What do they do, on a rainy night in Rio....

"Não falo o português", I finally, timidly said to my cab driver, 10 minutes into the ride from Tom Jobim international airport in Rio de Janeiro.  I couldn't stand my ignorant silence any more.  "Well, use Spanish then," he said, relieved and gracious.  The fact that he said that in Portuguese, and I understood it, spoke volumes about the next 72 hours I was going to experience in this fascinating place. We carried on a conversation about everything - the Olympics and the World Cup, how much the shops and apartments by the lake look like Monaco, how cold it really gets in Canada...as if my tentative and brutal Spanglish and his very considerately slow Portuguese were as effortless as the talk around a family dinner table.  And his firm decline of any tip at the end of the trip just underlined his sincerity.  


72 hours does not do justice to any city, let alone country, that one visits for the first time, and it would be desperately unfair to characterize anything about this amazing, complex giant country which few North Americans ever cross the Equator to see.  That might be because of the immense length of time it takes to get here - flying for 15 hours and yet landing in virtually the same time zone.  That kinda screws up jet lag.  Try flying 15 hours east or west from  Calgary - you're in a different day, not just a different country.  Also a bit unnerving is the idea that while we at home are finally getting our first glimpse of the end of winter, these folks are preparing for fall.  I love the idea that nobody here needs English to get along, let alone to get rich.  Nature here is as big, as strange, and as wonderful as anything I have experienced in my vast country - with glimpses of the extremely familiar crashing into the completely different.  It's almost like waking up and discovering you have a sixth, and seventh sense.  But how do you stuff any of this into your head in a mere 72 hours, and how do you let it make any kind of a difference?


It's not made any easier by the same language on every traveler's tips website, warning against walking around  Rio at any time with anything that might be of value dangling from your wrist or neck.  To hear them talk, Brazil is teeming with postapocalyptic hordes looking to sever you from your watch - with or without your hand attached, and predatory cab drivers driving you the long way into the boondocks before shaking you down for your hard-earned holiday cash at some dimly lit hotel at the end of the trip...


Maybe you just have to go, and keep the same common sense you'd use at home.  Keep your ears, eyes, and mind open, yeah - but not for pure self preservation alone.  Drink from the firehose - you're bound to swallow something.  Swallowing, yes:  When time is of the absolute essence, like on a two-day conference trip to the New World, sometimes all you can do is swallow, in order to get and keep a piece of the experience around you.  A picture may speak louder than a thousand words, but one bite of slippery maracuja, one heady sip of caipirinha, are worth ten million.  I had to taste whatever part of Brazil I could get into my mouth.


The standard array of runny scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, and pancakes, sat there in the buffet line - perhaps to quell the prospective rioting of desperate Americans asserting their constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of normal breakfast - but Lo! - the revolution begins right on that doorstep.  Innocuously named sausages sat ready to pounce, under their strategic cover between eggs and bacon.  They seemed ridiculously small - no bigger than a lima bean - but oh, the heavenly punch of garlic, real non-baloney meat, snappy casing and wreathed in gloriously sweet sautee of onion!   I hesitated, then put the egg spoon down.  There was a long table to the right, (which I had stupidly ignored, beelining like a drone towards "the usual").  On it, the parade of yellow things, as big as your fist, looked oddly familiar, like your best friend in sixth grade twenty five years later.  The sign called it "maracuja".  Passion fruit!  But passion fruit is purple!  Why is this yellow, and why is it so big?  I gotta take two....


 



It was passion fruit.  It was apparently one of a mere 150 species of passion fruit in Brazil - less than half of which are eaten, the rest made into valuable pharmaceutical and cosmetic things.  For 48 years I had thought there was just one, available in Africa and in certain Chinese grocery stores in Canada (if you were lucky).  This one was incredible.  Google informed me that the yellow version, which most Brazilians prefer, is "not as sweet" as the purple one.  "As if!",  thought I, spooning memory after memory down my throat.  Guavas!  Yellow ones, with pink in the middle!  Pineapple - pure white, like they are supposed to be, and ten times sweeter and more alive than anything coming off the boat to Safeway.  And bananas - fat, irregular, dusty-skinned - and the perfect essence of bananiness, the kind that also cannot seem to survive the trip North.  Who eats only fruit at breakfast?  I do!  (Well - and a few more sausages.  And those tiny little sticky buns and pastries so light they float effortlessly off your plate.  And cheese, after springy buffalo mozzarella, after grilled feta on a stick, after sliced "I thought it was Swiss but it's way more", after cheese, after cheese....)


Lunch was not required.


But at 4:00, something to drink while watching the pool, and the crashing breakers on the beach, was.  And maybe a little something to nibble on, to cleanse the palate...  First, the Caipirinha - famed national drink of Brazil.  This is nothing more than a sliced lime, smashed together with sugar, some ice cubes, then all mercifully drowned in Cachaça - something which Wikipedia helpfully identifies as "fermented sugar cane juice".


Now - others who seek to experience "national drinks" inevitably wind up with a surprise somewhat different than the pleasant kind. Witness east African "pombe" - fermented banana mash, which should be drunk from a brown beer bottle with a straw, thus avoiding both its unsettling blackness and occasional slimed chunk.  Or, on the west side of that continent - "mimbo" - palm wine similarly fermented in one day, but with the pleasing texture and mouth feel of saliva.  Not even Italy is exempt - "grappa" by any other name is kerosene lightly dosed with licorice (at least as far as I have tried to date).  So, national drink of Brazil - what macho posturing is needed to unearth your alleged charms?


None!  This stuff is magnificent.  We don't call bourbon "fermented corn mash drink", nor do we call gin "juniper berry hell" (although maybe we should).  I think the problem here is that one is not quite sure how to say "Cachaça" (ka-SHA-sa, as I learned at the liquor store today).  Let me herewith proclaim 'kashasa's" rightful place among the heralds of discreet, sophisticated imbibery known to man.  And - the best way to consume it, bearing another name perhaps only pronounced correctly before beginning to drink it - the Caipirinha.  One sliced lime, two teaspoons sugar, smashed (or "muddled") together in a glass, then ice to fill the glass, with two ounces of Cachaça.  Should you be so lucky to have fresh sugar cane idling about your kitchen, add a spear of it as garnish to the glass.  Enjoy.  Enjoy the tiny globes of pure lime sacs, liberated and floating freely through your glass, the crunch of the occasional undiluted sugar crystal, the clearly unmistakable rich first cousin of rum smoothly finishing and crowning every sip!  


 



Don't have more than two at a time, at least not by yourself.


And coming with the poolside drink, a poolside platter of antipasti.  Not the Italian kind, we soon discovered.  Grilled sliced sausage - reminiscent of but bigger and bolder than those at breakfast.  Olives shot through with strong florals, fresh radishes and rocket lettuce, and calamari which had clearly arrived that morning from just over there in the bay.


Supper was not required.  But procured nonetheless -  after another patriotic round of national drinks - much later that night.  A festival of small plates - none ordered, but placed on the table as obviously and naturally as your fork and knife.  Grilled eggplant, hot and delicately charred.  Sweet and slippery grilled pepper, tender and flat as your own tongue.  Chunks of pure white cod in grassy green olive oil.  Octopus chunks, impossibly tender and meaty as the finest filet mignon.  What might have been, and should have been called naan bread, although about as thick as a page of a good novel - and crusty slices of peasant baguette to purge the plate of every and all sauce and garnish.


Followed by a main dish - which, if it had to carry the title of dinner on its slender shoulders alone, may have collapsed to its knees.  After that round of appetizers, though - it was perfect.  Japan has its sashimi - a royal and excellent way to eat all fish (raw, the way it is supposed to be).  But here in South America, they have proven that this same fish can jump to a whole new level when bathed, simply and quickly in a dash of pure fresh citrus juice - lemon, and/or definitely lime.  The acid cooks the flesh ever so delicately.  Then, blend the fish with a handful of the freshest vegetable nearby.  Radish, sweet red onion, avocado - all can take their rightful place in this harmonic dish - behold, "ceviche".  My menu said mine was supposed to be tuna.  But my menu also gave itself the right to do whatever came in on the boat that day.  Salmon came in today.  So mine was salmon ceviche, and I was glad it was.


 



The next day, we stood again in our trade show booth, sweating gently under air conditioning valiantly losing against the tropical sun blazing off the ocean behind us, and talked to everyone we had come to talk to.  We still had four hours of conference left, but the mission was accomplished, and so we abandoned it, leaving long sleeves and long pants behind, and found ourselves under umbrellas on a promontory, with the boardwalk stretching left to the immense blinding white wonder of Ipanema Beach, lined with condominiums at $3 million per square meter, and to the right, our massive Sheraton perched on its private beach, at the end of a cascade of impossibly angled, precarious boxes affixed to the towering mountains climbing right out of the ocean to the sky. 


 



And so we toasted our goodbyes to a country which has so much more to taste - yes, some with caipirinhas, some with a green coconut, end lopped off and straw inserted into the most refreshing natural energy drink ever invented.  And up over my left shoulder, Cristo Redentor - Christ the Redeemer, on the mountain, hands outstretched over Rio and Brazil  


God bless Brazil - I hope I can see you again.