[brazil, week 1] Everything tastes better in Brazil.
The fruit, the greens, the street food, the tea, the coffee (oh god the coffee), hell, everything except for the bread and the pizza tastes better in Brazil. That one tastes a bit more like glue, and I'm unsure whether the main ingredient of it is sugar or air, at least the store bought ones. But, with the slight exception of the bread (which can still be used to make some good sandwiches), I'm reaaaally enjoying myself.
For instance, I make my own iced tea now. It's a very simple one for the moment - I just take four satchets of matte leão w/ guaraná and put it in some lightly sugared water before putting it in my fridge. In the future, I'll probably experiment a bit more with adding ie. lime or using fresh fruits or similar. Maybe I'll make something out of açai, love that stuff.
The first lunch I had in Brazil, consisting of only fruit
Food wise, Brazil is also just something else™. As mentioned earlier, everything tastes better here. I've been really enjoying making different meals with the beans here and also just how fresh all the salads and greens are. It's also a lot cheaper both due to the general price difference and also because the food doesn't have to be imported from all over the world. Being locally grown also means that the food gets ripe in the sun, not artificially inside a cold dark truck driving through the entirety of Europe. I've not once had as sweet bananas as the ones that I can have here, and I am really loving it.
There is also a very big street market circa 5 minutes from where I live on Sundays. Here they sell both better and cheaper fruits and vegetables than what they do at the store - and most likely the farmers make a bigger chunk of the profit. It's very nice to have a walk and see what they have, as it covers probably all my needs if I plan my meals correctly. That is, with the exception of dairy products and other products sold in fridges. This also gives me something to do on Sundays - there's not exactly a lot of other things going here.
An omelette made out of leftovers with a grape salad I made the other day.
The thing is, I live in Tatuí. Truth be told, it's not the nicest place on earth - there's very few green areas and not exactly a lack of car alarms during both day and night. The weather is amazing and it's great to have a conservatory with many great musicians here, but I do miss walking among trees or jogging on something that isn't a pavement and without having to stop for cars every 2 minutes. I did hear someone say that there's a running track somewhere nearby so I will have to look into that in the near future though. If it's true, it would make me very happy.
My flat here is very, very nice though. I even have an air conditioner and a small balcony that I can sometimes sunbathe on before noon and that provides me shadow for home workouts outside after noon. I plan to get a chair and a table to have there as well, maybe even a small radio or speaker so I can sit and chill there either before or after work. Seems like a nice place to have a coffee - probably the best product from Brazil.
They have ecological eggs here named 'happy eggs'. I like that :)
(authors note: wow, there's a lot I want to cover in this post! i do not have the time though but holy hell)
I've gotten to visit a few cafés here as well, and I'm glad that they have a similar concept to what we have in Norway. If I can buy espressos and maybe a little snack, then I am a happy man. If I can sit there and read, I am even happier. If the coffee is also really good, I am the happiest. And here, I am indeed the happiest. So far I've got to visit a place called Divina Cafeína and Padaria XV. Divina had really cool coasters, and Padaria even made coffee art on my 'medium sized' espresso - medium being a medium coffee cup, not a medium espresso cup.
All in all the first week has been a pretty nice introduction to Brazil. There's a lot more I'd like to get into at one point (like the language barrier when trying to do literally anything at all) but I'll just save it for now. I'm already two days overdue for when I originally wanted to post this, but I'm starting to get some ideas for how to maintain a good writing routine. For now though, just know that I'm having a good time here :)
authors note: i'm a bit too lazy to figure out proper image formatting on bearblog, so for the time being the images will be really small instead of high resolution with proper CSS formatting