one down, two to go
By the beginning of week three, you could say that some of us might have begun to feel the tiniest pang of homesickness. Mostly just for the food, though. That's why when we stumbled upon Cafe Gringo, we knew we had found a winner. It's a tiny little restaurant down the street from me, in the size of a cafe but the style of a diner. We were delighted to see waffles, pancakes, hashbrowns, bacon, sausage and the like on the menu (and all written in English, to boot). We were also delighted with the music: old school jams including everything from Destiny's Child to Michael Jackson. After stuffing ourselves full of our American breakfast faves and singing along way too loudly, we made our way to the next stop on our Tour De Praias Rio.
Ipanema beach is famous for being where "the beautiful people are" (there's even a song about it). They were certainly out in force on Sunday, but there were plenty of middle age+ women rocking bikinis as confidently as women 30 or more years their junior. That's one really interesting thing I’ve noticed here: yes, there are people who most might consider to be extremely fit or good looking, but everyone here struts it like everyone thinks they're extremely fit and good looking. Basically, it doesn’t matter what they look like in a bathing suit: Brazilians always bear it proudly.
Speaking of proud, the next day was the Fourth of July. We were less than enthused to be working on our favorite national holiday, but isso é vida (that’s life). I was also sad to be missing my grandpa’s 90th birthday, but we did get to FaceTime and it looked like he was having a great day, complete with a Donald Trump piñata to smash. We had burgers and American beers that night to celebrate, and nearby neighborhoods were even setting off fireworks (TBD whether those were celebrating USA Day, though).
Discovering cool places in your neighborhood is one of the most fun things about living somewhere new. I tend to be a creature of habit, so I’m always grateful when someone pulls me out of my routine and shows me something or somewhere I have to try. Such was the case with my lunch on Thursday. Jardim Botanico is absolutely bursting with some seriously adorable lunch spots. We tried one such place, so cute that I was in love with it before we even sat down. I had a fruit salad (always good here), a little focaccia glazed with guava jam (OMG, so good) and a brie and parma ham crepe, made with tapioca instead of a typical crepe. Tapioca is very common here and very different from anything I’ve ever had. It’s a gluten-free powder that’s used in the same way we might use flour, but the results are a little chewier. It’s not as bad as I just made it sound.
We ended our second week of work with a field trip. My third roommate works at TV Globo, which owns a ton of real estate in Jardim. On some blocks, every third building has a Globo logo on it. One of the partners of our company is married to an editor in chief at Globo, so she decided to take us to meet him and go check out the headquarters nearby. He proceeded to lead us through a massive maze of TV-ready newsrooms, state-of-the-art editing bays, gorgeous studios, functioning control rooms and creative office spaces connected by breezeways, thoughtfully decorated corridors, multiple elevators, so many stairwells and even a glass bridge with an altar on it.
The only way I know how to describe it is that I felt like I was at Selfridges (my favorite department store in London; a five minute walk from my flat, I would kill at least a couple hours a week there). I took it all in with the same wide-eyed window-shopping wonder, my head on a swivel, seeing so many things I wanted to touch but knew I shouldn't. I couldn't help but wonder if I might have chosen the wrong career path. Should I have studied journalism? I could be on air, right? Should I have done what everyone thinks I'm doing and try to be the next Erin Andrews? I know the answer to all of those questions is no, but Globo was cool enough to make me seriously ask myself them.
Check out the gallery for photos, and thanks for reading! GS
Lazy people, this way: we found waffles in Rio; Brazilians are brave on the beach; working on the Fourth is SAD; tapioca is interesting; TV Globo is like the Selfridges of news studios.