Feijoada and a Drink in a Palace

Hi all!

And the Brazilian adventures continue... The Fourth of July celebration was great fun—we made burgers (frozen—in true American style) with fries, corn on the cob, apple crisp, and ice cream. Americans and non-Americans alike had a good time.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were all rainy, stay-inside kinds of days. Therefore, Wednesday was a cooking day! I went to Copacabana and took a Brazilian cooking class. The chef was humorous and a great teacher: we made feijoada (VERY traditional beans and pork dish) with rice, greens, farofa (not going to try to explain that), fried cassava root, and caipirinhas (Brazil's national drink). The only other participants were a couple from Florida (though the woman was born in Rio), so it was nice to have a small class. I look forward to cooking Brazilian food when I get home; I am rapidly finding my favorite dishes!

After the cooking class, I wandered around Copacabana. You would picture sun, palm trees, people lying on the beach in bikinis, right? Well winter has finally arrived in Rio, so you can picture me walking along a cloudy, empty copacabana beach wearing a sweatshirt and long pants. I enjoyed the walk nonetheless.

Tuesday and Thursday, of course, I went to my circus project. Now that the show is over, we have gone back to a normal schedule, with three groups of kids rotating between aerials, mini-tramp, and stilts/unicycle. During my time here I've been discovering how I can help out the most, and as I keep saying, I'm getting so much out of my work there.

Friday was a wonderful, full day. A volunteer friend (Louise from Denmark) and I had an açaí (smoothie made of a berry from the amazon) for breakfast, then took a 2-hour boat tour around Rio's harbor. The harbor is said to be one of the seven natural wonders of the world (I'm sceptical of the number of "wonders" there are...), and it's beautiful. We had some great views of sugarloaf mountain, as well as Niterói, the city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.

After the boat tour we wandered around the old historic center of Rio, which has some really nice colonial-style buildings. We explored the Candelária church, and peeked in the Casa França Brasil, which has an eclectic mix of art, dining, and books. We enjoyed our cheapest and most-satisfying buffet-a-kilo (R$1.59/100g! so good!) and had a nice coffee before heading back home to dress up classy.
Once "classy-fied," we took a bus to Botafogo beach, where we saw somewhat of a sunset over Sugar Loaf (not the most dramatic, but it was nice). After a nice yet reasonably-priced dinner in Botafogo, we headed to Copacabana for dessert, and then the "crown jewel" of the evening: a drink at the Copacabana Palace. The Palace opened in the 1920s, and has hosted many of the rich and famous visitors coming to Rio. Louise and I shared a Piña Colada (not too sweet) and a Manhatten, and snacked on nuts while enjoying our table by the pool and the service by the immaculately dressed waiters. It was a lot of fun, sipping our drinks (R$22 each = $14), and trying to look classy while taking blurry pictures of everything around us.

This morning I had a wonderful time at the circus. The class seemed amazingly calm, and I had a lot of fun coaching trapeze, chatting with some of the older kids about Cirque de Soleil shows we like, and helping kids walk on stilts. The coaches and kids at the circus are becoming my friends, and I'm going to miss them a lot when I leave in two weeks.

This weekend the artists in Santa Teresa are having a sort of open-house, so I plan to explore that tomorrow to check out what my "bohemian" neighborhood has to offer. Tchau!