Brasil Alimentos

Another night, I went to a delicious pizza restaurant. For one set price, you can eat as much pizza as you want. The servers came around holding out a tray of pizza, either savoury or sweet, and you either accept or refuse to take a slice. There were so many different flavours; I didn't have two slices the same. The trick is to pace yourself because if you get full too fast, you can't fit in the strawberry and melted chocolate dessert pizza afterwards. It was a great idea and the restaurant was very atmospheric, decked out in retro-Italian memorabilia from license plates to posters and newspaper clippings.

On a different night, another friend from Caxias do Sul invited me to her apartment, where she and her boyfriend prepared me a great Brazilian style churrasco. Apparently each apartment in the complex has its own barbeque integrated into the kitchen. We had grilled cheese, grilled entire onions, sausages, beef and pork to be sprinkled with farofa (toasted manioc meal), and drank chimarrão (southern Brazilian mate). On another occasion we went to Cotiporã, a little village not far from Caxias do Sul, where my friend’s father comes from. Mostly Italian descendants live there; my friend's father's first language having been an Italian dialect from the north of Italy, which he still speaks with his family today. He has a country house there as well as plots of land because he comes from a farming family. When the parents died, they split the land between the 6 children, only one of them choosing to be a farmer full-time. However, my friend's father grows pears, grapes and other Brazilian fruits (Brazil has so many fruits, it’s amazing!) We ventured to his brother's farmhouse, where they had just slaughtered a pig and were making homemade salami, cooking the fat in the back garden.

My last evening in the state of Rio Grande Do Sul, my friend’s family took me to Nova Petrópolis, about 45 minutes from Caxias do Sul. The majority of the natives are descendants of German immigrants and therefore, the architecture is incredibly Germanic. It’s almost like we entered a German ski resort town; apparently it is quite cold up there in the mountains in winter. We ate café colonial, a German style breakfast that consisted of jams, breads, cheeses, hams, cakes, tea and coffee among other things. The food literally covered the entire table, all 5 of us barely made a dent in it by the time we were all bursting at the seams with food.

And of course, I ate plenty of pastel (the Brazilian answer to the Latino empanada) throughout my stay.