On-the-Road Tales

Marcelo and Donovan are two of my greatest friends and we have had many good times in the 14 years since we met in the Arizona country side as 18 yr old freshman at ERAU. Sitting here catching up with them in Donovans airplane or in Marcelos new clothing store, sometimes I just can not believe how far we have all come! While I love travel and new experiences, it is a nice break to just catch up with old friends and relax to a home cooked meal.

This is Carnival here in Brasil, biggest holiday of the year. They celebrate in the street with a myriad of colors and costumes the day before the start of Lent. We watched the Rio madness on TV just like back in NY, watching the Macys Thanksgiving Day parade though they have much better weather here.

We headed to a small town about 1.5 hours away to enjoy a local flavor fiesta. No tourists here but the town was packed. Every hours or so there is a band with afloat that comes through the streets playing a simple chorus. Everyone jumps behind the float and follows along, chanting, swaying, sambaing, throwing confetti and generally having a good time in the melee. The day was brutally hot, over 100 so the only relief was to duck into the shade between floats.

I offered to make dinner this night and learned and important lesson – never offer to cook when you only know one recipe and are not certain the country has the ingredients available. Marcelo informed me once at the store, that lemons here are not really lemons but they have 10 varieities of lime. The feta, in the speciaility cheese section was not exactly feta but all turned out well. I need to learn another dish or two for the next time in case!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.