The New And Improved Jabaquara

We left for Jabaquara Saturday afternoon. Most of the family was at Yuri's grandparents house already when we arrived. We looked at old pictures, ate awesome food, watched soccer and then headed into the town center to listen to live music. We had a great night!

Me and Yuri's grandmother, Creuza

Yuri's grandfather, Kachico getting us coconut water

Pedro with his new toy

Tio Patauta and Pedro having a great time

Bigger in Brazil: Grasshoppers.

Congrats to Tia Sandra who just found out she's pregnant :)

The stage with the band

Churros!! You know I got one.

We slept in this morning and then took a walk around town to snap some pictures of the improvements around town and of the house.

Tio Patauta playing bocci ball

Kachico headed back home

Some of Creuza's flowers

Yuri taking a shot at portraits

Creuza's Tomatoes

Creuza's Roses

A nice silhouette shot of Luana and Pedro

And what about bingo? Every one buys cards for the equivalent of $12, and you can buy as many as you want. Yuri and I each had one. You have to have all 25 spaces marked off, not 5 spaces marked off in a row. There were 3 prizes, 2 motorcycles and a car. They played for the motorcycles first, I was 5 away on the first one and 8 away on the second one. Everyone was pretty cranked up by the time they were going for the car. They start announcing when there are people that are only waiting on one number to win, but they don't say which number, which makes everyone anxious. They called 2 winners for the car. One was a ticket that was not sold, and the other one DIDN'T SHOW UP! They gave it a few minutes and continued calling numbers. I then became one of those few who was waiting on ONE NUMBER! When they called the last number they declared 8 winners. We left after that, but imagine! I almost won a car at a Brazilian bingo game.

Singing On A Farm

This morning I got up bright and early to take pictures of Yuri's cousin Eduardo singing with his classmates. I was allowed to bring my new camera so I was pretty excited. The event was rescheduled twice because of rain so they moved it to an indoor space, and of course it was beautiful today. I also got a free popsicle and unlimited use of a trampoline. Win.

It was a pretty cool location. It was a huge farm with tons of fruit trees and a huge pavilion. There were trampolines, bouncy castles, a huge blow up slide, a mechanical bull, and a zip line, it was pretty awesome.

Eduardo and his classmates did a great job. They sang 2 songs and then booked it for the fun stuff. We stuck around for a while, listened to the live band they had, ate hot dogs and popsicles, snapped a few pics and headed home.

The zipline!

Remember jaca? I posted a picture of it last time I was in Brazil.

Tio Lucio, Camila, Eduardo, Tia Sandra

When we got back we drank some coffee (it was an early morning!), played some wii and had lunch. Tia Sandra made a white lasagna that had tortellini in it, sounds crazy, and it was crazy, crazy good. I also went back up the the roof terrace to get some pictures of the view.

I find it so beautiful.

Now we're about to head out to Jabaquara to visit Yuri's grandparents and some cousins and... play bingo. That's right, bingo. You can laugh all you want but Yuri's grandfather won a motorcycle once while playing. Yeah, that's right. Pictures to follow.

Ladies Night!

Yesterday while Camila and I were at the gym she asked me if I wanted to go out for Japanese food with her and few other girls. I told her I'd never had Japanese food but I'd love to go! It was an opportunity for me to try something new and pick up some new vocab.

There only ended up being three of us, but we had a great time. We each ordered "batidas" which are supposed to be shots but are more like very small mixed drinks. They come in what looks like a taller version of a shot glass and they're made with fresh Brazilian fruit juices. Basically, if it's ladies night they're the perfect thing to order.

So colorful!

Since I had never ordered Japanese food before I decided to split something with Camila. We ordered a cone shaped piece of sushi that had salmon and rice in it, wrapped in seaweed and was fried. It was served split in 2 pieces topped with fried kale. I loved it.

You can see in the background one of the girls ordered a more typical sushi, but also fried. Warning: not to be eaten on first date, kale gets ALL UP IN YOUR TEETH.

After a lesson on what the difference was between a bouncy castle and a trampoline we headed to pick up Yuri and go back to Camila's for a churrasco. It was up on their terrace and there was a great view. It was a little rainy and pretty dark so I didn't get the greatest picture.

We watched soccer, had a few beers and ate amazing food. It was a great night, with even better company!

:)

Double Date!

On Sunday night Yuri's sister Larissa invited us to go out to dinner. Considering how lazy we'd been all weekend we definitely wanted to go. Her and her boyfriend Bruno picked us up around 8:30 and we drove over to Vitoria to have a look and see what was open.

The area we went to is really nice section of town, but recently shut down a lot of bars and restaurants. The residents had wanted a little more peace and quiet and that meant closing down a few places. That being said, there was still a ton open for that hour on a Sunday night.

We first stopped at a place called Emporio Da Empada. It was a small and busy place to grab empadinhas. You might remember us eating some on the beach in Ubu last time I was here, I posted them on the blog Right here.

They're like little individual servings of savory pie. They're DELICIOUS. This particular place had a Mexican version, and Italian version, and quite a few other varieties. They even had some sweet ones!

After we each had a bite there, and Yuri had a beer because all the empadinhas had cheese in them, we headed over to Habib's to see what they had to snack on.

Habib's is famous for these little almost pizzas. I don't know how else to call them. I didn't happen to take any pictures while we were there, most likely because the food didn't come out looking as good as it showed in the menu. I found a picture online though:

They had lots of little appetizer type foods for cheap, or combo platters for sharing, which was nice because I got to try a little bit of a few different things.

As if we hadn't eaten enough, we then went on an adventure to find the local Domino's Pizza. That's right. There aren't very many in the area, but Yuri and I are pretty big Domino's fans so we had to see it for ourselves. We were given directions at the empadinha place, and they turned out to be really good directions, because we found it!

I was clearly amazed.

Under 'Sobremesas" which is desserts, they have a mini banana pizza and a mini chocolate pizza! Might I add this is the only time I've ever seen pepperoni in Brazil.

Double Domino's Date.

This is apparently what Brazilians look like when they eat Domino's.

We ordered a medium pepperoni and an order of Cinnastix (That came with Dulce De Leche instead of that thin, white, powdered sugar gluey gook!) to go and managed to eat the entire order before bed. I must say, it was remarkably similar to American Domino's. Directly after I laid awake in bed wondering whether or not I would explode from fullness.

Lazy Days.

This weekend was a holiday weekend. Which meant nothing more than we were fairly lazy for about 4 days. Thursday night we went to Postinho for some food and drinks. We had some laughs, Yuri dropped some of our food the second it was delivered to the table, and people earned some new nicknames, it was a great time.

On Friday we went over to Tia Sandra's house to hang out with Caio and Luana. We watched Back To The Future in Portuguese, which was rather entertaining for me considering that Biff become "Biffee". As if his name wasn't bad enough. After we watched a soccer game and made plans to hit the movies. We didn't end up making it to the movies. We discovered that because it was a holiday they had jacked up the prices to the equivalent of $12 per person and no one wanted to pay that much. Eventually we ventured out of the house to get all the necessary things to make hot dogs, which was an adventure in itself considering everything was closed because of the holiday. Not long after dinner Caio and Luana left for Luana's house and we stuck around to hang out with Tio Lucio and Tia Sandra. It was a late, but fun and entertaining night.

Tia Sandra runs a catering business from home, this is one of her cakes.

Yesterday was the laziest day of all. We played video games, cruised the internet, I painted my nails, and topped it off with a 1/2 How I Met Your Mother 1/2 Green Mile movie/show marathon.

Played around with my camera around sunset.

Today is gorgeous, we don't have plans yet but they're in the works. I'll be sure to post pictures if I get anything good :)