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This is the biggie. The construction of an outdoor fireplace and wood-burning pizza/bread oven. HUGE project...14 feet long, 11 feet high at the top of the chimney. I don't know what I was thinking. You may have noticed the absence of a date from the title of this post. This is because it was begun July 2009 and here, in May 2010 I'm STILL WORKING ON IT! Granted I've had a few distractions and major projects for friends in the interim. But I'm still plugging along...
A unit this huge needs a serious foundation. I am hoping (fingers crossed!) that a 6" slab reinforced with 1/2" rebar (the thick kind), and water-cured to slow down the curing process, will suffice. If I'm wrong, the foundation will crack beneath the weight of the fireplace, the fireplace will tear itself a part, and I'll have a HUGE mess to clean up.
Again, the 6" foundation form was built with lumber from the deck, so that was free. 1/2" rebar comes in 20' sections at Home Depot for about $8. I brought my bolt cutters and cut it into the appropriate lengths in the parking lot, and then drove it home. Ideally, to prevent water from pooling beneath the slab, you want to dig down a few inches and fill that space with compacted gravel. Did I do that? Nope. Would a contractor? Possibly, but probably not. It's the right thing to do, but I was so nervous about pouring a slab of this size that I tossed down a bit of landscape fabric and gravel and got to mixing.  We're talking 50 80-pound bags here, people! That's 4,000 pounds of concrete that I single-handedly lifted into the mixer!!! I was really, really, really nervous about pouring 50 bags by myself, so I enlisted Chris and Christian to help. This was Christian's first real effort in the renovation. (Chris has been helping all the time.) And he actually had a blast working with the concrete! It's fun stuff.  See that rebar sticking up out of the concrete? Those are anchors embedded into the slab that will reach up through the cinder blocks and tie the fireplace securely to the slab. Technically you don't need them if you're not in a earthquake zone (and we're not, though we've had a couple of 3.0 tremors in the past few years!) but I'm really nervous about this project, so I did it anyway. You have to have your blueprints drawn out exactly, and you have to measure VERY carefully before you place this rebar. It must stick up directly into the holes (or "bays") of the cinder blocks, so placement is critical.
I have meticulously sketched out each individual layer of cinder blocks all the way up to the chimney using graph paper, so I know exactly where these rebars should be. Does that make me any more confident when I pound them into the ground?
OF COURSE NOT! I practically soiled my pants, I was so nervous.  Just like before, you overfill the form, jiggle the concrete to get it to settle, then screed off the top using a 2x4. After it sets up a bit, you finish the edges with the edging tool, but you don't have to do any surface finishing because we're building on top of it.
After the concrete set up, I left the forms on it, covered it with heavy plastic, and let it sit overnight. The next morning, I drenched the slab in water and let it run between the form and the slab. I did this every few hours to help slow the evaporation of water, which makes the concrete cure more slowly. This increases its strength. Wet-curing or water-curing is used occasionally when it's VERY important for concrete to be strong.
I let the slab cure for 2 weeks before building on it. Two layers of cinder blocks went down in the outline of the whole unit. (I've gotten loads of free or almost-free cinder blocks over the past couple of months by watching Craigslist like a hawk.) From left to right, there's 4 feet of pizza oven, then 6 feet of fireplace, then 4 feet of wood storage.  This image is looking down the unit...I'm at the far end working on the pizza oven section.
The center section where the fireplace is was filled with rubble and styrofoam (I had saved up old Sonic cups and packing peanuts for this express purpose...keeps it out of the landfill and makes the whole unit lighter). When I had it filled to within 4" of the top of the cinder block perimeter, I laid out rebar and poured concrete. Into the concrete, I embedded firebrick, a special kind of brick built to resist repeated high temperatures and rapidly fluctuating temperatures. Normal brick or cinder block would rapidly begin to flake and "spall" under these conditions, so we don't want the fire to ever come in contact directly with the cinder block or concrete.
Next comes the foundation for the pizza oven. The oven is heavy, so I need a sturdy foundation. I laid a piece of 1/2" cement board (HardiBacker...$30 at Home Depot) over the cinder block perimeter and I supported it from below with 2x4s. This layer I'm about to pour is going to weigh almost 700 pounds, so the cement board itself can't support that weight until the concrete cures and can support itself. That's why we have to prop it up from below with 2x4s.
Then I built the rebar reinforcement. To make sure concrete didn't leak out between the form and the cement board, I also laid some old pieces of tarp along the edge. Then I poured the concrete.  This 4-inch foundation layer required 8 80-pound bags of concrete. I covered it and let it cure for a few days before pouring the second layer...VERMICRETE!  The key to a great pizza oven is a thick layer of dense material that holds the heat well from the fire, but that is surrounded by great insulation so the heat stays in the oven and temperatures can soar above 700 degrees. Concrete is a heat sink...heat sucks right into it and stays there. If we put the oven right on top of concrete, all the heat from the fire will suck down into the concrete and out into the cinder blocks, and we'll burn through SO much wood trying to get the oven heated up because the heat is escaping into the foundation.
So...the solution is vermicrete! Vermicrete is a mixture of Portland cement (the basic ingredient in concrete) and vermiculite, which is an expanded volcanic glass. You know that volcanic rock called pumice that's full of holes and really light? Well, vermiculite is similar, but much lighter, and it comes in little pills. You can buy small bags of it at garden supply stores, or HUGE bags of it at a feed store. I bought a 4 cubic-foot bag that was almost as big as me for $30, and it worked for the whole insulating layer.  To make vermicrete, you add 1 part of Portland cement to 5-6 parts of moist vermiculite. You mix it really well and dump it into the form. This stuff is really, really light. The 4" layer of vermicrete weighs about 60 pounds, while the 4" layer of standard concrete below it weighs 700 pounds. It has an R value of just over 8, equivalent to a couple of inches of fiberglass insulation. The foundation for the pizza oven is ready, but I'm going to put a separate blog entry for the construction of the oven. Let's move on to the rest of the fireplace...
Any time you work with cinder block, you'll have to make a cut every now and then. The easiest and most precise way is to use an angle grinder ($30 for a decent one) with a masonry cutoff blade. Don't be stupid like me...wear a respirator when cutting because lots of silica dust is produced, and you DO NOT want silicosis of the lungs. Score the block about 1/2" deep, then turn it over and score the other side. Lay the block on the ground and tap it firmly with a hammer along the score line, turning it over occasionally, until the block cracks along the score line. Simple!
I lay a layer or two of block each day, working about 2 hours a day. Here I'm putting the finishing touches on layer 7. It's starting to look like a fireplace structure now! Here you can see the layout, from left to right, the pizza oven foundation with its own wood storage area below, then the fireplace in the center, and the main wood storage area at far right. You can see angle irons above the openings for the fireplace and the wood storage. You need to use these across any unsupported span to anchor and support the cinder blocks. You use 2 for each span, so BOTH sides of the cinder block are supported. They will eventually be covered by stone veneer, so you won't see them.
I've still got a long way to go on the fireplace. We'll cover things like firebrick and flue tiles in a separate entry, and the pizza oven will have its own entry as well. For now, I'm just chugging along, a few hours a day, and it's slowly coming together!
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The sub-base for the flagstone is going to be 6" of compacted "flex-base." Flex-base is recycled pavement from roads that have been torn up or resurfaced, so it's a very green product, considering you're saving it from going into a landfill. More on flex-base later when it actually arrives, but before it does, we need a way to retain 6" of it throughout the backyard without it spilling into the fence or the neighbor's yard.
The best solution to this is to pour retaining curbs that hold the gravel in. We had torn up a bunch of 2x6 lumber from the deck, and the curbs need to be 6" high to retain the gravel...what a coincidence! So the lumber to build the forms was totally free!
These curbs are 4" wide and 6" high, they are reinforced with 3/8" rebar, and every 5 feet or so they sit on top of a "pier" or a pillar of concrete that goes down into the ground to support it. To make the piers, we just dug a pit about a foot deep every 5 feet or so along the line where the curb would run, and drove a piece of rebar into the center of it. That rebar will poke up into the concrete of the curb to help keep it solid and upright for decades.  After a half hour or so, when the concrete sets up nicely, we run a concrete edger (a cheap hand tool) along the edges of the concrete to round them off. This will make sure they aren't brittle and breakable once the forms are removed. It only takes a few hours for concrete to set up firm enough to remove the forms. The curbs run around the perimeter of the yard, and down the division where the patio will split into a higher and lower level.
I had actually been really worried about pouring the curbs...I somehow thought it would be the hardest part of the renovation. They were surprisingly easy...the building of the forms was the longest part. But still, everything took less than an afternoon.
Done! Now, time for the biggest project of all...
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There was already a wooden retaining wall descending into the garden, but I knew that if I was laying stone over the backyard, the wooden retaining wall would decompose LONG before the stone did, and I'd have an expensive nightmare on my hands. It made sense to remove the wooden retaining wall and replace it with a stone wall that would integrate seamlessly into the backyard.
My friend J-P suggested that I raise the retaining wall above the level of the backyard, turning it into a bench along the garden which would also prevent people from falling off the 2' drop into the garden at night during parties. Brilliant! The less I have to worry about lawsuits, the better.
The first task was to rip out the landscape timbers. Using heavy pry bars and a chainsaw, an afternoon of grumbling and grunting and the timbers were all out. We discovered all sorts of cool snakes and insects and lizards living behind the wall.
My friend Karen, who works for an attorney who sues contractors, said we needed to get the new wall in place immediately. If it rained too much and the ground slumped where the retaining wall used to be, the slab foundation of the house could crack! Ugh...
I posted the used timbers on the FREE section of Craigslist, and within an hour there was a guy here taking them for use in a haunted house. They were dirty and had rusty rebar sticking out of them, and I had mentioned this in the ad, but that didn't stop more than 30 people from emailing in the first hour! Craziness!
The next step was to pour footings for the cinder block wall to sit on. The footings were constructed of 2x4s, and we ran 3/8" rebar inside the footings to make them stronger and resistant to cracking. The footings need to be level front-to-back and side-to-side. (I dug the footings into the ground rather than setting them on top because the soil would be more compact. This is my garden and I till and aerate the soil every year, so it's not compact.) Then, you pound wooden stakes into the ground, and then you level the 2x4 against the stake and screw the stake to the 2x4 to secure it. Then you lay the rebar into the forms and tie it together with wire.  In colder climates, you need a much thicker and deeper footing. But because we rarely get hard freezes that last longer than a day here in Dallas, we don't need "frost" footings like you folks do up north. If you live in a freezing area, you need the footing to reach below the frost line, which may be several feet deep in cold areas. That's a LOT of concrete.
Lucky for us, we only need 4" footings, so I started mixing concrete.  Yes, that's a concrete mixer. You can rent them for about $40 a day, but because I'm pouring HUNDREDS of bags of concrete over the course of this project, I bought one used on Craigslist. It was in practically-new condition, and this model costs $650 new. (Though you can buy cheaper models for $200-$300.) I paid $200 for this used model, and I plan on selling it for $300 once I get done. Concrete comes in 60- and 80-pound bags, which cost around $3.50 - $4.50 each. Sometimes you can get them on sale for cheaper. I don't remember exactly how many bags it took to pour the footings, but it was between 20 and 25 bags. I ran about 40' of footing 12" wide and 4" deep. There are Concrete Calculators online that will tell you how much concrete you need so you can plan ahead. Always buy a few extra bags...you can always return them.  Just shovel the concrete into the forms, move the shovel around to make sure the concrete fills the form completely and runs all around the rebar. Overfill the form a little bit, then run a 2x4 across the top of the form, zig zagging it back and forth. This is called "screeding" and it gives the concrete a nice level surface. Since I'm leaving the wooden form in place, and since I'm just laying cinder blocks directly on top of it, I don't have to do any more finishing.
Now you just cover the concrete with a layer of plastic and let it cure for at least a week. It's April here, so the days are getting really hot. You want concrete to cure slowly to reach its strength potential, which means you want to slow down the evaporation of water inside the concrete. This is what the plastic is for. It's also a brilliant idea to mist down the concrete with water a couple of times a day for several days.
Now that the slab has cured, it's time to lay cinder blocks! Also called concrete blocks, these things are pretty cheap (about $1.50 each at Home Depot), but I need HUNDREDS of them for the whole renovation, so I kept an eye out on Craigslist.
My first haul was a load of 50 FREE cinder blocks. To get ANYTHING from the FREE section of Craigslist, you have to be the first person to contact the poster...which means you have to be lucky enough to see it immediately after it posts. I saw the ad 2 minutes after it was posted. There was no contact information, just an address in Grapevine, about 10 minutes away, and an invitation to "come and get em!"
I frantically drove to Grapevine and loaded by RAV4 to the gills...there were even cinder blocks on the dash board and in my lap as I was driving! But I got them for free. I had to purchase about 15 extra blocks from Home Depot to finish the wall.
Laying cinder blocks is easy...you mix up mortar ($4 a bag which will lay about 20 blocks), you use a pointed trowel to toss mortar onto the foundation, and you set the block into the mortar, tapping it gently to seat it firmly in the mortar. See if it's level both ways using a level. If not, pull it back up and put a little mortar under the low side. Once you've got one row of level blocks, the others lay down level and you don't have to be so careful.  The wall rises 6" above the ground level, so it will also serve as the retaining curb for the 6" of gravel which will sit beneath the flagstone. Along the long side of the garden, it sits 26" above the ground...6" for gravel and 20" to serve as a bench. Later I'll pour a nice stained and imprinted concrete slab to lay on top of it to serve as the seat. Those railroad ties you see behind the retaining wall are for the pergola, and they are reclaimed from a defunct railroad in Arizona. They cost me $8 each from a Craigslist guy who has a small business buying and selling them. New ones are $20-$50 each at landscape supply yards and are so soaked in creosote and tar (preservatives and insecticides) that they'll ooze for years all over your lovely flagstone. These are decades old, and though they are still well preserved and do have creosote at their hearts, they are solid and dry on the outside and won't leak. But that's a future project...
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Knowing I'd have to rent a "Bobcat" (a small bulldozer) to grade, or flatten, the backyard, kept me from really starting the renovation. The flagstone sat behind the house, weeds growing around it, bunnies and snakes taking up residence...until some new neighbors moved in several doors down! Tony and Lindsey, a young couple who completely renovated their house just like I did.
Tony worked in landscape contracting, among other things, and I noticed that he had a Bobcat sitting in his backyard! I figured he'd let me rent it from him, and even if I didn't get a better deal than from an equipment rental place, I wouldn't have to rent a truck and trailer to haul it to my house! But, as we didn't know them very well yet, I didn't want to ask.
Still, I had to get started somewhere, so we decided it was time to rip out the 100 square foot wood deck that led off the back porch. I pried up the boards carefully. I didn't want to damage them, because I planned to use them as forms to pour concrete for various structures around the back yard. The wood went into the garden, which would have to take a season off as I needed that space as a staging area for the renovation.  To my extreme surprise, once I had gotten the deck removed and brushed away the dirt and decomposed wood below it, there was a 4" concrete patio under there! NIGHTMARE! That would have to go, so I got out my sledgehammer. After an hour of screaming and swinging that thing, it broke right in half! And I had busted up only a small corner of the slab. I knew I'd have to resort to more drastic measures.  A quick trip to Home Depot, and I came home with a medium-duty electric jackhammer. It costs about $40 for 4 hours of rental, including insurance, which you should definitely get, because if you damage or break one of the chisel heads, they are EXPENSIVE!!!
I had never used a jackhammer before, but it was super easy. Very loud, and hard on the hands, but you just bear down and the chisel splits the concrete.
Tony heard the noise from several doors down and came to see what I was up to. He first picked up my pick axe and helped break up the chiseled concrete, but eventually he wanted to have some fun with the jackhammer, so I gave it to him. (He's quite a bit stronger than me, he had the rest of the slab busted up in a fraction of the time it had taken me to do a third of it!)  Tony asked what my next step was, and I said I needed to rent a Bobcat to grade, or flatten, the backyard. The patio would be on two levels, but the backyard slopes considerably and there was quite a bit of grading to be done before we could lay down a sub-base for the flagstone.
"Well, let me go grab the Bobcat in my back yard, man! I love using that thing!"
"I'll pay you for it!" I said.
"Shut up. We're neighbors. Actually you'll be doing me a favor, I love that thing and I hardly ever get to use it."
I took down a fence panel while he ran back to the house, and a few minutes later he was scooping up the busted up concrete. Then he got to work grading the yard. He took several inches off the top of the ground near the back door, and deposited it out by the fence where the ground was lower. Then he ran back and forth over the freshly-laid dirt, compacting it. After watching Tony maneuver that bulldozer in the cramped quarters of our backyard, I was SO GLAD that I hadn't tried to rent one and operate it myself. He was an expert, obviously, and I could literally imagine myself breaking through a wall into the living room! Less than 30 minutes after he started, he was done. It would have taken me all day, and wouldn't have looked nearly as good. He also used the dozer to scoop out an area where I would expand my garden and relocate the compost pile...saving me a couple of days of shoveling.  If your backyard needs grading, expect to pay about $300-$600 to get some guy off Craigslist to bring his Bobcat over and do the grading, depending on the scale of the project. If you hire a landscape contractor, you'll pay twice that. You can rent them for about $100 an hour if you have experience doing it yourself, but you'll have to haul the Bobcat to your place and back. And have plans for what to do with all the leftover dirt you'll scrape up, if it won't be deposited somewhere else in the yard.
Believe it or not, that was a single afternoon. All of it. I started cutting up the deck around noon, and by 5pm the concrete patio had been busted up and the yard was graded. I lavished thanks on Tony for saving us hundreds of dollars, and he just waved us off.
"It was more fun than watching TV, which is what I'd still be doing if I hadn't heard your jackhammer."
Now the yard was graded and it was time for the next project! Retaining walls!
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The renovation was something of a distant pipe dream until I spotted an ad on Craigslist for flagstone.
"We just moved to a new home in Colleyville and our back yard is all covered in flagstone. We have two kids and two dogs, and we really need grass out there. My husband has stacked up all the flagstone into piles. You'll need a wheelbarrow to get it out of the back yard to the driveway. There's a lot, over 1200 square feet. $500 for all of it."
The reason the renovation had been a pipe dream was because the cheapest quote I had found for enough flagstone to cover our back yard had been in the $5000-$6000 range. JUST for the stone. That doesn't include all the stuff that has to go BELOW the stone before the stone can go down.
I called the poster immediately and within a few hours I had rented a truck, a flatbed trailer, and my friends Chris, Christian, and I were headed to Colleyville, a 30 minute drive from the house.
The flagstone was thick...between 2 and 3 inches...which was good because it would be sturdy. But it wouldn't be easy to transport. There were some slabs of it that were four feet long and five feet wide that weighed several hundred pounds each.
We loaded the truck and trailer until the axles were about to break, and had hardly made a dent in the piles left in their back yard! This was going to be a serious project.
Three trips later we were so exhausted we could barely move. Christian called in sick to work the next day, knowing we were only half done, and knowing exactly how sore we'd be!
The next morning we could barely get out of bed, our arms and legs were shrieking in pain! But we had to get the rest of the stone. So we grunted and groaned and made three more trips. And finally, 36 hours later, the back of the house was lined with stacks of massive flagstone.   NIGHTMARE!!! But we had saved over $4000 by doing the Craigslist thing, so the sore muscles, smashed fingers, and chafed palms were definitely worth it!
Before the flagstone could go down into the backyard, though, we needed a substrate...or a prepared surface to lay them on. You CAN just lay them right on the ground, if you're lazy. But it won't look professional, the stones will rock back and forth on uneven areas, the joints between stones will not stay filled, and you certainly can't get it level enough to build on.
But before you can lay a substrate, the ground below the substrate has to be leveled, and then you need some way of keeping the substrate held in so that it doesn't spill out everywhere. MAN this is a big project!
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When we bought our house, we renovated it from top to bottom. EVERYTHING was torn out except for the bricks on the fireplace. Carpet, light switches, doorknobs, lighting and plumbing fixtures. Everything. The house cost $131,000USD, which is pretty cheap for an urban area in the US. Something that size in suburban Los Angeles or Seattle would cost over a million.
We never got a final price tag on the renovation, but since I did all the work myself, we saved tens of thousands of dollars. We probably spent around $8,000 renovating the interior, and that includes kitchen appliances, a nice TV and surround sound system, as well as all the carpet, tile, natural stone, hardwood flooring, lighting and plumbing fixtures, doorknobs, paint, tools, and lots of tool rentals. A contractor friend of mine said he'd have charged about $75,000 to do the kind of renovating we did. (We ripped out bathtubs and toilets and put in giant walk-in slate showers...that kinda thing.)
After taking a couple of years to rest from the renovation (it took 2 years of pretty intensive work), it was time for the back yard!
But I'm not wealthy. And the interior renovation really drained the proverbial coffers. So if I was to successfully renovate the backyard, it would have to be done even more cheaply than the interior. Not an easy task, when you consider that we wanted to completely clad the ENTIRE back yard in flagstone, build an outdoor fireplace and bread/pizza oven, add a hot tub, an outdoor kitchen, a pergola, and a beautiful stone retaining wall dropping down into my big organic garden.
Ebay had been an enormous help in keeping costs for the interior renovation low. But for the back yard I'd be buying heavy, bulky things like stone and concrete and heavy timbers. Things you can't buy on Ebay because shipping costs are prohibitively expensive.
So I turned to Craigslist, which is becoming more popular in the Dallas area. My goal was to get as many recycled items on Craigslist for free or cheap, and only purchase the bare minimum of materials at Home Depot. My contractor friend said that he could quite easily take over the project for me and get it done for $80,000. (And that included a hefty discount because we're friends.) So let's see how things go, doing it all myself... |
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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
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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
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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
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