Sagu

My favorite dessert in Brazil is called sagu. And that is high praise given its competitors include passion-fruit mousse and every imaginable combination of dulce de leite with chocolate sauce and coconut.

Sagu is a tapioca (slightly larger than our tapioca) cooked with wine and cinnamon and cloves and served cold with vanilla whipped cream or sweetened condensed milk. Normally, its served at restaurants. I love it and had my first attempt at making some last night. I forgot that if you cook 1 cup of tapioca, you end up with more than six times that amount in the end.

This will not be a problem. The trouble is, I found six different recipes for it, each very different from the others. The one i made had a great flavor but less than ideal texture. Once I have perfected the recipe, I will post it here so everyone can enjoy it!


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Around Town

Here are a couple more photos from Marcio and I walking around the city center! We visited two art galleries, the Santander Cultural (housed in a gorgeous old bank) and one of art from Rio Grande do Sul.

Brique do Redencao

Sunday before last, Marcio took me to the Brique do Redencao, a weekly food and crafts fair in a big park. It was so fun! The fair wasn't too crowded when we arrived because we went on election day, and voting is mandatory in Brazil. (It's so mandatory that police can't arrest anyone the night before according to urban legend.) On a side note, I AM SO HAPPY THE CAMPAIGN IS OVER. The vans that drove around in circles playing campaign slogan songs were driving me crazy. 

Anyway, at the brique, we passed by a lot of stands selling paintings, crafts, really random antiques, junk and street food. Musicians and entertainers stood in the street, and we saw one that could play about 15 instruments on his body like Bert in Mary Poppins. It was amazing. We had to give him two reais. 

Then, we walked around the park and went for a ride in a swan paddleboat!

The park is picturesque, isn't it? And a lot of the trees are blooming with red and purple flowers. I have noticed a lot of hydrangeas and hibiscus. We also bought fresh coconut water in the park. It was really awesome because the girl had a special cart that could refrigerate the coconut water before pouring it into the cup!

Sorvete

I finally found one food that is better in the United States than in Brazil:

grocery store ice cream

It's just not good here. It tastes really artificial. On the other hand, ice cream from the ice cream shop is delightful and comes in all sorts of neat flavors like maracuja (passion fruit), coco (coconut), and figo com nozes (walnut and fig). 

We have been eating ice cream because it's getting HOT here! Porto Alegre is ready for summer. I kind of miss fall though. It's weird to go from wearing shorts to jackets to shorts in 4 weeks. It's as though we had an extra-condensed Texas winter. 

Roadtrip to Santa Maria

Last weekend we took advantage of a holiday to take a roadtrip to Santa Maria, a nearby city where Marcio's family used to live (and where some still live!). It's about four hours away, and we arrived just in time for a churrascaro lunch at Marcio's aunt and uncle's ranch house. It's located in a gorgeous valley.

As soon as we arrived, a blue morpho butterfly drifted by! It has been one of my dreams to see one of those ever since my brother and I were addicted to the Amazon Trail computer game. (Classic game. It was on a floppy disk.)

We took a hike after lunch. It's such a beautiful area! It reminds me of the Puy-de-Dome region in France.

We had a ridiculous amount of delicious food at an Italian restaurant that served us about five courses of amazing traditional fare.


Food was a theme of the weekend! To balance it out, we took long walks around the city and went driving through the hills. In the past, Santa Maria was the most important city in Rio Grande do Sul because it was the railway hub. This last photo is from the Colonia Belga, where the original railroad workers from Belgium lived in the 1800s.


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O Mercado Publico

My favorite thing so far in Porto Alegre has been the Mercado Publico or the public market. It's a giant building enclosing tons of market stalls and restaurants and cafes. It's also in the city center, and Marcio and I went early last Saturday morning in an effort to beat the crowds. This little armadillo is the symbol for the 2014 World Cup. He's inflated right outside the market. There's a local controversy going on now because Coca Cola just bought the rights to brand this square. We walked around the market and ate lunch at an amazing fish restaurant.

We bought some meat to grill at our bbq the next day (although looking at the meat stand make me slightly sick in the stomach) and had AMAZING coffee at Cafe do Mercado. This sign outside their stall made me laugh:

There was also an orchid show going on! 

O Centro

We took a tour around the center a couple weeks ago with Marcio's cousin Ricardo and his wife Linda and their two little girls, Julia and Laura. It was really fun! They have been so great at welcoming us to the city. We drove around quite a bit and stopped at Praca Matriz, the city's main square where the government offices and the main cathedral are located. 

The architecture in the city center is from the colonial period -- other parts of the city are newer including the neighborhood we live in. Porto Alegre is built from the water level up several neighboring hills (TALL HILLS). Now, I understand why Marcio is in habit of using the parking brake in Texas. 

Then we went to watch the sunset from the Gazometor, an old electricity plant with a view over the water.

Fundação Iberê Camargo

One day we visited an art museum dedicated to a local artist with Marcio's parents. Apparently the artist -- Iberê Camargo -- had a really dark period and went crazy around the time Marcio's family was living in Rio. I think Marcio's mother said she saw him throw something across a room in anger, but I am unsure whether that was in person or in the news. Regardless, the museum is located in a gorgeous building similar to the Guggenheim in New York.

One unique thing about Porto Alegre (and this region) is that people LOVE drinking a green tea beverage called chimarrão. People walk around the streets and parks on the weekends carrying hot water in a thermos and the chimarrão cup. I will try to post a picture of this later. Here's how it usually works: the yerba mate tea fills up the left half of the cup and then hot water goes in the other side. You drink it through a straw that has a strainer on the bottom to keep out the tea leaves. Then, you pass the cup to whoever you're with and they drink a cup, and this continues for several rounds.  I think the tea is kind of bitter but will try it every now and then. The reason this explanation is important is because the art museum specifically forbids chimarrão (see where Marcio's dad is pointing in the picture below).  How funny!

Porto Alegre

These past few weeks we have gotten into the routine of life in Brazil, and we're back in the swing of working and studying. I'm enrolled in a Portuguese language school and love my classes. It's been fun meeting Marcio's friends and family and trying to figure out how to get things done here. For the first few weeks, we were utterly spoiled by lunch and dinner invitations, so much so that I didn't figure out how to operate much in the grocery store and kitchen. The food here is wonderful, and I would be concerned about coming home with a Brazil belly if we didn't walk so much everyday.

The weather has been moving back and forth between winter, spring and summer. I hope that spring will start sticking soon! We had several storms lately, one of which knocked out the power to the whole city for two hours on Saturday night. Strangely, this was not a huge deal. We tried to listen to the local radio to hear when it might come back on, and the broadcast of the local team's soccer game was not interrupted to convey this information. The outage happened right before we were set to go to a birthday party for one of Marcio's aunts at a fancy bistro. It felt very odd getting dressed up in the dark with the light of a single small flashlight, but I thought this might be what it's like to be Hilary Clinton visiting Pakistan (or another country with electricity shortages). The party was really fun, and I met a whole new batch of family members. Despite the large number of family gatherings I've gone to, there continue to be substantial numbers of cousins and uncles I have not met. It's getting confusing.

I want to catch up on posting all the fun things we've seen around the city. So those posts will start. Now.