More things that grow today.

I was going to add this to the end of the last post, but then realized how much I wanted to talk about fruit, saw how long the post was, opted to just make another one. This is it:

And here, for fun, are other things that grow. I know it's a broad subject, so maybe I should made a 'label' for it. This is our local gardening store. We didn't buy anything (yet) so I didn't take many pictures. Lime/lemon trees that are a few feet tall are about R$6. Seeds are R$2, ponytail palms (pretty large ones) are $R25. All I really wanted was a lime tree anyway, so I'm glad it was about the cheapest thing in the store. I plan on... borrowing... the rest of my plants from nature. 

Look at that specimen. You can hardly see how beautiful it is through those flowers. (get it? I'm talking about Toby).

Froots

I'm sitting here eating my breakfast (coffee is still successful, although I was informed that the country of Brazil probably does sell some sort of coffee filter. Maybe. I sort of like it thick anyway), papaya and cashew nuts and I was thinking that in the US I'd probably munch on a multivitamin of sorts also.

Here that seems like a ridiculous suggestion. The fruits here are livin' life. They're big and gnarly and bright. Our plates are always very colorful. I mean, the plates themselves are green, but usually we have a good amount of colorful food too. No multivitamins needed here.

On a similar subject, do any of you ever read the note on the bag of apples at the grocery store telling you that they've excluded all the odd sized apples? They have to be a certain size to make it into the bag. They do no such excluding in Brazil. I found a lime about the size of a grape and one about the size of a tennis ball. All hanging out together.

This was the 'smaller' bunch of bananas. I made Toby put the one back that weighed about 20 lbs. I should have put something for reference... They're much larger in real life. Put on your 3-D glasses.

Okay, and one last thing that's great. Fruit=cheap. Here's a little taste of what we're paying:

Banana (all those above): R$1.26/kg

Mango: R$1.74/kg

Papaya: R$0.91/kg

Guava (okay, the guava was expensive!!! But I've never had one): R$2.09/kg

So, translated to Standard, we paid R$ 7.94 for 13 pounds of fruit. On a good day a USD is worth almost twice as much as a real (the money here). SO what I'm saying is: fruit is cheap. It's good. We like it. We love it, we want some more of it.

Jiu Jitsu!!!!

We're not sure how to spell it. All I know is that it's not Jew-Jitsu. I have met a few Jewish Brazilians though.

Toby has started his Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It seems like a ton of fun (for a guy at least), he comes home reeeally sweaty and smelly with cuts on his hands and feet.

How many of you actually know what Jiu-Jitsu (or at least Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) is? I didn't until I watched. I assumed it was a Kung-Fu fighting, ninja action, HI-YAH! kind of sport, but it's not really. It's more like 'controlled' wrestling. It doesn't look controlled to me.

I usually assume Wikipedia is pretty much accurate, so here's a little description from there:

KAPOW!

HIYAH!

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a martial art, combat sport, and a self defense system that focuses on grappling and especially ground fighting. The art was derived from the Japanese martial art of Kodokan judo (which itself is derived from Japanese Jujutsu) in the early 20th century.

It teaches that a smaller, weaker person can successfully defend against a bigger, stronger assailant by using leverage and proper technique – most notably by applying joint-locks and chokeholds to defeat the other person.

So that seems like fun right? My first thought was "How do you get to the ground to wrestle? What if it's a knockout punch that takes you down. They should teach how to get the guy to the ground first". Well, they do. So I guess they have it all figured out. If only I had known a little Jiu-Jitsu when my Aunt Sarah tickle-attacked me as a kid.

Also, on another subject, as you can see in the pictures, we have no furniture yet. Our boat is supposed to get here mid-February (read: mid-Carnival), so we're thinking we'll get it mid-March. Our great plan was to watch a little TV online (hulu, network websites, etc), but no streaming websites are allowed to broadcast overseas. That means no hulu, pandora, abc, nbc, fox.... Have any of you ever gotten around this? I mean, those of you that have lived overseas? It's not a huge deal though, because we get to look at this every day, and it's not getting old:

"sunrise", meaning when we get outside, around 7AM. The sun is already that high in the sky (oh, it's behind the cloud). Yowza!

Time for some coffee of my own

Brazil is great because almost everywhere you go they offer you a tiny cup of coffee (when I say tiny, I mean like maaaybe a half an ounce). I was (and am still) of the impression that Brazilian coffee should be way better than American, because I think a lot of it is probably grown down here (you should see how plants grow, it's like we're in the jungle...).

Unfortunately, I do not go out of the house (other than to the beach or pool) every day, and so I get coffee either when I venture with Toby, or from my tutor. On our last grocery excursion I got some coffee with the intent of making my own brew.

I tried it out today.

There is one person I've seen make coffee more ways than I knew were possible, and I think without that knowledge, I wouldn't be able to make this delicious cup I am drinking today. You see, growing up, my parents usually just used a good ole coffee maker. I'm sure they made it other ways, but I don't remember many of them. It wasn't until I met Toby's dad that I learned about improvised filters and cowboy coffee. I tried to use both Tim Watson techniques today, and it actually came out pretty good. A little weak, but I don't think that's the fault of the techniques, just the amount of grounds I used.

Looks like the mixins for a good cup o joe, eh? Coconut milk was incase it turned out really bad.

The filter process. I broke the napkin once, poured in back into the pan and started over. Broke it again. Double filtered. Isn't that exotic?

Thanks!

This post is going to be a little themed. How about that? Something other than rambling thoughts? Man, you guys are lucky.

Here it is, what we're thankful for here: I think I'll go in chronological order

Thanks Uncle Dave for sending us/me Fordlandia. For those of you who don't know it's a book about an American utopian village Henry Ford tried to build in the Amazon. There are a lot of references to Northeast Brazil, which is where we're living, so it's a very interesting read.

Thanks TAM airlines for getting us down here and giving me a sweet in-flight magazine that has articles in both Portugues and English! NEAT! Also on this note, a big UN-thanks to TAM for giving us seats with broken TVs on a 10 hour flight. Other than that, for those of you visiting us in Brazil, I recommend them.

Flash cards I've made, a letter from the states, on top of Fordlandia, on top of our neighbor's old newspaper! Errr, also, sorry for sideways photo... I thought I could rotate, but apparently I cannot.

Let's seee, thanks for the two letters we've gotten, it is really fun to get mail. Thanks Mom and Dad Watson for our mail, we got it, and in RECORD breaking speed: 5 days!

Thanks to my Portugues tutor for helping me understand a little more Portugues, but loooots of thanks to Toby for being my dictionary/translator/tutor, even if that means I'm wrong fairly often.

Left paragraph in Portugues, right in English, thanks TAM! A really well designed magazine, with really nice articles too.

Thanks Skype! Oh Skype, you make it so easy to talk to our friends and families, we sure do enjoy your service. I hope you are free forever.

Let's see, one last one. Thanks new neighbors for recycling your old newspapers. We don't mind getting the news one day late....

Don't worry guys, we will not go hungry here

It's really hard to find a place in this area where food for sale isn't more than 20 feet away from you. Everywhere we go there are vendors, which I like, but it also leads to more eating. Yesterday's lunch (we still don't have all our cooking stuff, so we're eating out a little bit) on the beach was 4 kebabs: chicken, chicken hearts, beef and a hotdog. Then from a different vendor a popsicle, and yet another vendor a beer. They all come to you. It's great.

Dinner last night was a feast. I'm not quite comfortable enough to order at a restaurant, and I also can't really read the menus. So Toby orders for both of us (although I did manage to order myself a water, yay me!). The item he picked serves 4 people. There were two of us. We came home with a ton of leftovers. 

The dish we got was matatao, which if you break it down is: matata=restaurant name, the ending ao=HUGE. Two dishes of rice with meat in it, two dishes of black eyed peas, a bowl of french fries, and a bowl of macaxeira (a veerrrry starchy root vegetable) fries, two bowls of vinaigrette (which is like salsa, but with, you guessed it, more of a vinaigrette dressing), and two bowls of farofa, which is a semi tasteless ground up grain of sorts. It's not my favorite, but I try it everywhere I go. The meat selection was comprised of many of the common meats here: picanha (beef with a large strip of fat on the side, very tasty), carne de sol, linguica (we had two kinds, but it's just sausage), HALF a chicken (it was a big dinner) and another beef whose name we cannot remember. I didn't have my camera with me, so you'll have to deal with this picture from the internet. This is sort of what our dinner was like. Just multiply it times three or four.

 

Leftovers from dinner. Below: the view of our building from our pool, then the next picture is the view of the beach from the same spot.

The meat kebab truck with the view of our building from the beach behind (I'll get a better one from all the way out on the reef, I didn't have my shoes this time), then next picture picole (popsicles).

Aaaand, just for fun: some of the hermit crabs from our "front yard". It's  video.

Cajus for you!

My Portugues tutor is loading me down with fruit on a regular basis now. Last lesson she left me with hours of homework and many new words, as well as a bag of caju. Any idea what those are? Well I'll let you know! It's the fruit of a cashew. I guess the nut is connected too, but the caju is the fruit here, and the castanha is the nut part. Toby thought they were poisonous somehow, if eaten incorrectly, and I thought I had heard somewhere that raw cashew nuts were poisonous also. But my Portugues teacher mentioned nothing of poison. Of course, I can't understand anything she says either, so, in hindsight, maybe she did warn me. Here are some pictures.

Oh, and I just looked it up. The shell of the castanha de caju is poisonous. Lena (tutor) probably thought I was smart enough to now chew on the shell.

Okay, well now I'm eating the caju. It's not super juicy, and very... ummm... I don't know how to describe it. It is chalky? Or it makes my mouth dry. I really have no idea how to describe it. But it is tasty. I sort of gumming it down to a mush ball. No too attractive.