the river moves on

Friday, December 25, 2009

Christmas in Brazil

The Brazilian Christmas spread

My Brazilian family on Christmas eve. And yes, I am sweating a lot, because it's 11 pm and approximately 85 degrees.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

The most excellent Christmas present yet!

Today I received an amazing Christmas present, courtesy of Simone:

A cabbage!!!

Jaque, cabbage, me, Simone

Saturday, December 19, 2009

It's Peanut Butter & Jelly Time

It's a powerful feeling to be able to be exotic in a foreign country by introducing, the elusive American food consumed in so many movies...Peanut Butter.

"Does it really exist? Do you actually eat that? Is it sweet"

There was so much mystery surrounding the Pasta Amendoim (Portuguese for peanut butter), I decided to sacrifice the jar I was gifted by Frances for the sake of cultural understanding. What follows is the series of photos taken the day peanut butter arrived to Musiartes.

The item of mystery, complete with Eat Me With a Spoon written in permanent marker around the bottom, and the location identification clue of the Brazilian flag in the Background.

The first tentative taste test, round one with crackers

"Annika! It's not sweet...well it's sort of sweet, but it's not like Doce de leite." The mystery begins to peel away.

Round Two: I introduce bread and grape jelly into the mix. Initially the thought of such a combination is met with disgust.

The one woman production line. On the other side of this camera there are 5 or 6 people, all making predictions about likelihood of the bizarre combination being a total failure.

The finished product, cut into small bits to encourage tentative consumers.

And finally, the hearty endorsement of the Musiartes staff for Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

A successful product launch overall, only a few people that were not terrible thrilled by the taste. It's a beautiful thing when something that is mundane in one culture is so foreign and new in another.

And with that, I shall leave you with an inspiring tune that we used to use as a cheer in ultimate frisbee.

Monday, November 30, 2009

A tribute to Thanksgiving's past

This year marks my seventh Thanksgiving in a row out of the US, beating out my birthday, and Halloween the closest contenders. It is a close tie between Halloween & Thanksgiving in terms of how much I enjoy sharing the traditions of this day (Halloween abroad has yielded new phenomena such as reverse trick-r-treating, carving watermelons, and bobbing for apples out of giant water coolers).

My first Thanksgiving away from home, the one that unbeknownst to me at the time would set off a streak that has lasted seven years, occurred in Ghana in 2003, near the end of my time studying abroad at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology. My mom was there, dressed in her newly tailored African garb, so technically half of the Rudback family was in attendance. We peeled buckets of potatoes, drank palm wine as we went and tried to fix over peppered watery gravy so that it would be at least moderately edible.

2004 Thanksgiving happened remains one of my proudest moments, as the first that I prepared completely on my own, with only one propane burner, without internet access to All Recipes.com to figure out how the hell to make stuffing or gravy. Granted, I settled for chicken rather than Turkey due to cost limitations, but in two hours I prepared a roasted chicken, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and a salad. It went over well, except the the mashed potatoes. Even before I started cooking, Achille & Magadelene were asking me what I planned to do with the potatoes and asked me multiple times if I was Sure that I wanted to mash them. Yes, of course. So there they remained, pushed to the side of the plate.

Thanksgiving 2005 was actually my first in Brazil, a bit farther North in Salvador. We ate enormous plates of various seafood moquecas, dishes of seafood and sauce drenched in palm oil, while sitting on the beach overlooking the ocean.

In 2006, I spent the day at the first conference of AIESEC in Jordan with these wonderful people, bringing in guests and barely eating dinner due to stress about the conference. I didn't get to partake in the gorging aspect of Thanksgiving, but the elation and beautiful people helped ease the void caused by a lack of Turkey.

In 2007 in Cairo 30 of my closest friends feasted on two enormous turkeys, a duck, 6 kilos of creamed onions, gravy, salads, a vat of mashed potatoes, stuffing,3 apple and berry pies, 4 pumpkin pies & cranberry sauce imported from the US by my dear visitors Michelle, Kelly Rae and Lara. There was binging. There were the quintessential Thanksgiving Day Guantanamo inspired pictures taken next to the American flag that may never surface again.

Last year, I ate Iraqi food in Qatar, in Souq Waqif in Doha the day before leaving on a plane to Iran, and a few days after having a Qatari style Thanksgiving feast, at the museum of Sheikh Faisal. A visual image that sticks to my brain, is the Sheikh, on the the most important and powerful people in the country, picking meat from the skull of the goat with another goat bone.

This year while at home in Seattle, fearing that I wouldn't find the ingredients to cook one of my favorite meals of the year, I enlisted the help of friends and my mom to have a "Fakes-giving", complete with all the trimmings, just a month early. The results were delicious and after dinner we all stood around watching classic YouTube videos including, So your cat wants a Massage, and Pregnant Women are Smug, and reveling in friendship and food comas.

So this is actually the second Thanksgiving I'm celebrating this year here in Santa Maria, Brazil. I decided to cook for my host family to share a bit of American cuisine and of course because I absolutely love the glorious combination of Turkey with all the accouterments. I went all out; roasted Turkey (called Peru here), Garlic mashed potatoes, fresh stuffing, giblet gravy and topped off with pumpkin pie made from fresh pumpkin. Before I started cooking I definitely had some concerned looks from my host family, "you want to do what with the pumpkin? are you sure? It's not a sweet vegetable..." but in the end, everyone's bellies were full, and we had leftovers that will likely last a week, a culinary success.

We will see what the next year brings.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

I need...a cabbage

Oh the challenges of management in a foreign language, one that you are far from fluent in.

Yesterday I was doing well, explaining the agenda for the summer courses at Musiartes to Simone, one of the receptionists.

"Here you can see who are the teachers, the number of hours per session, the number of sessions for week. So what I need you to do is created the agenda"

It is all good until here. There are nods of understanding.

and then.

eu preciso...um repulho ate sexta feira

I need a...repulho...by friday...

Blank look

The word I am searching for is Draft and I recall a word starting with R and ending with HO printed across a document that was a draft...

Repulho? Simone asks.

Si, um repulho. Yes, a repulho. I am more convinced

She searches online for a minute and then finds a picture of a repulho. It is not a draft. Not even close. It's a cabbage.

"Dear Simone, I need a cabbage by Friday, it is extremely urgent."

Awesome.

By the way, the word for draft is Rascunho. A difference of a few little letters and I go from draft to cabbage.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The sun sets on Santa Maria

The sun makes a brief appearance only to descend into the horizon

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Do you like blue or red?

"Annika, which color do you prefer, red or blue?"

This is a loaded question in Santa Maria, one that means friendship or the cold shoulder.

I was first asked this question driving from Porto Alegre to Santa Maria, bumping over the pockmarked pavement.

"So what's your answer?"

I can tell by the way it is phrased and the way that everyone in the car turns around in their seats to hear my answer that they are asking something more important than what is my favorite color.

"Ummm, well...I wear a lot of blue..."

"YES! Gremista!

"But I like red as well"

Other person in the car, " YES! Internacional! Colorado!"

As of yet I've not had to choose sides and am trying to avoid doing so under any circumstance. Both teams are from Porto Alegre, both started in the early 1900s.

One of the most common ways Colorado fans explain the difference is by pulling at their skin and saying "Preto, preto!" meaning that Internacional has always allowed people from all ethnicities to play, whereas other teams were exclusive, sometimes even to only a certain ethnicity, such as the German only team, or the Italian only team.

I'm sure the day will come soon when someone will give me a shirt as a "gift" as a way to brand me as one side or the other. For the moment I remain unclaimed.

Friday, November 13, 2009

night fears

tic tic tic.

tic tic.

tic tic tic tic.

In my subconscious I hear these tapping noises on my right ride. Must be a dream.

tic

No. Not a dream.

I reach to my right and feel for the switch on my bedside lamp...

I swallow a scream. Adrenaline shoots from a pocket in my heart.

On the edge of my laptop, this very computer, sits my nemesis. Two long antennae tap the screen, feet that emerged from primordial ooze freeze for a moment, brown shell of a body taunts me with its ability to survive a nuclear holocaust.

I turn off the light, hoping to escape the visual image.

tap tap tap.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

The sound of cockroach feet hits the pit of my stomach, draws sweat to the surface of my skin. I should be able to deal, it's just a damn cockroach. But I remember waking in the middle of the night in Cameroon to the Flying cockroaches that would land on the sides of my mosquito net, and once going on an adrenaline fear fueled rampage to eliminate this creature from existence. Shock, and suddenly I flashed forward out of the craziness into a moment of meta cognition and realized that here I was, in only my underwear, viciously focused on crushing a fairly harmless animal with my flip-flop.

So now I sit here awake, blogging about my irrational fear of cockroaches, hoping that the one or two who reside in my room will please just disappear into a nice cockroach hole for the night, change their schedules to hang out and tap around during the day while I'm not here and agree to not ever, for any reason, venture into the cushy territory of my bed, or into the soft folds of my clothes.

Monday, November 09, 2009

Ridiculous amounts of Meat

I pity the vegetarian of Rio Grande do Sul. I haven't met one yet, but when I do, I will be in awe of the will power, the sheer determination to find restaurants with vegetarian dishes on the menu and the stomach to withstand watching the regional past time of this state: Churrasco - Brazilian BBQ.

My first two days in Santa Maria I attended three churracos. The first was my host family's welcome churrasco, complete with enormous slabs of meat, chicken hearts, and salads that allow you to fool yourself into pretending that you're eating a light, healthy meal, and that you didn't just have grease dripping down your face a moment ago.

My second BBQ took place at my friend and co-projecteer Mauricio's house: once again the theme of chicken hearts and huge slabs of meat continue, with a new twist of dipping the meat into farofa, a powdery substance made out of manioc that is very similar to giri in Ghana. At this point I'm pretty sure I've reached my meat saturation point for a few days and that I may need to have a vegetable fast for a few days to normalize my digestive system.

But it is not to be.

Day two in Santa Maria brings yet another Churrasco, with even larger slabs of beef skewered onto small metal poles that pierce the flesh. This time I get to watch the process of impaling the sides of meat onto the skewers, a process of weaving the poles through the meat and then rubbing it in rock salt. It slowly roasts on the grill, browning perfectly, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside.

It is delicious. Every five minutes or so I decide that I definitely will not eat anymore. And then I fail at keeping that promise. The pieces are cut so small...so easy to eat...

My second extreme meat encounter happened after attending an amazing percussion show on Thursday. It was late, but we decided to go get a Santa Maria favorite: Xis.

Pronounced Cheese, it is the American Cheeseburger's enormously obese older brother. The Xis is something that looks like it should be eaten only in one of those How Many can you eat competitions, or those restaurant promotions where they offer you a free meal if you finish the Mac Daddy of Burgers.

I tried, but in the end the Xis won.

Summer is coming and with it Churrasco's galore. I will need some mental preparation and will power to survive, but I know that I will.

Ate logo...until next time...

Labels: Brazil, food, meat

Saturday, November 07, 2009

a week of heat and storms

I head out into the street outside my office building in Santa Maria at the end of the day, attempting to catch the break in the rain in order to walk home.

Turning the corner, the weather is clearly not on the same page as me. The clouds tear open and the battering of the earth begins again. Four days ago the temperature in Santa Maria was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and now I am cursing not bringing my raincoat to work.

My open umbrella dances with others on the street, rising and falling to pass each other and avoid poking out their owner's eyes. Again, I turn and the rain beats down, increasingly more aggressive. I stop under an awning, waiting for it to slow, but after a while decide that the bottom of my jeans are soaked anyways so I might as well continue.

As I walk, the rushing water on the sidewalk seeps into my shoes and slowly soaks my feet, creating an internal slip and slide for my foot.

I come to a crosswalk that is no longer a crosswalk. A river about four feet across now runs through either side of the zebra strips, ankle deep, brown water that is carrying all the dirt of the city to some unknown location underground. I survey the scene, walk towards a slimmer part of the river and in the end have to stomp across anyways, giving into the wet, allowing it to fully bathe my feet and ankles.

And I can't help but smile as an old woman stomps across with me in her flip flops as she explains to me that it's good she's wearing a short dress so it doesn't get wet. At the next river, deeper and wider than the last, off go her flip flops and she wades across the street.

A small bird rolls down the sidewalk with the water, its feathers slicked down to its body, a tiny drowning victim of the storm.

When I reach home, I sit with my host parents at the front door of the house sipping juice and chimarrao, a bitter herbal hot drink characteristic of the South, and watching the rain drops explode on the street.

The storm eventually passes and leaves fresh wet streets,wet people and clean air, staving of the heat. At least for today.