How Does It Feel

Yesterday I had a morning meeting at the school, Wizard, which is here in Novo Horizonte. The meeting happily consisted of about an hour of chit chat followed by about ten minutes of discussion of teaching. They will use me as a pronunciation guru and also to instruct about writing composition and speeches. Cristina told me that in Brasil there is pretty much zero instruction, even in Portuguese, about how to write an essay (i.e. thesis, body, conclusion, etc). I told her that I could happily begin to teach these things, and said that I should just start my own academy for Composition here in Brasil, she agreed and added that a woman was opening one in the town very soon. I told her maybe I could find a way to make it a graduate school research project and get a ticket back to Brasil later. In hindsight, I reckon I oughta find out where this woman’s academy is and pay her a visit.

Sonia’s daughter Jacqueline and her boys Ricardo and Igor picked me up in the afternoon to give me some pointers on grocery shopping here in Brasil. I was mostly in need of learning how to buy some of the produce we don’t get in the US and aid in navigating the meat department. Included here in the photos are: the sweet avocado they have here, a persimmon, a fig, a mango, some fresh cheese (queijofreco) and also one of my favorites, what are called paçocas (puh-sock-uhs). Paçocas are peanut candy! Since the peanut butter here is 9 parts sugar to 1 part peanuts, this is the closest thing. Good peanut candy is totally endemic to the culture, and good peanut butter is totally absent.

For late dinner, there was a Churrasco (shoe-hoss-ko). There was fine tasty meat and sausage and lots of lively Portuguese. In Brasil when they BBQ, they cook over coals and put the meat on spits and on different levels of racks. As the meat on the outside gets cooked, they slice it off into small pieces that people just pick at with their hands. Meat and beer and cigarettes, nothing more. At one point in the night I left with a man whose name I cannot remember, but everyone calls him the Japanese He is Japanese. This was an occasion to notice the racism here, since there was a lot of eye narrowing and sushi jokes thrown around. We did a few passes around the town and I got him to blast “Like a Rolling Stone” while cruising. He had a curious habit of flashing his headlights on girls that he liked, and they really didn’t seem to mind all that much. Or maybe they were just diggin on Dylan. Alas, made it home by two. Nothing like drunk passengering in small town Brasil, keeping my eyes on the stray dogs and one-way streets.