I know, I know...I promised photos today, but they are all on Christian's computer and haven't been edited yet, so you'll just have to wait a little longer.

Today was a fabulous day!  We slept in because we were so exhausted.  Waking up at 10am, the maid, Lucia, had breakfast ready  for us.  She came up and gave me a HUGE hug and rattled off in Portugese while everyone laughed.  Apparently she thinks I'm  very cute because I have blue eyes like her husband.

Good time to talk about domestic help here.  Most middle class families here have maids because the lower class is so poor  that domestic help is extremely inexpensive.  Most middle-class apartments and houses have a maid's quarters attached to the  kitchen and laundry area, and if maids don't have families of their own, they typically stay there during the work week and  return to visit their families on weekends.

For big families, the maids are there all week, but for single people like Uncle Marinho or couples like Pi and Flavia or  Floh and Enrico, the maid may only come once a week.

Maids become an integral part of the family.  Lucia raised Pi and Floh as if they were her own children and even though she  now has become middle class and has a family of her own, she is still steadfast in her devotion to the Murano family.  She is  SO important to them that she is a bridesmaid in the wedding!

I ate very light for breakfast because we were supposed to go to a churrascaria for lunch.  Churrascarias are those massive steakhouses where the waiters come by with giant swords of meat and carve off whatever you like, so I knew I had to save room.  But Lucia had made this coffee cake that was filled with guava and banana and I just couldn't resist a piece.  Or two.   Or three.

Then it was time to go to the "feira" (pronounced "FEY-duh"), or street market, that had been set up in the street right  below Vera's apartment.

Like in many countries, each neighborhood has a market day one day a week.  Vera's feira is mostly food...fresh fruit and  veggies and fish.  Marinho's feira also has other things, like cheap DVDs.  (He got all the Academy Award-nominated films for  about $1 each in his feira.  Back in the US, most aren't even out on DVD yet!)

We walked through the feira looking at all sorts of delicious fruits and veggies, and Floh kept dashing over to the vendors  to get me slices of plum and mango and other fruits I can't pronounce and have no idea how to spell.  The fishmongers had  HUGE shrimp the size of small lobsters, and huge lobsters the size of small cats.

I kept my eyes peeled for hearts of palm, or "palmitas," which is one of my favorite foods.  Vitoria had told me you could  buy huge logs of them in the markets.  But when we eventually stopped by a spice vendor who was very friendly and talkative,  he told us that it's now illegal to sell the hearts of palm because when Brasilians harvest them, it kills the palm tree.   Only the indigenous natives know how to harvest the heart without killing the tree, so only the indians are allowed to  harvest hearts of palm in the wild.  This is one of the reasons hearts of palm are so expensive ($5-$6 for a small jar in the  states) because they can only legally be raised on farms and it takes several years for the tree to mature enough to produce  a single heart, and then the tree dies when it is harvested.

As we left the feira, Floh and Vitoria insisted that I try a "pastel."  This is a pastry that can be filled with meat,  cheese, hearts of palm, or sweet things like fruit or caramel, and fried until it's light and puffy.  This is one of the few  meals you can get in Brasil for very cheap...you get them from street vendors for about $1.  We had a pastel which was  stuffed with ground meat, onions, and olives.  It was DELICIOUS!

By now it was noon and we were supposed to be at the churrascaria in a few hours stuffing ourselves silly, but I was already  full of breakfast, fruit, and pastel.  So we left for the other side of town and stopped by Enrico's (Floh's husband's)  parent's shop.  They sell crystals and handmade crafts and herbs and we got some gifts there and enjoyed meeting them.   They're so earthy and grounded and genuine.  Enrico's mom gave Floh a Reiki treatment while we looked around the shop.

Then we headed to Marinho's to go the churrascaria.  We went to their favorite one, Jardineira.  It was a big building of red  brick, and the inside reminded me of those dining clubs that the idle rich would visit in London back in the 1800s.  Very  high ceilings, formal decor, waiters in tuxes walking around adding and removing sundry eating utensils deftly when you turn  your head to talk to the person next to you.

We were met there by Pi.  That's his nickname, his real name is Luis, but his family calls him PiPi (pee-pee) and we call him  Pi.  (What is up with this family?  Dogs named DooDoo and guys named PeePee?)  He's the one getting married to his lovely  bride Flavia tomorrow, but he had escaped the mayhem of wedding planning for the afternoon to join us for lunch.

They escorted us to our table and the waiter with the drink cart pulled up.  He was there to make caipirinhas and caipiroskas  (basically a caipirinha with vodka instead of cachaca) and his cart was mounded with fresh fruit.  I ordered a maracuja  caipirihna, which is made from passion fruit.  He cut open the fruit and scooped out the pulp and seeds and crushed them into  the drink for me.  You eat the seeds of the passion fruit with the pulp, and they are so crisp and delicious...maracuja has  quickly become my favorite fresh fruit here.

After making the drink, waiters started arriving with food...pao de queijo (little round breads stuffed with cheese), polenta  covered with cheese, smoked nuggets of cheese.  Cheese, cheese, CHEESE!  All this as an appetizer to the salad course.

The salad course is an all-you-can-eat buffet of incredible dishes.  Salmon couscous, smoked salmon, hearts of palm salad,  roasted eggplant, marinated tomatoes, tabouli, mussels, boiled quail eggs, and every type of cheese under the sun that you slice yourself from giant wheels.  I took the tiniest bite of everything and my plate was mounded high, so I didn't make it to the second table, which was filled with hot dishes...rice, feijoada (the Brasilian trademark dish of black beans stewed with a dozen types of meat and sausage), and various soups and stews and seafoods.

As soon as we sat down, the waiters started coming with more food.  Braised salmon with passion fruit cream sauce and  roasted shark with ginger lemon jam.  Smoked "St. Peter fish" (which was my favorite)...a hearty fresh-water fish with firm  flesh that held the smoke beautifully.  Fried bananas.  Calamari.  It just didn't stop.

The conversation at the table was lively, but for the first time in my life, I was so overwhelmed by food that I couldn't  even connect with my tablemates.  It was incredible.  Torture, really, but in a very good sort of way.  Every bite was  amazing, but each bite surpassed the last.  I wanted a full serving of each my favorite things, but there was so much more to eat  that I had to divorce myself from each newly-discovered favorite, knowing there were more to come.

Then came the meat.  Oh, the meat!  You flip a little disc on your table from the red side to the green side to indicate that  you are ready for meat.  And the instant you flip, a line of waiters forms behind you holding a giant sword with a specific  type of meat.  Each one a different cut, each one marinated and cooked a different way.  Everything from tenderloin to skirt  steak to sirloin...then came sausages and chicken legs and chicken hearts.  I thought my favorite was the picanha...a cut called "rump cover" in the US where it can only rarely be found, but which is prized in MOST other countries above even filet tenderloin because of it's robust flavor and tenderness.  It comes from the top sirloin area, but in the US the actual rump cover cut is divided so that pieces of it belong to other steaks and you can almost never find it whole unless you have a butcher.  The picanha was my favorite until they  brought me GARLIC picanha, which was so good that it was TOO good, and it almost hurt my mouth (and my soul!) to eat it.

I kept telling the waiters that I only wanted the tiniest morsel to taste...whether I said it in English, Portugese, Spanish,  or French (the waiters are all multi-lingual), or just pinched my fingers together to indicate, "Just a tiny bit, please,"  they still cut off almost steak-sized portions of meat for me.

I had been to churrascarias in the states before, but it was nothing like this.  Of course Christian and Vitoria and Marinho  and Pi were accustomed to this.  They don't eat there frequently because it's very expensive, but I was a complete virgin to  this experience, and I still haven't wrapped my head around it effectively.

Finally, the meat stopped.  I looked down at my plate which still held probably a pound of prime, grass-fed beef, and wept.   Our plates disappeared by the deft hands of the waiters.

Pi leaned over to me with a gleam in his eye and said, "They have cleaned our table now, and we have asked them to bring the  main courses."  Courses.  Plural.

I could have slapped him.  But it was a joke, and I knew it, and we all had a good laugh after I recovered from the idea of  more food.

The desert cart came by and Christian, of course, had to partake.  He ordered a slice of lemon cream pie and a scoop of a  tiramisu-like combination of creamy pudding and chocolate-covered nougat bonbons.

The check came, and Vitoria and Marinho very graciously picked up the tab.  The spoke to each other quietly in Portugese, and  I later found out in the car that Marinho had said, "Yes, it's expensive, but think about what we've just enjoyed together!   When is the next time we will all be together like this, enjoying each other's company and sharing a feast?  There is no  price you can put on this."

It may have been expensive by Brasilian churrascaria standards, but the tab came out to around $40 per person, which included  all our food and drinks.  The currascarias in Dallas are much more expensive.

They rolled me out in a wheelbarrow.

Not really, but I wanted them to.  I was still in shock and it took awhile for me to come back to myself.

"Make sure you saved room for dinner," Marinho said, "Floh is taking you to all-you-can-eat Japanese food tonight."

I had no response to that.

We came back to Marinho's apartment and I plopped onto the couch.

"I have a delicious coffee ice cream I want you to try, Ben."  And that wasn't a joke.  I begged for a little time, so we all  sat around and chatted.  And somehow I drifted off.

When I woke up, they were all looking at me.  "How long was I out?" I asked.

"We're leaving for the airport in three hours," Christian said.  "You've been asleep for three days.  The wedding was lovely, it's too bad you missed it."

I almost believed him!  Moments later, Marinho had a bowl of coffee ice cream in front of me.  Marinho is very health- conscious in his eating, and I just couldn't believe this ice cream was fat free, but it was.

Floh called and said she was ready for us at her apartment across the river, so Marinho drove over the spectacular estaiada bridge over the Rio Pinheiros.  Estaiada is the type of bridge, not the name...it's a suspension bridge, but the platforms  are gracefully curved and the central tower reaches up into the sky at a striking angle.  The actual name is Octavio Frias de Oliveira, but most people just call it "Ponte Estaiada."  It's magnificent.

Floh and Enrico and Pi and Flavia live in the same apartment building in Panamby, which is a fairly remote district of Sao  Paulo.  It was one of the last areas to be developed in Sao Paolo, so it's one of the newest.  Because it takes 2 hours to  get to downtown in traffic, it's a cheaper area to live in.  But, of all the districts I've seen, Panamby is the one where  I'd live.  There are still large remnants of forest from the farms that were there, so your view is of thick green jungle  rather than a wall of high-rises.  Because of the trees, the air is much fresher and cooler.  There's actually a fragment of  original Atlantic Forest directly below Floh's balcony which is protected by law.

Floh took us to see the slum at her gym.

Yeah, I thought that sounded weird, too, when everyone was telling us, "Floh will take you to see the favela at her gym."

In Panamby, the super-rich, the middle-class, and the dirt-poor all cohabit.  The big favela is surrounded by some of the  most expensive luxury apartments in the city, some of which have private pools on EACH balcony.  The gym where Floh works out  has a giant glass wall that looks out over the favela.  So whille the middle-class people like Floh and the incredible  wealthy people are swimming laps or working on stairmasters with their iPod going, their view is down over the slum where  people's average income is 300 or 400 Reais a month.  (The current exchange rate is $1 to 2.3 Reais, so those people bring  home around $150 a month.)  Pi says that you will see a Ferrari parked on one street, and the next street over will be one of  the poorest in the city.

After the gym, Floh needed to run some errands at the mall, and while we were there, she said, "Oh, Ben, let's get an acai."   Acai is a berry from the northern regions of Brasil that has just recently become trendy in the U.S.  It's one of the most  nutritious substances available in nature, and also gives a strong energy boost.  To make the acai, they blend the berry up  with ice and sometimes other fruits like guarana and banana (Floh's favorite).  We ate the acai with a drink made from mate  (pronounced "MAH-tay," a stimulant tea that is a cultural institution in Argentina, blended with pineapple and passion fruit.   (J-P and I discovered how popular mate was in Argentina...it's like tea in the Middle East.  Any time you have social or  professional interaction with someone, you must share a mate with them.  It is drunk through a metal straw which has a filter  permanently attached to the end to strain out the leaves as you drink, and the whole thing is passed from person to person, sharing the same straw.)

We convinced Floh that we couldn't do justice to a Japanese buffet for dinner, so she decided to cook for us.  Back at the  apartment, she put together an amazing dinner.  It started with a cheese salad made from a type of crumbly cheese like a ricotta or feta mixed with onions, garlic, and tomatoes, along with olive oil and oregano and cumin.  Delicioso!  She also offered us a hard cheese from nearby Minas Gerais, that we put hot pepper jam on top of.  The main course was artichoke risotto, smothered in parmegiano and olive oil.  Afterward I relaxed in the hammock on Floh's balcony listening to the rain in the trees, and life was perfect!

If there has been one theme of my visit here, it has been food.  You can scarcely go an hour without being asked, "Are you ready for some food?"  And yet everyone is skinny and beautiful.  It must be something in the water...

Around midnight, Pi drove us back to Vera's apartment, which is 30kms from Floh's.

More tomorrow as we prepare to leave for the US!

Love,

Ben

Greetings from busy Sao Paulo!  (Apologies for spelling it Sao Paolo yesterday..."Paolo" is the Italian spelling, and Christian's family were Italian immigrants to Brasil.)

I learned that my first email has been bouncing around Brasil, and was even used in an English class, so that puts pressure on me to make certain I'm writing properly.  Still, it's 130am here and I've got so much more to write that you may get a completely incoherent email.

Today's email may be mostly information about Sao Paulo, so that you can understand it a bit better.  Tomorrow's email will be more about my personal reaction to the city and to the people I've met here, and the insights of my friends here on the city and on Brasil.  But today is all about education!

As much as I adore lists of statistics, when it comes to city populations, there's just really no way to know which city is the biggest.  Sao Paulo is definitely in the top 4.  They estimate that the legally-defined area of this city has 19 million people in it, according to the census of 2005.  (NYC metro area has about the same population, but the NYC metro area is almost 7000 square miles and extends almost from Philly to Boston, while the Sao Paulo metro area is half that size.)  However, the urban sprawl has made it hard to define exactly what is "Greater Sao Paolo" and the entire region's urban population (called the Expanded Metropolitan Complex) is 27 million, which makes it the second largest metropolitan region in the world behind Mexico City.

This city is a SEA of skyscrapers.  It's like no other city I've ever been to, and I've been to most of the biggies.  It's not particularly scenic in terms of natural beauty, but it is uniquely intriguing in terms of architecture.  Walking down the street, I saw a neo-classical build smack dab next to a flawless, kitschy Art Deco relic, and a few blocks down was a Tudor mansion.  There are some very striking architectural buildings and a bridge that will blow your mind.

Sao Paulo has been around since the mid 1500s as a Jesuit mission, but it began to grow dramatically in the 1800s as coffee began to be planted and exported.  Slavery was abolished in 1888 (23 years after the U.S.) and then a flood of immigrants from Europe came to Brasil to work in the coffee fields.

When the Great Depression hit, coffee prices fell, and the economy of Brasil tanked.  But then clever entrepreneurs began investing in industrial development, which brought a new wave of immigration, primarily from Italy.  (Today, Italians and their descendents make up the vast majority of Sao Paulo's residents.)  This is where Christian's family came from.  His great grandfather had a brick factory and a sock/stocking factory here.  This new prosperity lured farmers from the rural regions of Brasil, and the subsequent flood of rural people coming to the city for work was what gave rise to the "favelas," or slums, for which Sao Paulo and Rio are famous.

Today Sao Paulo is a mix of extremely poor, a sizeable and growing middle class, and an extremely wealthy upper class.  Crime is rampant here.  All Christian's family have friends who've been robbed and murdered...even last week a close friend of the family was killed in a robbery here. 

But, when confronted with such crime, the citizens of Sao Paulo have learned to cope in a clever way.  At Christian's aunt Vera's apartment, you enter an outside gate that is unlocked remotely by a guard who recognizes you.  You enter the gate and wait until it closes.  The interior gate is then unlocked, giving you access to the building.  In the event that you happen to be in the presence of kidnapper or robbers who are threatening you to pretend that you are friends with them so the guard isn't alarmed...as soon as you enter the elevator, you simply push the button to go to the 22nd floor, and the police arrive immediately.  Their elevator is cleverly programmed so that you punch a series of numbers to indicate the floor you want to visit.  You can't just push "6" to go to the 6th floor.

Statistics show that crime is decreasing in Sao Paolo.  Murders are down 67% since 2000 and are only a fourth of the number of murders anually in Rio.  Sao Paulo is just about to reach the UN's "acceptable" level for violent crime.  But the residents would probably tell you differently.  Christian's cousin Floh says the decrease is due to the current mayor, who put a lot of extra police out on the streets.

You'd think, in a city this large and chaotic without a truly saturated and efficient public transit system, that driving would be a nightmare.  And, yes, traffic can be awful here.  But I've been very pleasantly surprised about how civil and orderly drivers are here.  It's not like Paris or Cairo or Thailand where drivers whizz back and forth between lanes, where they cram 5 lanes of traffic into a street that only has the capacity for 2 lanes.  Driving is straightforward, but spiced up a bit with the thousands of motorcycle delivery boys who DO whizz in and out of traffic like they have a death wish. 

To help deal with crowds, there's a driving restriction in place that's really unique.  If your license plate ends in "5," for instance, you can only drive during rush hour on Monday.  If your license plate ends in "6" you can only drive in rush hour on Tuesday.  The rest of the week, you have to take public transit or carpool.  Outside rush hour, it's still permissable to drive regardless of the day or your license plate number.  Very clever!  And trucks must always stay in the far right lanes on major thoroughfares.

Still, traffic is gridlocked often enough (a drive across town can easily take 2 hours any time of day) that Sao Paulo has attracted the largest fleet of civilian helicopters in the world.  It's faster for businessmen to whirl between the tops of the skyscrapers between business meetings and lunches, so the air is constantly filled with the whir of choppers.  One of the city's chopper companies is run and piloted entirely by women.

Sao Paulo DOES have a subway...one of the best in the world, in fact...but it's coverage isn't good enough to make it an efficient way to get around the city.  There are buses, but I've seen them and they're packed...even the triple-length buses, which I've never seen in any other city.

We left Vitoria's apartment in Santos this morning and it took about an hour to drive up the Imigrantes highway, which was even more spectacular than coming down.  The forest is filled with manaca trees that are heavy with purple flowers.  Vitoria sang a song about them...a folk song that the girls love to sing about getting married "underneath the manaca tree on the other side of the mountain."

Once in Sao Paulo, we stopped to visit Christian's uncle, Marinho, who I've met before in the US.  He's a professional musician and it was cool to see his studio.  Then we drove with his dog, who he told me to call "Dude" but his name sounds more like "Doo Doo," to Christian's aunt Vera's apartment.  Their housekeeper, who is considered part of the family and has been with them for decades, is an accomplished cook, and she made us a traditional Brazilian lunch.  A salad bursting with heart of palm (one of my favorites!), beans and rice, chopped beef in a spicy gravy, and fried manioc root.  Dessert was a delicate custard, a light cake filled with guava and banana, and big, juicy persimmons the size of your palm.  You spoon out the flesh and it's sweeter than sugar.

After lunch, Christian's cousin Floh took us to the big market in the center of the city.  It's a very poor area, so we took a cab.  The market is housed in one of the grand old buildings from the glory days when coffee made the city rich.  And it was wonderful!  So many cheeses and cured meats...fruits you've never heard of, fish fresh from the coast, spices galore...  I can't bring much of this stuff back to Dallas, but I did get a back of whole nutmeg nuts for $2.  Total bargain.  I also spent $12 at a fruit stand getting some of the most exotic fruits they had.  Some are found only in the Amazon basin.  My favorite was siriguelo.  It's like half fruit and half berry.  You put it in your mouth and it's so sweet and tangy it's like a slap across the face.

We came back to Vera's for a rest and Floh made us caipirinhas out of passion fruit and "sweet lemon" which is a type of citrus fruit we don't have in the states.  It smells just like a lemon, but without any hint of tartness, it's just lightly sweet.

Floh's husband Enrico joined us and we went to their favorite pizza restaurant for dinner.  It's one of the nicer pizza places in Sao Paulo...a pizza is around $20.  (Eating out in sao Paulo is pricey...like Europe.)  We ordered two pizzas, each came half with one combination of toppings, and the other half had another combination.  My favorites were the pizza with no sauce, just cheese, thick slices of tomato, slices of fresh mozarella, and Greek olives...and the roasted eggplant pizza.  We also had a smoked-cheese pizza, but it was a touch too cheesy for me, and a pizza drizzled with pesto made from a bitter herb like parsley.  Perhaps my favorite part of the whole meal was the complimentary bread brought out in the beginning...it was a flaky bread with salami baked into it, and you used it to sop up electric-green olive oil that had been soaking with whole garlic cloves.  AMAZING!

As you can imagine, sleep came pretty quickly afterwards...

A few more interesting tidbits about Sao Paulo before closing.  The record high temperature on record here is only 96F (35C), which is laughably cool by Texas standards.  Still, it's darn hot and muggy here most of the time.  The record low is 28f (-2C) and it snowed here once in 1918.  Those low temps aren't common, though.  Uncle Marinho says it does get VERY cold here (in the 40s and 50s F) but since the cold is wet, it's a harsh cold.  Oh, and apparentely Sao Paulo has one of the best public water systems in the world, but everyone still gasps when I drink from the tap and tells me to get water from the filter.  Sheesh...I have Nutribiotic on my side!

Much more tomorrow, including pictures!

Love,

Ben

Greetings from Brasil!  (Yes, you're accustomed to Brasil being spelled with a "z" which is common in the U.S.  Each time you see it spelled here, though, it's with an "s" so I've always used it that way.)

Christian and I arrived here yesterday.  We're down here for his cousin Pi's wedding.  Right after landing in Sao Paolo, we got on a bus to the coastal city of Santos, where Christian's Mom, Vitoria, has an apartment a few blocks from the beach.

The 40-mile drive from Sao Paolo, which sits around 2600 feet above sea level, down to Santos is spectacular.  The Serra do Mar mountains drop precipitously right at the coast.  Because Santos is the largest and busiest port in South America, the highway, known as the Rodovia dos Imigrates, is one of the busiest on the continent, with more than 1 millions cars traversing it each summer weekend.  (When traffic gets bad, they switch BOTH the uphill and downhill sections to flow unidirectionally and they divert the opposite flow of traffic onto an older road.)  Across the final 2400-foot drop to the sea, there are 53 bridges and 11 tunnels, and sometimes it's as wide as 6 lanes to support the cargo traffic coming up from the port to South America's largest city.  So you can imagine riding a bus through the hairpin twists and turns and tunnels of such a massive highway, being passed by huge trucks and trailers, was quite an adventure.  Luckily, the scenery around was so spectacular with waterfalls and cliffs that I was able to keep myself from worrying about the road.

Santos is a huge city, over 1.5 million people, though most of us in the U.S. have never heard of it.  The beach, for miles, is lined with high-rise apartments and hotels, which give way to the massive port where cruise ships and cargo liners are constantly coming in and out.  Santos is historic (founded in 1546) and the port is where the majority of the world's coffee is exported.

Between Sao Paolo and Santos runs a narrow strip of the Atlantic Forest, again something few of us have ever heard about.  The Atlantic Forest is recognized as one of the top 5 biodiversity hot-spots in the world.  It's an unusual combination of rainforest and dry forest, broadleaf and needleleaf, tropical and temperate, that runs almost the entire length of the Brasilian coast for thousands of miles from the northern part of Brasil all the way into Argentina.  It's unique in the world in that the tropical rainforest portion extends BELOW the Tropic of Capricorn into the temperate zone, which brings wildlife that normally live in the tropics, like monkeys, into contact with wildlife and weather that exist in temperate regions.  (Think monkeys in Nebraska.)  And because the area goes from the tropical coast to alpine mountaintops in such a short span, during ice ages the tropical creatures were isolated to the mountaintops when glaciers filled the valleys.  So the Atlantic Forest is filled with VERY bizarrely-evolved creatures and plants.

When we arrived in Santos, we strolled along the beach, and then went to the market to stock up on all of Christian's favorite childhood foods to bring back to the U.S.  We also stocked up on cachaca (pronounced "ka-SHA-suh"), which is Brasil's trademark liquor.  Produced from fermented sugar cane juice, like rum but much stronger, it is used to produce their trademark drink, the caipirinha (pronounced "kai-pu-DEEN-ya"), which is made by crushing limes with sugar and pouring cachaca on top.  Because the water in Santos can have high levels of bacteria (no different from the beaches in Southern California), it is strongly recommended to have one or two caipirinhas after a swim.  Luckily, beach vendors will whip them up for you for a few dollars and deliver them to your beach chair.

For dinner we went to a Lebanese restaurant.  There's a huge Lebanese population in Brasil, probably the largest outside Lebanon, so Lebanese food is plentiful and superb.  This particular restaurant was famous for their yogurt, so we ordered a large plate of it. 

It was as thick as cream cheese, tart and tangy, with the richest flavor and consistency I've ever tasted.  We sprinkled over it a bright green olive oil that was pungent and olive-y, and ate it on whole wheat pitas.  Unreal.  Maybe the most delicious single thing I've ever tasted. 

We slept 11 hours last night, exhausted from two short nights in the days before our trip.

Vitoria's apartment here is GORGEOUS!  Each room has its own balcony, with high ceilings and tile everywhere.  There are separate elevators and entrances for beach trips, with faucets to wash off feet and chairs, so that the building is kept free of sand, compared to most hotels and apartment homes.  Because furnishings in Brasil are so expensive, Vitoria has had almost everything shipped here in containers from the U.S.

Breakfast at Vitoria's apartment was fresh fruit, a locally-made cheese, and fruit juices.  You wouldn't believe the fruits here.  We had a papaya that was almost 3 feet long!  And also "cashew apple" which is the fruit that grows on top of the cashew nut.  The nut was still hanging onto the fruit, so I decided to break the cashew out of its rough husk.

It wasn't working with the knife, so I put it in my mouth to try to crack it.  Vitoria gasped and said not to, but I assured her it was fine.  A few seconds later, my mouth was BLAZING with pain.  I flew to the internet and discovered that the husk around a cashew (and the nut itself) contains URUSHIOL, the compound that causes rashes and irritation in poison ivy.  Cashews must be roasted or steamed to remove the urushiol before it can be consumed, and workers in cashew factories often have long-term health problems because of constant exposure to urushiol. 

I could just imagine my mouth erupting in oozing rashes for weeks, but I've never ever reacted to poison ivy, so I kept my fingers crossed.  I also gargled with vodka, since urushiol is alcohol-soluble.  In an hour, I was back to normal.

This morning we went to the beach.  Vitoria said the water was very cold, but I didn't find it to be any colder than the Caribbean...in fact I remember some trips to St. Maarten where the water was much colder than it is here.  The sand in Santos is dingy grey, but across the entrance to the bay lies an island, Isla de Santo Amaro, which has many white sand beaches.  On this island is the city of Guaruja, which was where Christian's family has vacationed for generations.  When Christian was young they had a house on a rocky point above one of the longest beaches on the island.  Christian still remembers walking around the rocky mountain each day with their maid to bring water from a spring.

Gradually, all the homeowners gave in to pressure from developers, and now the hill where they used to live is covered in high-rise condo units.  In fact, the entire island is now one of the top vacation spots in all of Brasil and practically every square inch is covered in condos and hotels.  As we drove down the main avenue lined with high-rises, Vitoria told me that when SHE was a little girl, nothing on the island was developed at all.  It was completely natural.  And in the span of her lifetime, it has turned into Vegas!

We had lunch at a seaside restaurant in Guaruja, and Vitoria strongly recommended that I get Moqueca de Peixe, a typical dish from northern Brasil.  It was a very hearty, meaty fish (like shark) that was stewed in a cast-iron Dutch oven with tomatoes and coconut milk.  The flavor was so delicate, it was delicious.  It was served over rice and topped with Farofa, which is an extremely common side dish in Brasil.  It's made from toasted cassava flour, which is a course, grainy flour from the root of the manioc plant...the same root that tapioca comes from.  She also recommended that I get Acerola juice to drink.  Acerola is a native Brasilian fruit and its flavor was somewhat similar to passion fruit, but a bit less tart.  After some more sightseeing around Guaruja, we had some passion fruit ice cream (sugar free!) and then took the ferry back to Santos.

We're headed to Sao Paolo tomorrow and things will get hectic...but probably less to write about.  (Apologies all around for the length of this entry.)

Cheers!

 

I'm excited to announce the release of the first volume of my new cookbook series: So You Think You Can Cook: Every Recipe Has A Story!  It's available now by clicking above.  There has been overwhelming positive feedback among the first customers who've purchased it, and they are all excited about Volume 2, coming very soon!

Hi, everyone!  Welcome to benstarr.com.  I'm really excited you stopped by.  Whether you found me by watching the Rachael Ray Show, or have been a regular visitor to this site over the past ten years, you are very welcome here.  If you've been to benstarr.com before, you'll notice that it looks a lot different.  We're slowly incorporating all the great travel blogs and photos from the old site onto this one, so you'll see it change a lot in the coming weeks as we add tons of content.

 

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