Things have been fairly busy since I arrived back in London 10 days ago. Mostly my time has been taken up with my new job (which is going really well!) and catching up with friends (which has been great fun but exhausting).
What I thought I’d do over the next week or so is show you some snapshots from my London adventures so far.
More on this guy a little later…
A few days before I left for England, I was walking down a street in the neighbourhood of Laranjeiras. There was a large overpass/flyover just off to the right and on the side there was some pretty nice, colourful graffiti.
What is it with eyes on pyramids? I guess the illuminati made it to Rio.
Hello from freezy London. I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to hear that I had a reasonable flight and am now safely ensconced in a cosy room with a cosy radiator. The temperature has dipped to 2°C (36°F) – a temperature I haven’t had to endure since Patagonia back in 2009.
I don’t really have a lot else to say about being in London yet, so instead I’m going to continue on from my last post about the wonderful Hortifruti. First off, a mystery vegetable I spotted on my last shopping trip – can someone tell me what these are?
Any ideas what these are? What do you do with them?
Sooooo, today is my last full day in Brazil for 2 months. Such mixed feelings – it’s going to be great to see my family and friends, start my new job, eat proper cheese and drink proper beer again (in that order). But I’m leaving Brazil! For 2 months! There are so many things I’ll miss that I’m trying not to think about it too much right now. Instead I’m throwing myself into last minute preparations
One of the things I need to do is harvest my beloved chillis and turn them into hot chilli sauce! This time round I’m going for a genuine Trinidadian hot pepper sauce recipe and I’m also going to experiment with a chilli infused oil in the style found in many of Rio’s snack bars and Pé Sujos.
Yesterday, in preparation for all this peppery-cookery, I took a trip over to my favourite food shop in Rio – Hortifruti.
If you can afford it, this place is great. I love it!
Hortifruti (sounds like ORtchee-FROOtchee) was such a revelation to me the first time wandered in. The displays of fruit and vegetables are amazing – it’s like they have some kind of beauty contest for fresh produce and only the really sexy ones get through.
When it comes to learning languages, there are enough similarities between Spanish and Portuguese that I’m never really impressed when a native Spanish speaker tells me they speak Portuguese (or vice versa). My attitude tends to be “big deal – compared to English, they’re practically the same language anyway”. But when there are so many similarities, I do rather sympathise when a Portuguese word comes along that is just nothing like its Spanish counterpart.
Take this prickly customer:
I love pineapple! You know the French almost call this fruit bananas... (they say "Ananas").