican food would be very similar to Brasil, it is not even remotely similar.  In fact, you can’t find most of the things we use to make Mexican food, including tortillas.

To make a Mexican meal required a lot of work. 

First you needed to sort the beans.  They came dry and often contained other additives like rocks, stones or if you were really lucky occasionally an egg sack or weevil.  Once sorted the beans had to be washed, brought to a boil, and then allowed to soak for an hour or so.  Then they were pressure cooked.  Pressure cookers are a necessity of life in Brasil.

Once your beans were cooking you started on the tortillas.  First the dough was made and then allowed to rest before rolling each piece into a circle.  Humidity made the kitchen moist and hot and the dough was as likely to melt into the counter as to roll into a nice circle.  If you did succeed in completing a haphazardly-shaped, semi-thin, tortilla-like-ish creation you then got the pleasure of frying it over a hot stove.

Once the beans and tortillas were complete—and providing you had not passed out from exhaustion and the blistering temperatures in the kitchen, made worse by all the tortilla frying— you then needed to shred the cheese.  It sometimes turned out to be rancid or festooned with mold.  After whacking away with a knife you were able to shred it.

If you were feeling particularly adventurous you might then make salsa, but in a pinch ketchup mixed with hot sauce provided a decent sauce.

As long as it wasn’t wine ketchup, my family’s name for the off brand ketchups that were a bizarre purple color and did indeed taste like wine mixed with ketchup.  Only a blistering amount of picante sauce would make it semi-palatable.

Once the beans were mashed and flavored and we added some fresh avocado, our meal was complete and delicious enough to make us forget the hours in the sweltering kitchen.

At least until the next time we had a hankering for some Mexican food.

 

Rub-a-dub-dub Spider in my tub...

It is surprising how many varieties of showers there are.  High end showers come complete with marble walls and a hundred or so faucets shooting water at you from every angle.  I imagine the resultant experience might be something akin to getting caught in a monsoon.

On the lower end of the spectrum are the fiberglass showers with only one faucet shooting water at you from one boring angle.

While most Americans might be depressed to have the latter, I still find myself thanking God for my simple, one-faceted shower.

I find my gratitude after experiencing the unforgettable quandary of a Brazilian shower.  Most Brazilian showers are tiled and attached to the shower nozzle is an electrical box that looks like it shouldn’t be anywhere near a shower—let alone in it.

This is the heating element which heats the shower water as it passes through the box, since most Brazilian homes don’t have water heaters.  The higher the water pressure the cooler the water, thus thrusting upon you the quandary of either high water pressure, or hot water, because you sure can’t have both.

I generally ended up settling for something akin to a light-ish warm rain, which wasn’t particularly good for getting the shampoo out of my waist-length hair.  I might have complained then, but soon looked back with fondness as things only got worse when we moved to the jungle in the northern part of Brazil.

We had to build our house and moved in long before it was ready because we had no place else to stay.  This meant we had one bathroom with a toilet and nothing else in it.  The shower was a black plastic 3x3 foot enclosure on the back porch.  This faucet didn’t even have a heating element of any kind.

Even if we had been tempted to linger in the plastic shower, the cold water hastily reminded us to get in and get out with supersonic speed.  The other added benefit was that black plastic attracts spiders.  Very large ones.  There is nothing quite as unpleasant as reaching for the shampoo with icy water pouring down your back and finding an eight-legged voyeur looking up at you.  One was never quite certain if the screams coming from the plastic enclosure were because of the cold water, or the addition of an unwelcome guest.

Things got worse when the power went out and we were left with a limited water supply.  If the power outage was going to last for a long time, we couldn’t afford to waste much of our water on bathing.  A problem in a tropical climate.

We had a choice of either bathing in the river in bathing suits—where our bath water might hide such critters as piranhas or crocodiles.  Or if we got a hard rain we would wash in the overflow from the gutters which was far more refreshing than it sounds.

So while most people may long for the complete spa experience or a fancier shower, for me it’s enough to have four solid walls, hot water, and no spiders playing amongst my shampoo bottles.

We began our language studies with a wide range of books.

On particular book was called “Grupos”.  It was basically conversations written in Portuguese on one side and English on the other.  The idea was to learn to read the conversations quickly, thereby improving one’s knowledge and pronunciation.  Being of a competitive sort, my sister and I also spent a lot of time trying to say it the fastest.    We might have no idea what the words meant, but at least we could say them quickly.

We were quite upset when it was decided that, perhaps, comprehension was more important than speed and our races ended.

One particular conversation in the book included a woman speaking to a guest in her home.  After asking if the guest liked the coffee she said, “My daughter made it.  She’s eligible for marriage.”

A useful phrase if one is a closet Mrs. Bennett trying to get her daughter married off.  With four daughters, my mom might have found the conversation useful if we hadn’t abandoned the book in favor of better ones.

The main problem with Portuguese, though, is that a lot of words sound the same.  (Yes, yes, I know English has to, too, and two, etc…  But I found English so much easier, I learned to speak it as a baby).

Three particular words were Sol, Sal, and Sul, meaning Sun, Salt, and South respectively.  The danger, of course, was to ask someone to pass you the sun at the dinner table or tell someone to go salt to Uruguay. 

Two more words that sound alike are the words for soda pop and cold (as in sick cold).  My Dad fell into their trap when he asked a waiter if he had a cold while trying to ask for pop.  The waiter gave him a funny look.

And we never did get that pop. 

In America, people dream of white pickets fences.

In Brazil, people dream of high cement fences embedded with glass and topped with razor wire.

Or, perhaps of barred fences topped with spikes, or a swirl of barbed wire.

My Dad says because they can’t lock all the thieves up, they lock everyone else up instead.

When it came time to choose a house to rent we had a choice between two.  One was in a neighborhood and had a lemon tree.  The other was part of condominium and the back gate opened onto a long courtyard with a pool and basketball/soccer court.

We forewent the lemonade in favor of the condominium and promptly moved in.  The house was slightly reminiscent of a prison.  The front of the house was cement with two small barred windows high in the wall. 

On one side was the gate that led into a roofed garage area.  Bars went up and ended in spikes.  Bars came down and ended in spikes.  Getting locked out of your house could be deadly if you tried to break back in.  On the plus side no one else could break in either.

It was a bit annoying that you couldn’t pull into your driveway without unlocking a padlock and undoing the chain.  After making it past the first gate you still had to contend with the front door, which was also barred.

As you can imagine, hearing someone knocking on our door was a thing of the past.  Instead, people clapped outside the gate to get your attention.

We became quite grateful for our barred house when there was a prison break shortly after we moved in.  Although the info varies, around seventy men escaped from the prison.

For days, the sound of helicopters searching for the escapees left us very glad for our barred door, our gate, our chain, and our padlock.

In Brazil, we quickly learned the prayers for protection were not a mantra to be taken lightly.

Brazilian homes are also empty when you buy them.  As in NOTHING is left in the house.  We were fortunate in that our kitchen still had a sink.  Cupboards and appliances were gone, but we did have a sink.  There were also built in cupboards in the bedrooms, which was highly unusual.  Most Brazilian homes have bureaus.   

Not so fortunately, the cupboards were painted a particularly weird shade of orangey-browny-yucky-yellow.

We shared common walls with the houses on either side.  Our hallway bordered the neighbor’s hallway.  Since there was not insulation and the walls, ceiling and floor were all cement, the house echoed. This was unfortunate since it wasn’t only our echoes we heard.

Our house was haunted.  Often we would hear the clicking of high heels and we would all be sitting still.

Okay, so maybe that is a slight exaggeration.  It just might have been the neighbor’s heels we heard clicking up and down the hallway.

  All in all, though, our fortress was very nice.

And secure.  Quite, quite secure.

 

 

 

 

Brazilian cuisine is not extremely exciting.  I mean, yes, they do eat chicken hearts and feijoada, a bean dish that contains such delicacies as pork feet and snout. 

For the most part, though, they eat rice and beans (sans pig snout most of the time).  The rice is plain white rice and oil is added while it is cooking.  Beans are brown beans that have been pressure cooked in water.  The beans in the unflavored bean water are then poured over the rice and that’s your meal.

Without salt, it is little more than an exercise for the jaws. 

We were forced to embrace it.  According to missionary friends serving a guest anything other than rice and beans is an insult.   

Salad in Brazil is not tossed.  Instead, the vegetable are cut or shredded and arranged on a platter.  There is no dressing.  Eventually, the wife of another missionary taught us to make homemade French dressing which was the only kind of dressing we had.

We tried to do things properly when having company and so adopted the Brazilian way of having a salad.  We arranged our carrots, beets, avocado, etc…

It was until we’d had several groups of people over that a lady finally took us aside and informed us that avocado was, in fact, a dessert.  It should be served with sugar and not in a salad.

We rallied—although we never did look upon avocado as a dessert.  We removed it from our menu.

Next on the foods to be chopped was the Jell-O.  In the States, Jell-O is considered a side dish.  However, in Brazil, it too was a dessert and only a dessert. 

I can only imagine what our guests thought as they came to the Americans’ house.  Probably something akin to what we would feel if we were guests in someone’s house and found chopped cake in the salad and lemon meringue pie as a side dish.

Of course, there probably is a recipe for cake salad somewhere out there, but it is not something I necessarily want to try.  Nor is feijoada or chicken hearts, although according to my braver sisters chicken hearts aren’t that bad.

I’m quite willing to take their word for it because I never did bring myself to try one.

Have you?

Moving a family of six from one country to another is not for the faint of heart.  There is, after all, quite a lot of junk involved.  I say this fully cognizant of the fact that some of the aforementioned junk was mine, and, therefore, precious.

Honestly, however, moving from one place to another does require the taking of some items.  Clothes to say the least and household items.  Blenders and blankets are useful things, and when moving to a foreign country it is important to have something familiar.  Even if it is only a kitchen mixer.

First, we looked into a shipping container.  However, after adding up the various bills involved, we decided it would be cheaper to buy wood, build a boat, hire a crew and sail down ourselves.

Not being of a nautical turn of mind, we discarded the plan.

So having eliminated the sea we were left with land or air, or a molecular disassembler which then sends the molecules zipping through the air to another molecular reassembler.  The latter option may have been the wisest course but, upon looking into it we discovered it hadn’t yet made the leap from Science Fiction to reality.

We were now down to land or air.

The route to Brazil was long and through multiple places where robbery was the default pastime.  We looked into the price of an armored truck and started military drills.  However, an army of a middle-aged couple and four girls was hardly likely to strike fear into the hearts of any would be robbers.

We had one choice left.  Air.

Since the price of suitcases was high we began to shop at thrift stores to find enough to move a family of six.

Our collection was broad and worthy of any art gallery.  It included a bright orange suitcase.  A delightful neon pink suitcase with a frog sticker.  My carry on was tweed and hard on the bottom and soft on the top.  I have never again seen such a suitcase.

Not being picky we also took suitcases other people offered.  One was a heavy monstrosity with no handle.  Not perhaps the best combination, but then we couldn’t afford to turn any away.

In this imaginary gallery would also stand a statue of my mother and oldest sister, who packed and repacked the suitcases in a valiant effort to get right to the weight limit and not an ounce more—or less.

In the end, there were twenty-four suitcase, six carry-ons, five purses that weighed enough to make Goliath fall over, a briefcase, and a partridge in a pear tree.

 

Have you ever made a long move?

Have you ever lived in a foreign country?