…Tacos from Mexico…
About three months ago my wife and I moved into the top floor of a lovely house near the top of a steep hill in Santa Teresa, an artsy neighbourhood near downtown Rio. To be honest, it’s a little more than we can afford and walking up the hill is exhausting, but the beautiful view makes up for cutting back on a few luxuries and the achy legs.
A sight for sore legs – the view from our new house, situated where the neighbourhoods of Santa Teresa and Glória meet. You can see Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain) and Guanabara Bay in the background.
Santa Teresa (or simply Santa as the locals say) is quite unlike most other Rio neighbourhoods, being a hilltop district with steep, windy roads lined with beautiful old buildings. In English we would describe the streets of Santa as “cobbled”, but here in Brazil they have a far more interesting word for the rough, rectangular stones: paralelepípedos. Try saying those seven syllables after a caipirinha or two!
Literally translated, Pé Sujo means “Dirty foot”. This is the term used to describe the many low-end bars that pepper the city. You will find a Pé Sujo on almost every street in Rio. As the name suggests, these bars are not known for their standards of hygiene – if your feet weren’t dirty when you went in, they most likely will be by the time you leave. They say that when the waiter wipes your table with a cloth, it actually makes the table more dirty! But these grubby drinking dens are loved as a quintessentially Brazilian place to drink beer and share gossip.
Right now it is quite chilly in Rio. In fact it has been cold for the last few weeks and I have to say I am starting to feel somewhat aggrieved – this is not what someone from my part of the world expects from ‘Sunny Rio’. Thankfully, most of the year the weather is just how I like it – hot, very hot or boiling. And the drink of choice when you are in need of refreshment? Cerveja! [ser-VAY-zha]
In the course of my (ahem) exhaustive research I uncovered some interesting beer facts. Brazil is the fifth largest beer producer in the world, making nearly 10 billion litres each year. Most of this is made by an evil company called Ambev which has something approaching a monopoly here. But I was surprised to discover that the average Brazilian drinks just 53 litres each year – compare this to the average Czech who drinks 158:
Top drinking from the Czechs. No big surprise to find Ireland near the top! (http://snippets.com/how-much-does-beer-consumption-vary-by-country.htm)
One of the things I enjoyed most about travelling was meeting people from all over the world. Granted there weren’t many Somalians climbing the mountains down in Patagonia, but even so, I still found myself meeting and getting to know people of nationalities I’d never previously encountered. And through these people I was introduced to all kinds of new music, films, books, phrases, etc.
I now know that a “yoke” to an Irishman translates roughly as “thingamy” as in “Pass me that yoke there will you?”. That Fahhhhn! is a rude word in Swedish. That Mexicans sprinkle a little salt into their Corona (turns out that you can now actually buy specialised salt to add to your beer).
You want salt with that? I hated it at first, then found I loved it. But as soon as I left Mexico it was disgusting again…
Of course these differences in culture, taste and tradition led to many disagreements and debates, though perhaps ‘debate’ is giving these conversations too much credit as they rarely surpassed the repetition of the phrase “That is so wrong!”.