Thursday was a religious holiday in SP—Corpus Christi, in this case. That likely means something to the mostly-Catholic people of SP, but for we secular kids it meant that Wednesday night we watched foo-chee-bow (er, “football”) on TV and drank wine, slept in on Thursday (OK, I do *every* day—plus naps), and spent the rest of the day achieving one of the things on our list. So, pretty normal. This is all like a soothing balm to my dear departing Type A soul, as I learn to come down and not care so much about the details, lest I go quietly mad.

Our 1 thing? We drove and drove and drove on an abortive mission that led us to a mall that I was pretty sure that I, in my patched jeans and 8-year-old sandals, was probably too déclassé to enter… to buy a cookie sheet. I’ve started to notice something—my due diligence sucked, because Brazil is actually expensive. I was seduced by a currency that’s .61 Brazilian real to the Canadian dollar… when in fact food can be pricey and (some) goods are, too. Like anything imported…

Marcella has a can of Campbell’s tomato soup in the kitchen. Just one. She says it’s “in case of emergency”. I think that emergency *might* be “I won the lottery and want to splurge!!“, because this can cost her the equivalent of CAD$4.

Marcella also has a love that is deep and true… for Special K. I half thought I should buy her a cow when we were in Berlin, what with the amount of milk she went through for the sake of her beloved… But there’s no Special K in Brazil, so Marcella has found the next best thing:

Ondilège cereal is Casino brand—as in, the same brand in the Parisian grocery stores—and this one box will set you back 15,00 reals. Or, CAD$9.15. For breakfast cereal.

I don’t really have words.

But that might also be because of the throbbing pain in my finger for the last 24 hours… remember when Kath wrote about her thesis, and provided a clip of Pinky and the Brain? I’m not plagiarising her, or anything, but the play on words was just way too tempting.

Here’s pinky:

and here’s its brains:

How awesome is that? This is why Marcella and I are friends: an equal love of ridiculous kitchen items. Like ice cube trays… that produce brain ice cubes, redefining the phrase “brain freeze”. Heh.

So, here’s me using my head:

Stop me if you’ve heard *this* one before, but I WAS BAKING… and multitasking: I was also trying to make and eat lunch. Being too lazy (and without the counter space) to pull out the toaster, I tried to toast my bread over the gas stove… and had I known that the kitchen hid a pair of these:

I *might* not have been so inclined to use two forks as pincers… and then to grab the tines of the fork to reposition the bread mid-way through the laziest operation ever…

Who does that? WHO grabs hot metal?!?

Ouch.

After I’d gone through three brains, my water-logged finger still showed the signs of one and a half tines. Yarg.

I *can* say that that was the best damned toast I had EVER had, and the cookies weren’t bad either. I used this recipe from one of my favourite food porn websites—The Traveler’s Lunchbox—but added espresso instead of vanilla extract, reduced the sugar and added a mashed banana to try to recapture some of the lost moisture when I was without *actual* brown sugar.

This recipe is brill for two reasons: you melt the butter (so you don’t have to plan ahead for room temperature butter), and then you freeze the cookie dough balls, and can thereafter bake only as many as you want to have at a time.

See how it’s glossier than “normal” creamed-sugar-and-butter cookie dough?

And then, frozen:

I wrapped them up in threes, and we baked six of them for dessert:

and in the end, they were a bit less pretty than they might have been, had I actually used brown sugar—they just sorta looked like they could use a couple of hours in the sun, you know? But they were baked to happiness, and I wasn’t going to overdo it for the sake of aesthetics. The banana flavour was very faint and, I think, a nice way to decrease the sugars… but I bet these are inSANE when the recipe’s followed to a T.

Well! Two days, one solid achievement… and today (Saturday), we went to TWO food markets, so tomorrow’s post will be filled with some weird and wonderful—whenever I felt OK about bringing my camera out. Stay tuned!

I’ve been in in São Paulo for 16 hours now… and so far, so good. Well, “so good” means that I spent most of the day lapsing in and out of consciousness—I always apply the motion sickness patch for trans-hemispheric flights, and it leads to sleepiness and cotton mouth. Both of those really shaped today.

Marcella and her manfriend (who is, if you can imagine, a redheaded Brazilian… I once jokingly called him “a Ginger”, not maliciously because ginger-bashing is DUMB, but it was more like an incredulous “your Brazilian boyfriend’s a ginger?!?” and now she uses it as a term of endearment. ) anyway… they came for me at the airport this morning, and we stopped for a late breakfast after that. I had a sort of cheesy bun that was really dense and sort of corn-bready (no photos, all I had on me was my wallet)—yum!—and a ham and cheese sandwich. So, my first Brazilian meal was actually the exact same as my last Canadian meal. Oh travel, you’re one adventure after the next…

We got home, and Marcella decided she should maybe go to work. And as she prepared, she told me, “today is the day you won’t go anywhere—promise me—until I can show you around and tell you where to go and, more importantly, where NOT to go.”

This would be a buzz-kill for a lot of people, but I still had scopolamine running through my veins, and so I read, watched TV and slept… all the while *just* worried enough about the water situation that I didn’t want to brush my teeth or shower until Marcella and I could have a really good convo about it.

I’ve never been any place where you can’t just drink the water. And almost exactly a year ago, I lamented the inanity of Canadians buying bottled water… but now, that’s what it’s gonna be if I’m drinking. I don’t know how far I’m supposed to take this: can I brush my teeth with tap water? Wash my fruit & veg in it? Do I rinse my dishes in bottled water?

I apologise for there being none of my own photos in this post (it’s winter here, so I was surprised to wake up from one of my naps at 6pm and have it dark out already, before I’d snapped the things I meant to include here!), and will end instead with 5 surprises so far:

1. Brazil is no place for a Type-A personality… schedules and rules are pretty flexible. Really flexible. Threat-to-safety flexible. That’s a big plus AND big minus.
2. There’s no recycling. Anything, to Marcella’s knowledge. BUT: she has also said that a good project for us could be doing research to find out if there’s any place that might take our (many) water bottles…
3. The sheer size of some of the fruit is terrifying. Chayote squash and papayas, particularly, are at least twice the size of anything I’ve ever seen before!
4. It’s common for “not so poor” people to give work to poorer people: example—a domestic helper comes in every day to unpack groceries, or Marcella’s bag if she was travelling, to wash dishes, make the bed, do laundry and tidy up, generally. Interesting.
5. Outside of the slums, it’s usual for people to have barbed wire surrounding their property. Tomorrow, I’ll snap the balcony, and you’ll start to wonder if “going to Brazil” was actually code for “going down to Pokeytown.”

Other little surprises include the fact that today it was 25 degrees out (and tomorrow is the first day of winter!!), and when I tell people “não falo português” (I don’t speak Portuguese), it doesn’t stop them from continuing to try to wrest a conversation out of me.

So, day 1, challenge 1: must aggressively start working on my Portuguese. I have a book, and maybe I can find a cheap tutor?

Day 1, challenge 2: go to sleep knowing that the BIGGEST FREAKING BUG I’VE EVER SEEN JUST DARTED FROM THE STAIRS TO THE BATHROOM!!!!

Confession: I LOVE everything Christmas.

Love! I love decorations, I love Christmas spirit, I love snow, I love the tree, I love the lights, I love watching the Sound of Music (ritual!), I love chocolate for breakfast and… well… this will be my first Christmas dinner sans-salmon in awhile. I suppose there will be a moment of silence and then I’ll… what? Maybe cook myself a mean bison steak?

I also love the music (already listening to a Starbucks Christmas CD in my car!), I love my stocking that my mom made for me when I was little, and… I even love eggnog!

Well, sorta. The idea of drinking a grog of cream and egg yolks makes me want to run screaming (in 3-and-1s or 30 / 30, S?), but commercial eggnog that has been pasteurised and guar gummed within an inch of its life does the trick nicely!

Well, it has—as in, “in the past”. But I’m pretty over milk, to be honest, and the double-whammy is that those nogs are sweeter than all get out. Anticipating that I would feel exactly as I do right now, (nostalgic, craving nog, but wanting a non-dairy version), I sent an email to Almond Dream and said “how about eggnog almond milk?”

They said “Dear Customer, we value you as a person. Thank you for your comment”, or something equally inspiring.

I shoulda let it go then… but last weekend at the grocery store I saw this, and launched hard-core into impulse-buy territory. In fact, maybe this was what made me forget the eggs…

So: I tried it! I was excited at first, and thinking about whether I’d cut it with vanilla or plain almond milk to reduce the sweetness. Sure, it’s soy, and I have thyroid disease so soy milk is possibly not great for my health… but I’ll try (almost) anything once!

Alas.

Flavour failure! All I could think was, “I know this flavour… what is it?”

Pause for identification…

“oh yeah. This taste is what the soap smells like in the Vancouver airport.”

Mayyyybe time to try some old-fashioned, milk-based stuff?

Are you a nogophile or nog-hater?

Et voilà! My new camera! And my new hair cut (just a trim, really…) and new high- and low-lights, to “blend” the steadily increasing grey. What annoys me is, if you look reeeeeeeally closely, you can see a white hair in my freaking part. Still. Argh.

So—as I said, my camera is pretty out of control. I don’t know how to use it yet (that’s what the New Zealand trip is for!!), but I’ll try in the meantime. I’ve gone with the Nikon D90 and an 18-105mm lens. This is way more camera than I’d have gotten on my own, but, I wasn’t on my own. I brought much-needed reinforcement.

Do you remember how I agonised and hemmed and hawed about NZ? I have serious anxiety about spending money sometimes. Patti, my friend and at this point basically life counselor ( ), said that I have a fear of commitment. I think, “no, I have a fear of debt and not paying off my credit card every month.”

But Patti and her husband Bryan know about cameras, and were JUST the right people to see me through my anxiety. We shopped around at Black’s, Costco, and then more seriously at The Camera Store in Calgary (P&B’s favourite), where they were SO awesome. Customer served me out the yin-yang, but they had nothing in stock. We thought about how we could make it work, and then… walked, so I could think it all over. We walked, in fact, just about 6 blocks down 11th Ave SW to Vistek. They had the D90 in stock, and were willing to match The Camera Store’s price. Sweet!

(source)

I asked Patti to tell me what to do—I literally said “Patti, tell me what to do.”

And she said “do it.”

I looked at her blankly. She said “look, this camera will be all you need. The Canon T2i [my other option] would eventually have limitations in terms of the controls, so while it’s a good starter camera, the D90 is a starter *and* a longer-term camera. And it’s what we’ve got and we *love*!”

The deal was sealed when she observed that the price of the body had come down SIGNIFICANTLY since they had bought theirs. And they dig it. And then I got a better lens… and an early Christmas present from P&B—a Gorilla tripod!

I have a Canon SLR already, but it’s 8 years old and a film camera. Now that they digitise *everything* when printing, film looks pixelly and grainy, no matter what. So while I definitely prefer film photography, if I’m going to go digital… well, I guess I went big… and on Tuesday, I’ll go home.