FIFA WORLD CUP!

So as I was walking in a local park the other day I saw this character and a lot of people around it taking pictures.  At first I had no idea why there was this big blow-up cartoon, but then I realized it is the mascot of the 2014 World Cup (It says it on the plaques) and this little guy is making his way around to all of the host cities.  We, Recife, are lucky enough to be one of those cities.

They are building a brand new stadium, creating new roads and housing just for the World Cup.  It is pretty amazing all of the work that is going on to support a one month event!  We already have friends and family planning on making the trip down.  It will certainly be exciting to be here in 2014!

The FIFA World Cup begins Thursday, 12 June 2014, and ends Sunday,13 July 2014.  There is a count down timer on one of the major roads that lets us know exactly how many days are left until the World Cup Starts.  I will try to snap a photo of it next time I am on that side of town.

Sugar and Sugar Cane...

All that Green is Sugar Cane

So a lot of you have been asking what I do for a living down here.  Everyone knows Sarah is a designer...make sure you check out her website and blog here!  She is currently in the states getting ready for a big show in Texas...that is why you are stuck with me blogging this month.

My job is a little more ambiguous. I have fallen into the Sugar (and as of late other commodities) business.  Now before we came down here I had no idea that there were different types of sugar or really where or how sugar was produced.

Here is a previous post Sarah did a while back on some of our trips into the sugar cane fields.

I am learning more about it everyday and more about the impacts it has on Brazil and the world.  The Sugar industry is really quite impressive and is filled with interesting stories.

I had no idea how hard and dangerous it is to get to the final stage of sugar on your table.

This is cut Sugar Cane...it can grow up to 5 meters tall

So just in case you didn't know Sugar comes from Sugar Cane and Sugar beets, but we are going to focus on Cane...it is a plant that takes 12-16 months to mature.

A video with one of the Mills I work with.

Did you know that 100% of the Sugar Cane in the Northeast of Brazil is cut by hand.  Most of the workers here in the Northeast have to cut 2 Tons of Cane each day in order to make the minimum wage. Two tons of cane?  Two tons of anything sounds like a lot...and minimum wage is about 311 USD/month.

A lot of the cane in the south of Brasil is now being cut with machines, which is saving a lot of money, time and lives.  It is also helping create a better/cleaner sugar.

The cane that is cut by hand has to be burned first in order to make it safer for the workers to cut it.

After all the leaves are and animals are burned out, then the workers go to cutting and hauling the cane. It is really quite impressive when you watch a whole hillside of green cane, get turned into just black dirt.

I will put some more information on the sugar industry up in later posts.

Children's Day

In Brazil, Children's Day(dia das criancas) is celebrated on October 12, coinciding with Our Lady of Aparecida's day, the country's Patron Saint, which is a national holiday. Children throughout Brazil look forward to this day all year, as it is the (another) day they get to unwrap gifts from their parents.  In several places in Brazil Children's Day is a bigger event than Christmas.

I am telling you, you already read my post on kids birthday parties, but kids also get Children's Day!

What a deal!  This is a national holiday so it's a long three day weekend.  The beaches will be packed and the kids will be getting gifts!

From what I understand there will be some parades and parties celebrating Children's Day and we are all supposed to give a gift to the kids.  It's kind of like Mother's and Father's Day except it's the kids special day.  Interesting huh?

What did you do for Children's Day?

The Beach, Done Right!

Check out those umbrellas, even out in the middle of the water!

 Our friend Wendy and my lovely wife enjoying fried cheese!

 Sarah and my cousin Duda enjoying the ice cold beer (well not Duda, but Sarah)

Cashew salesman walking by as we enjoy the beach!

So, I love beach!  Who doesn't?  Well actually a lot of people don't, but that is beside the point.

I have been to beaches all over the world, and at face value they are all great.  They all have the basics of a beach.  Salt water, sand, beautiful scenery and sometimes sea life.

Brazil is different.  Brazil has a beach experience that in all my travels I have not found or replicated again.  Brazil does the beach right!

So unlike when you go to most beaches in the US or Europe, once you are arrive on the beach you are not left alone to fend for yourself.  You don't have to bring your own chair, table, food, umbrella, sunscreen, or anything else for that matter.

Most beaches in Brazil are lined with chairs and umbrellas that you can sit at for free as long as you purchase just one thing...So you can go to the beach, buy one coconut water and sit in the beach chairs all day long, with someone watching your stuff and with the protection of an umbrella.

But the good part about most of these beaches with chairs and umbrellas (at least here in the Northeast) is that you can have a full day of food and drink at a reasonable price (I am going to talk about costs going up in a a future post).

To give you an idea:  a soft drink, 500ml costs about R$2.50, almost a liter of beer R$4.00, a coconut water straight out of the coconut R$2,50, a whole fish with french fries and salad, R$18,00.

And if you aren't interested in what your vendor is selling just wait a few minutes and someone will be walking buy selling something else.  Anything from quail eggs, hot dogs, crabs, shrimp, ice cream, to tanning oil and sunglasses.  It really is quite the treat.

767 Candidates for City Council!

So if you have been following our blog at all you probably read this post about some of the campaigning!

Well election day was this past Sunday. There were 767 candidates for 27 councilmember spots.  That is a lot of candidates isn't it?  I sure thought so!  Well just so you know the winner on had 1,7% of the popular vote!  1.7% that's it!  To me that is amazing...

This guy Ze Radiola is our Jiu Jitsu instructor and a really great guy.  He really seems to be someone who really cares more about the people than the money and benefits. I believe in him and he has my vote and I have done some work to help his campaign. He didn't win this year, but it was his first year running...I hope that he will try again.

But for the past month with all the campaigning there has been a new technique that I have never seen, as for most of the technics thus far.

This is a giant organized parade of cars.  The different candidates do it all day Sunday.  So what is it?  Well they get all their friends who have cars, trucks noise makers, fill the vehicles as full as they can and drive slowly through town, honking their horns, dancing, playing music and disrupting traffic.  They are only allowed to do it on Sunday's because of the traffic, but it is still quite the site and quite disruptive.

When I run for a political position here or in the states (never going to happen), I know how some new tools that I intend to put to use!  Check out the pics below!

Birthdays in Foreign Countries

Brazilian Style Birthday Candle!

So today is my birthday.  That's right, according to my good friend Burt, I am now 29-3 (32).  I was laying in bed last night thinking about the last several years and where I have spent my birthdays.  So let's take a quick look.

2003 - Richmond, Va

2004 - Richmond, VA

2005 - Baumholder, Germany

2006 - Ramadi, Iraq

2007 - Mosul, Iraq

2008 - Mosul, Iraq

2009 - Atlanta, Ga

2010 - Alberta, Canada

2011 - Atlanta, Ga

2012 - Recife, Brazil

Impressive I think.  Six of my last 10 birthdays have been spent in a foreign country.  Odd places too!

Birthdays are a bit different here in Brasil. They are much more of an event than they are in the US, or anywhere else that I have been for that matter.

I threw Sarah a surprise party for her FIRST birthday in a Foreign country back in March.  It was great, but it was a Brazilian party for sure.  We had little munchies, dinner and a bar set up.  Everyone who came was dressed up...much more than we were, and they all brought presents!

Then in July, we went to my cousin Artur's, a Brazilian child, second birthday.  Let me tell you what a blow out it was.  First of all it was at a party house.  Yes there is a huge business here in Brazil for party houses.  They are almost as common as Drug Stores.  

So we showed up and the first thing you see are the THOUSANDS of balloons in all sorts of shapes and lining the entrance.  When we entered there were more balloons.  It was quite impressive

Once inside there was every imaginable game you can imagine.  They had slides, video games, basketball, a Ferris wheel and a tilt-o-whirl.

There were waiters serving  juices, water, 12 year old scotch, and various wines.  The other waiters were serving finger foods and then the main entree!

I would guess there were 300+ people at this party for my cute cousin.  Every kid got a gift when they left.  It was truly a production.

It is not unheard of for parents to spend R$3000 for their kids birthday parties.  They are truly events.

But adults have good parties too...usually not as extravagant, but sometimes.

So for my birthday, I took my Grandma and her friend out for lunch.

What have you done for your birthday when in a foreign country?

Change in the seasons

A little writing post, since I've been really busy with work lately and I feel like my posts have been more about pictures.  The seasons seem to changing now, back to summer from "winter". Winter pretty much entailed rain, cloudier skies in general, and lots of wind. The temperature was a bit cooler, but no more than a degree or two. Summer time is warmer (I think much warmer feeling because there's hardly any cloud cover) and much less windy. In the morning we wake up and it is hot. Regular old hot. The breeze seems to die out overnight, and strengthens throughout the morning. Our beef with that is that morning is the sunniest time in our condo, so with the lack of wind and addition of the sun, it is super warm when we get up in the morning. It's not a huge problem, we just may start sleeping with the air conditioning again.

And on that note, what I had planned on writing this post about. I woke up this morning and it smelled like summer in Brazil. This place has a great smell to it. I have no idea what it comes from, but I forgot about it over winter. It's one of those smells that brings back memories (okay, we've not even been here a whole year) of the first times you smelled it. So I was thinking back on the things that I remember from when we first moved in here. We were without a lot of things that we had readily available in the US, and it really sort of seemed like we were doing without, in a 'livin tough' kind of way. Now those things we don't have I have almost totally forgotten about. Here's a little list:

1. We don't own a microwave. It's not a all-of-Brazil thing, I've seen then at lots of people's houses. We just didn't buy one when we moved in. This is something I used so many times a day in the states, and when we first got here thought we would have for sure bought eventually. Now I don't even remember what I would use it for. We're pretty accustomed to heating up leftovers on the stove and in the oven. We can pop popcorn on the stove pretty handily (except I think my corn is old, our last batch was awful). I don't even remember what else I used it for! Thawing out frozen things I guess....but in this climate all you have to do is leave it out for a tiny amount of time, and it's thawed.

2. Water heater. No houses or condos in our city (that we know of) have water heaters. That means cold showers, cold wash laundry, and dirty dishes are cleaned with cold water. That was what I had the hardest time with at first. I couldn't figure out how to get the grime off the dishes without heating up a pot of water and using it for dishes. Now we've found an all purpose bar soap (family, you're getting this soap for Christmas) that is the most amazing grease-fighting thing I've ever used. The laundry we've just upped the detergent, I don't notice that our clothes are any less clean. Except our Jiu Jitsu gis. They are pretty gross. They could use hot water. The showers were amazing in the summer time, since it was pretty hot out. Over the winter I missed a hot shower, but still, wasn't bad. We had an attachable water heater (for all you cautious people, this is a super sketchy device that attaches to your shower head and plugs into an outlet IN YOUR SHOWER...how's that for unsafe?) that ended up blowing up right after I got out of the shower, so we don't use that anymore. Our guest bath has a nice heater attachment, so maybe once a week I take a hot shower, just because I do notice feeling more clean (we've noticed ear wax removes easier with a hot shower) after a hot shower every now and then.

3. Dishwasher. We don't have that.... And it's pretty annoying. We're just so lazy and we both dislike doing dishes... Add in no hot water and they pile up more often than they should. But still, I don't think about it like I used to.

4. Garbage disposal. Don't have one of these, but have totally gotten used to the little mesh screen in our sink that catches the food. I did love to use the garbage disposal, but it's definitely not a necessity.

5. Air conditioning. There are two window units in our house, but they're only meant to be used at night in the bedrooms. All winter we haven't used ours at all. With the stronger winter breezes it's been so comfortable sleeping at night. But this morning I woke up drenched in sweat, so I think we might need to consider turning ours back on. We always have our windows open, and there are parts of the condo that are meant to be always open (our back window, for example, just used to be a gridded wall, you couldn't close it), and we don't have any problems with it at all. I used to imagine that there would be bugs, and figured that was the reason most US homes didn't go open air, but we're on the 13th floor, so we get a rare mosquito, but not more than once a month. All in all, I can't seem to remember why AC seemed so necessary in the states. I guess it might be hotter...or more humid... or less breezy. For some reason, not having AC in this climate works well.

That's pretty  much it. I've been thinking about it, and I'd love to total up my 'carbon footprint'. I used to do that in the US, and it was relatively low for someone in the US, but here! We use very little electricity in the home, we use our car once a week, tops, about 90% of our food is grown in state.... I've gotta have a super great carbon footprint.

So. Moral of the story. Go turn off some appliances. You probably would be fine without them.

Working hard, hardly working.

Brazilian workers have this great way of napping during lunch break. I've thought of picking up the style. These guys are great examples. Just find a flat-ish area, maybe a piece of cardboard, take of your shoes, and snooze. Snoring, drooling, looking like you're sleeping on the job, don't worry about any of it, because as much as we see city workers asleep on the side of the road, it must be a job requirement.

Look at this guy!!!

So I have a draft post coming up, and eventually I'll get enough material to post it. But short story, it's about the things that I do not understand about Brazil. I worry that if we move out of the country at some point in our lives, we will be extremely bored with the normalcy of the rest of the world. Or, possibly our next move will be somewhere just as interesting. But I doubt it.

We were driving home on a highway bride, in rough traffic, when we saw this guy coming. Walking his cart, against traffic, on a 4 lane highway bridge. Shouldn't this be illegal? The guy didn't even flinch when we had a tough time changing lanes and almost side swiped him. Traffic wasn't moving slowly either. People were buzzing by him!

Brazil, seriously, you crack me up. In a good way though.

Some thoughts...

 Every time we drive by this building I wonder if they will change that 6 to a 7 next year. It's a big sign, I can't imagine they update it every year, but what else are you going to do, right?

 Maybe this place was a little less run down when the ad was put up, but it's for pet funerals and cremation services. I feel like the people in this neighborhood probably aren't buying custom caskets for their cats and dogs. But maybe I'm wrong.

OOOoooh! Yay, the mango trees are in bloom!!! You can see a few mangos at the bottom of this tree. When we arrived the trees were jam packed, and they seemed to be full of mangos all spring. Now there's hardly a mango to be found on the trees. Just flowers. So hopefully by the time these turn into fruit my Portuguese will be good enough to ask "May I climb you tree? I'd love to pick myself some mangos!".

Our first football game!

Yaaayyoo! We're back in Brazil! And a day or two back we went to our first football game! It's really hard getting used to saying that, not soccer. Why does the US raise their children learning the wrong word for the sport!!! Doesn't the rest of the world say football? I'm pretty sure we're the only country that says soccer. So confusing. I guess it's because we have the other football. That is played without using your feet. Good excuse I guess.

So, the game! It was pretty fun! The stadium was interesting, sort of rustic with cool metal chairs with handpainted numbers (I hear they're tearing it down soon, I'm going after those seats!), clean bathrooms and a really cool workout area/facility/pool. Oh, I guess that's leading me into the names of the teams. Sport was the home team. Creative name, no? I think it's because they play/train at a sport club? My best guess. The grounds are very nice.

Anyway, they were playing Portuguesa, a team from Sao Paolo, I believe, and Sport won. The score was 2-1, so I was okay with that (I was worried I would be bored with such a low scoring sport). Now, I've only seen two forms of soccer: my brother's high school performances, and the Olympics on TV (which I'm super pumped about BTW). So I'm not sure if I was putting this professional team on a pedestal, but it seemed like they weren't super super great. The first goal (scored by Sport) honestly looked like an accident. The ball was on the other side of the field about 80% of the first half, so I think everyone was surprised when it happened. The second and third goals looked legit though. A good game overall, but the most exciting part was the 'youth' section!!!!

They were sooo good! Coordination and cheers like I have never seen in the states! I put a video up at the top of the post, but I don't think it does them justice (you'll have to come down here to see it in person). They cheered literally the whole game (90+ minutes, right?). At one point they all (like really almost all of them, I think it was mostly guys) took off their shirts at the same time and did a little dance with them. So neat.

Okay, I tried to capture the range of emotions we saw, by way of internet searching. I didn't find very great pictures. With the way people were yelling, I would have thought there would have been plenty of finds when I googled 'soccer fan yelling'. Oh well. Rage, horror, agony, shame.... Aren't football games supposed to be fun?

Francy, francy, fancy pantsy.

le peace monsieur

So with our Jiu Jitsu gym we get a lot of visitors. It's a pretty well known gym (I guess) and they have a few gyms around the world. So a long time ago there were some Frenchmen, like 10 of them, visiting the gym to train for a month or week or something. We invited them over to the pool, because they'd been just going to the gym and back to the place they were staying. One guy thought our underwater camera was the best thing ever, and he took probably 50 pictures like the one above. We got one group picture, but with the other guy's camera. He said he would email us, but never did. This guy here really wanted his underwater pictures too. Oh well, his loss I guess?

So this is the subject of foreigners. There really aren't many of them here. This week we met  a Brit doing some post-graduate traveling, but mostly coming here to train at the gym (she goes twice a day, so that's what it seems like to me). So we've met her, the Frenchmen, and I met a guy at the Federal Police office (I'm almost all the way to a permanent visa!) from New Zealand...or Australia. I forget, sorry to both of those countries, I get them confused. There is one guy married to a Brazilian and they both go to our gym, he's from Hungary.

Oh, and Toby just reminded me of the last instance of foreigners. Cirque duSoleil was in town for about a month and I met some of them at our grocery store. We have two large, nice hotels near us. I was walking around and, not to stereotype, but Brazilians are sort of smaller, a little darker skinned and normally slight framed. Not too large people. So I saw a group of lighter skinned large folks (and one tiiiiiiny girl and one extremely muscular girl, who I decided must be in the crazy shows) and happened to be behind them in line and struck up a conversation. We never did get together though. Oh well.

So that was just an informative post. Recife=not many foreigners live here (that we've found).

Tambaba: ADULT CONTENT!

 BEFORE YOU READ, MAKE SURE YOU'RE OKAY WITH NUDITY, BECAUSE THERE IS SOME IN THIS POST.

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 In the middle of our little jaunt to Joao Pessoa, we headed over to a nearby beach. Nudey beach. Haha, yes, we went to a nudey beach. Half was clothing, the other half was no clothing, with a really neat natural divider (rocks and trees and stuff). You guys can leave it to your imaginations whether we stayed on the clothed side or ventured into the nude.

A little more, when we first moved here we heard camping wasn't really done much here. And I think that's mostly right. But we saw our first camp ground at this beach. It was all very comfy looking, because the rocks made these nice little coves. We might be headed back there some day for some nude surfing, nude paddleball, nude camping (just kidding, you have to wear clothes at the campground, or at least we think). And all of that stuff you can do clothed too. Just funny to think of it all nakie.

The clothed beach. Look at that palm tree hanging out on that rock, neat!

OOooooOOoh, headed in?

By the way, this is our car. We bought a Volkswagon Gol (just like the american VW Golf).

The coastline of Tambaba, which as you head up has lots of really great private beaches, and camping!

Bahahaha!!! I don't know why the guy was so timid and covered himself up, because apparently the woman was all for showing everything!

Brasilia 1: Sugar Cane Processing Plant

So we just got back from Brasilia (the capital of Brazil) and Rio. We were there for a short trip, but man we packed it full of stuff! We visited a sugar cane processing plant (lots of sugar is grown here), a tomato processing plant and a corn processing plant. At the sugar one they make regular sugar, as well as ethanol. The first two presses of the sugar cane (it looks sort of like a stick of bamboo, but shorter and solid) is used to make sugar, and the next five are used to make ethanol. It was a really crazy plant. I'll post the tomato and corn in another post. For now, let me tell you about our trip to Brasilia with pictures.

Emus here (statues), because there are snakes that endanger the workers in the fields of sugarcane. Emus eat snakes.

Handsome couple in our safety helmets, yes? We also donned hair nets and face masks later. Luckily you can't see the sweat pouring down our faces here. It was hot.

There were a lot of neat pictures of the factory. I couldn't figure out which were the best, so I thought this one of me might be good. Behind me is the machine that sort of dumps the sugar cane into the area to be crushed. I think.

We are standing on a platform and there is some sort of machinery behind us, but the stuff in front is the stuff that does the actual crushing of the cane. Remember? First two presses are for sugar, the rest are for ethanol? You can see four boxes in a line sort of near the middle of the picture. Those are the presses. There are more, hidden.

The left of the image you can sort of see a clear film with blue stuff printed on it. This is how the bags start, flat roll of film. This machine makes it into a cylinder and fills it with sugar. Then it's on that little conveyor belt, and off to a truck to be shipped!

Each bag is 1 ton of sugar. The warehouse was insanely huge. And also had one of the stickiest floors I've been on in a while. 

A gift at the end of our tour. A bag of sugar for each of us. Then we got to carry around the 2kg bag for the rest of our trip. 

I forget what this machine does. But pretty, right?

We also stopped by a guy's house (a worker from the plant) because he was making pamonhas. It was a really nice family process. But we arrived thinking we were eating them soon after we got there. Which really meant (Brazil's not so good with time, sometimes) that they'd be ready in 4 hours. So we left.

When we got to the office in the morning they were waiting for us! Yummy snack.

I also saw this GREAT looking bird. I chased it around the property trying to get a good picture. It was lunchtime, so all the workers were watching me. Luckily I don't understand much of what they say. Anyway, this bird was about 2 feet tall. Neat right? The people didn't act like it was anything special, so maybe it wasn't.

Also the whole campus had these great fishtail palms. They were different than lots of the ones I've seen in the states. More like a palm tree. But they were fruiting while we were there. Pretty berries right? Not good for eating though (or so I was told. I'll try them eventually).

A post with no pictures

We're in Rio right now and I don't have the cord to upload any pictures. Also we're not done with the trip yet, so I don't know what other great things I'll see. But for now I'm going to write down what we've seen, because most of it I haven't gotten great pictures of.

Leeet's see... We arrived here on a 5AM flight, which means we got to see the sunrise from the airplane, which was nice. We went straight to a cliff to go...HANGLIDING! Well I went hang gliding, Toby went para gliding since he had never done that before. Both were awesome. There are a lot of pictures, so more on that later. After that we were picked up by the world's happiest Brazilian (a friend of Toby's parents) and she brought us to her house, where we're staying, for breakfast. Deeelicious, like Brazlilians do: coffee, cheese, bread, fruit, juice, anything else I would have asked for I'm sure I would have received. We then watched her play a little tennis (okay, maybe this post isn't the most exciting one ever), and she's really good. I've mostly seen my family play tennis, and although I think we have a few good players mixed in there, they always have to play with the rest of us, who are horrible... So this lady we're staying with (Suely is her name) seemed semi-pro! Then she took us on a great city tour. We saw the Sugarloaf (big ole rock, we're not sure why it's named like that), downtown Rio, the largest slum in Rio, and the largest slum in South America. Rio is a really beautiful city. We're much further south than where we live, but it's surprisingly hot! Much hotter than Recife. Or at least it seems.

Okay... well, this is a horrible post. Breakfast is on the table (again), and we're off to see the Christ statue (which was a gift from France, who knew?), and do some other things, but I'm not sure what.

Drinks

Well, I lost my laptop this week. And that's what I've been working on since we arrived in Brazil, so I have no pictures to blog with. When I say lost, I mean it like "We lost great-grandma, she just had to go sky-diving". I revived it earlier today long enough to grab some work files, but not transfer photos. So for now, just some thoughts, with photos that we took the first time we visited Brazil.

The thoughts, what are they about? They're about drinks. Probably could have guessed from the title, huh? As you may recall earlier, I have a tough time getting water to drink here. People seldom offer me water. I have to beg. And usually I still don't get it. A lot of people here pride themselves on their juices, but I'm pretty sure one or two times I've been fed pre-packaged juice, under the guise of fresh-squeezed. I ain't having it. I'd rather have water. The problem is, here, water costs just as much as anything else (at, say a restaurant...at home I'm sure it's cheaper). The tap water isn't drinkable, so when out to eat, why not get a beer, coconut water or soda. It's all pretty much the same price. It makes sense to me. But in people's homes, I just can't seem to get water either. Must be habit of the people. Along with things like reading (family is almost to the point of worried that I haven't tried to plug in the TV yet) and exercise (also worried that I walk too much...?) the "healthier" option isn't really the most common one. Not saying the US is any different, probably the same. Except for the water. 

Anyway. I'll drink these fun drinks when they're offered to me. Below we're drinking something that I haven't had since our first visit: caldo de cana, sugarcane water. It is deeelicious. I first had it after a day of sightseeing, and man, it was refreshing and a jolt of sugar that got me back on my feet. So good. Probably  not very good for you. But natural, at least.

Also, coconut water is one of my favorite drinks. In the grocery store it's actually not cheap (coconuts are EVERYWHERE, how is this not cheaper!), and it has additives, sugar and preservatives, so I stay away. But on the beach or walking around, there's not much better than drinking it out of the coconut. Yum. And, I mean, I don't think it needs to be said that I like the beer here. Another favorite drink. More on drinks later (as I type I realize that there's a lot to talk about on this subject).