Culinary Edition

The food here has been amazing, and I'd like to touch on some of my favorite dishes that I've had the pleasure of enjoying since I've been down here:

1. Acai (pronounced AS-AI-EE) Smoothy
The best cure for a hangover is heroin—a little known fact you won't find in a reader's digest—but second to that, an Acai-smoothy does the trick equally as well. Purple, sweet but pungent, one of these bad-boys contains 1000 calories and does a very good job indeed of counteracting inhuman amounts of alcohol consumed during the previous night. Stains your teeth a bit, but after a night of hard drinking, who really gives a shit what your teeth look like?

2. Bolinhos de Bacalhau
Sort of like a crab cake, except with cod instead of crab. These guys are fried, crunchy, and delicious. While I believe this is the most popular incarnation, I've also had Bolinhos with risotto in the middle, and some with meat within the rissoto, almost similar to an Arancini. As Flavia has told me, there's a lot of Italian influence here in Sao Paulo, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Bolinho is the Brazilian take on that classic sicilian dish. Great snack.

3. Coxinhas
The fried balls I spoke of previously. These are very popular and you can find them in almost every restaurant as well as in street-vendor carts and little bloqados. A thigh cut of shredded chicken mixed with the Brazilian cheese Catupiry and various other herbs and spices, wrapped in potato and deep-fried. I'm not really a fan of catupiry, but when it's in the context of one of these guys, I love it. Crunchy, savory, and very filling.


4. Escondidinho
Sort of like a casserole, but not really, this is another staple of Brazilian diet. Shredded meat of any variety (but usually beef or pork) with other herbs and tomato baked with a layer of mashed potato on top. This was the last thing that I ate at the Mercado Municipal the other day, and on top of everything else, it damn near made my stomach burst. Still, like a bingeing bulimic, I couldn't help but gobble up every last bite on my plate. Delicious.

5. Bobo de Camerao
Sort of a hybrid of shrimp curry and gumbo, it's cooked in a big special pot with garlic and onions being sautéed in palm oil and olive oil, then tomato puree is added with cilantro and other herbs I couldn't figure out, then the shrimp, and finally topped off with a couple quarts of coconut milk. It simmers for a while, and is then served with rice and uncooked farina (sort of a cornmeal-textured wheat product) with plantains. Very similar to Vatapa, except without manioc and bread. Absolutely incredible! I had it home-cooked on a sunday, and ate so much I was full for two days afterwards.

6. Pastel
The ubiquitous street food, you can find these guys anywhere. A sheet of pastry wrapped around any kind of food—you can get it with plain cheese, with beef, with shrimp, with chicken, with pork, with mozzarella tomato and basel....anything, really—and then deep-fried to perfection (have you noticed a lot of this food is fried?)Almost like a wonton, except more savory. The meat in the first pastel I had here literally melted in my mouth, and I was hooked, although I've found out since then that they tend to be of varying degrees of quality, depending on where you're eating. Still: strongly recommended.

7. Temaki
There's a large Japanese population here, and the Brazilians are very proud of their sushi-game and say it's the best in the world (to which, as a Californian proud of our own sushi game, I might have to disagree...I have yet to see sea-urchin on any menu here. How can you have the best sushi-game when you don't even have sea urchin?) Still, they get points for the Temaki. Sort of a sushi-burrito, temaki's have any filling you'd like—most Brazilians opt for shrimp or salmon—wrapped up like....well, you see the picture. These things are dank, and there are little places called Temakierias that strictly serve these; apparently, they're the preferred late-night drunken-munchie food. Back in the states, I usually had to settle for burgers or hot-dogs after a night of drinking....it would be awesome if there was some affordable variation of sushi for us degenerates out at late hours. America: Get on this!

8. Quindim
Little candies made out of egg yolks and coconut. They even look like the yolk portion of an egg! The top is sort of custardy but at the bottom there's a crunchy cookie-like base. Great texture, sweet, and very nice with coffee after a meal. I'd love to talk about the more widely known Brigadeiros (condensed milk—almost like dolce de leche—cooked with chocolate and rolled into balls), but honestly I haven't even had one here yet! Definitely on my to-do list, but in the meantime, if you ever get a chance, try a Quindim. Tasty.

and, of course:

9. Feijoada!
The most chronic of all the chronic meals you can have down here. Wednesday and saturday are feijoada days, and most restaurants serve it as a sort of special. Basically beans and different cuts of meat stewed for hours with other goodies like onion, bone marrow, whatever, until the meat dissolves in your mouth. Served with rice. The place where I had it here had a system set up with a whole regiment of pots, each containing feijoada with a different kind of meat (linguisa, pork shoulder, beef shanks, etc.) so you could go down the line and pick what sorts of meat you wanted on your plate. Like the best dishes, this one originated from poor people trying to make something great out of nothing (rice, beans, and the left-over, undesirable parts of pigs and cows), and has evolved into probably the best-known dish of Brazil. For good reason too...I could sit here and wax poetic on Feijoada all day, but the simpler solution is for you to just go eat some. Seriously, go get some. I don't care where you are, go track down a brazilian, make him/her take you to their grandmother, and force her to cook it for you....at gunpoint, if need be. This dish is God's blessing to this country, and it's really the most important comestible item that you should sample if you ever come down here. VIVA FEIJOADA!
~

With all that being said, theres so much more to write about. I went to my first soccer game the other day (Vai Corinthians...or as I like to say, 'Corinthians or No-rinthians'), and it was dope. I'm leaving to kick it in Buenos Aires for a week on monday, so maybe I'll have something to say about wine, steak, and tango when I get back. Hashtag, so international. Hashtag, step your life up. Hashtag, John Downey out.
-JD

Que Linda!

I suppose it's only fitting that the people of this country match the landscape and cityscape; that is to say, they are all beautiful. I remember I was in Australia, and I thought to myself, 'No wonder there are so many Australian actors...everyone here looks like some bronzed beach god'. Little did I know what awaited me here down south. Simone de Bouvoir, Luce Irigary, Julia Kristiva, please forgive me, but for a moment here, I'm going to have to objectify women.
    The girls here are more beautiful than anything I've ever seen in my entire life. Gorgeous creatures, I often find myself walking around with my jaw hanging well below my chest, dazzled by the beauty of each and every one of them. Tan skin, perfectly formed faces, bodies put together like classical greek statues. If you had asked me a year ago—in my naiveté—where the finest, sexiest, most physically endearing and uplifting women lived, I would have crossed my arms matter-of-factly and said, 'Prague...there is something in the water there that makes all the eastern women have such an indivisible level of beauty that it's staggering; bed-room eyes, perfectly-proportioned bodies, faces that put the works of renaissance painters to shame." Little did I know the true source of amazing-looks lay just a few hundred thousand miles south of my humble abode in California.

    It can't be whatever is in the water here—regularly, aquifers smell like something more rotten than fermented sewage—so I have to assume it's a product of decades of different ethnicities cross-breeding. Only the best and most breathtakingly stunning genes have been passed on from generation to generation to create something ungodly exquisite; if Helen was the face that launched the bloodshed of Troy, I can't even fathom the atrocities that would be committed over the plainest woman in Brazil a couple hundred years ago.

    I'm not that much of a horn-dog, really. I remember once, a couple years ago, I risked ostracization to chastise some friends for whistling at a passing women's behind. Growing up in Berkeley, and taking some feminist-lit classes in college, I've long known that when it comes to women, it's not what's on the outside that counts, but what's on the inside; the outside, in fact, should be actively ignored—even shunned—in order to achieve 'gender equality'. But all that erudition flew out the window the second I touched down here. Every other minute I find myself ready to gladly marry and spend the rest of my life with a complete stranger passing by on the street, even if they are the cruelest, pettiest, most inhumane and toxic person ever to grace the face of this earth. Seriously guys, it's that bad. The women here are on another level gorgeous.

    It's not like people here take it for granted. All the men I talk to freely admit (and with some pride) that Brazilian women are ravishing entities. Resplendent, angelic, they float from breath-taking place to breath-taking place, embellishing the atmosphere with their own distinct charm, not only by looking like minor Aphrodites, but by being fun and talkative and bringing all sorts of color and flavor into the equation. It has become clear to me, at this point, that I will certainly have to wed a Brazilian woman or spend the rest of my life tormented by the idea of what could have been.
    However, to speak highly of women is not to deny the men. All the guys here are also on another level of gorgeous, just look at this knock-out:

 

JK. That's Zach Galifinakiananiaskiosioakis with baby Carlos....but if you guys' want the real baby Carlos:

It was this little guy right here. Superman of Carnival, just waiting to grow up into a lady-killer (or dude-killer). Godbless you, Carnival-Superman-Baby. May our hearts one day grow up to be as bold as yours.
~

-JD

Manha de Carnival

So, back from Carnival in Rio. Wow. Just....wow. Sitting on airplanes and buses and taxis on the way back, staring out the window, puzzling over exactly how to describe that wonderful cavalcade of sensuality, I feel overwhelmed....there was too much, so many moments I swore I would laminate with words (words that would always be too clumsy) as soon as I could get to a computer. Of course there are the pithy journal entries I recorded over the course of my stay, but they don't really belong here. I sit here now, tasked with how to tell the story of perhaps one of the best times of my young life....
.......
I don't think I can do it justice.
The inadequacy of language becomes very evident now, trying to describe how things actually were. How they felt. Abstraction seems like the only solution; to boil down a narrative to it's emotional truths through images. To paint an impressionist picture—a Monet, a Pissarro—with flowery language, elegant words.
Ugh. So unappealing.
    I have pictures. They're supposedly worth a thousand words, but a thousand words isn't that much, really. A thousand words tells what the weather was like when i got off the plane. A thousand words describes one beautiful girl, shuffling a samba. I need a million words—a hundred thousand pictures—to really make you understand what Carnival was like.
I guess the best thing to do would be to give up. Really guys, you just had to be there.

Still, a couple things:

The weather in Rio was overcast most of the trip, but that didn't slow anything down. I still went to the beach everyday; the water in the ocean was bathtub warm. At night, I would slip off to Ipanema by myself (or sometimes with others) and imagine the ghost of Jobim sitting on the white sand, strumming a guitar, constructing my favorite song in his head, inspired by the same scene I was looking at then. I splashed in the waves with the favella children, I sat with thousands of other tourists (mostly people from Sao Paulo), baking in the sun, sucking on straws thrust into coconuts, each one of us thinking we were having a unique experience.
    At the Bloquinos, the little carnival parades that happen all day all over the city, I danced, drunkenly and exuberantly. A smile permanently plastered on my face, I laughed, posed for pictures, joked with strangers, let the catchy rhythms of the Carnival songs overtake me: always a single song, repeated over and over again, until even the most inept gringo could sing along with the words. I became a part of the huge mass of people, a festive monster, spewing balloons and ribbons, ravenously eating up the street in front of it, swaggering along to the blaring music, it's breath the melodies of bossa-nova.
    In Sao Paulo, where even the flowers are made of concrete, it is only the city's churning energy that sustains itself; a perpetual beast, an ouroboros, feeding its expansion from it's own tail. In Rio, the natural world plays much more of a role; slums built into rock faces, every horizon weighted with trees, the smell and taste of ocean salt present in every breath. A constant perfume of the most human stenches, prime-evil earth, lingering nimbus' of sweat and piss and mud and beer and sex and shit. When we were stumbling around one day, the word that kept popping into my head was 'electricity'. There was something electric about that place, a current that jumped from person to person. You could feel it in the street; sparks flew from peoples feet as they danced. There was lightning in every pretty girl's eyes. An ecstatic voltage, the kind you feel when you first kiss someone you're starting to fall in love with...that's what it's like in Rio.
    The people I stayed with in our apartment with were amazing. I made new friends, brothers and sisters, people I will always have that experience in common with. Carolina, Gabriella, Caio, Allen, Adriana, Maria, Carla, Joao...all names etched into my head besides specific moments. All the people I've encountered here are so warm and friendly. Even the little kid who stole my mask during a parade was nice about it. The sound of portuguese, a lilting and beautiful language, was always in my ears. The food was heavenly...I won't say more than that, because I intend to devote an entire entry to it.
Oh, look at this. I said no shitty, over-saturated writing and what did I do? Exactly fucking that.
I'm sorry guys. Once I can get people to give me their photos, I'll do a much simpler run-through of some of my favorite things from there. It'll be quick and breezy, and illustrated too: exactly what the internet wants.
Until then,
tchau companieros!
-JD

In an Ivory Tower

    I woke up this morning to the faint sound of eery, ice-cream truck music floating in from my window. It's 10 am, early now, for how late I've been sleeping; my jet-lag has finally worn off. I sit up in bed, sticky with sweat. It's been raining since I got here, so the humidity makes the air thick, your clothes cling to your skin, beads of perspiration ever-present on your forehead.
    This is my fourth day here in Sao Paulo. I'm in a mansion in a gated community in Crotia, some suburb nestled away from the manic inner-city. Joao's family all work from early in the morning til late at night, so I am left to my own devices during the day. I share the house with two maids and Joao's 100 year old grandma, who apparently is 'confusado', as one of the maids tells me. It doesn't make any difference, I can't understand anything she says anyway. No one speaks english here.
    I'm hampered from going places by the removed location of the house and a lack of transportation vehicles, so mostly I've been puttering around this castle. Coming here, I sort of had this fantasy of doing my Henry Miller thing—living in a hovel, subsisting on literature, starving amazing sentences out of myself—but it's become very apparent that as long as I'm living in this house, starving is the last thing that will happen to me. Everyday I wake up and walk down to the kitchen, I'm greeted by a plethora of foods stretched across the table; different cuts of carne, feijoa & arroz, salads, corn with cream, and a dish that seems to be shredded kale cooked with egg. I feel obligated to stuff myself by the expectant looks on maid's faces. It's as if they're making up for the language barrier through food; hospitality slow-cooked into the beans and rice. I'm going to go to the store today and get some supplies for Latkah's, try to cook it for them tomorrow to reciprocate...if they'll let me. They've been very adament about me not doing little things I'd normally do: washing dishes after a meal, making my bed, and cooking for myself. So we'll see.
    We leave for Rio on friday, Carnival starting on saturday, I think, so I'm fine to do nothing for my first week or so here. A typical day for me so far has been to wake up at noon, eat lunch with Grandma, smoke a joint (thank god I brought pot down with me!), read a book/write, take the two family dogs for a walk, smoke another joint, attempt to teach myself some portuguese, and then try to make some moves. I caught a cab out to Faria Lima yesterday to go to the mall and get a phone. I ended up watching indoor soccer (weak!) in a sports bar and pounding back caipirinhas, until Joao got off work and met up with me. We went out to dinner and came home.
Exciting, I know.
    One of the nice things about not understanding the language here, is that I compensate by imagining everyone is saying flattering things about me. When one of the maids walks by and says something to the other maid, gesturing at me, I pretend she's saying 'oh, aren't we so lucky to have such a handsome and polite young American in the house!', and when the other maid laughs and says something else, I imagine it's 'Hahah, oh yes, I'm laughing because of how funny it is that we've always talked about wanting a tall white boy to live in our house, and now it's happened!'
Oh, Natalie and Li, you're too kind. Stop it, I'm blushing!
    I guess there's not a whole lot to report right now. Since I started walking the dogs, the little pug has taken a liking to me. She follows me around the house, tries to jump onto my lap every time I sit down, which is sorta cute, but she's smelly, so it's sorta wack too. My work plans are to teach english, and the guy whose supposed to hire me said he definitely has some gigs for me in the near future. At the moment, I'm just counting down the days until I go to Rio, really get to jump head first into this Brazilian cultural thing.
    This will be the last blase post I make. Everything after this will be an exciting story, hopefully with pictures, hopefully an engaging, epic tale that will have you glued to your screen (not that you aren't already....you facebook-lurking internet junkies)
Stay tuned....we'll see if I can really live up to that promise.
T'chao.
-JD

The Adventure Begins...

So here I am, sitting at my gate in the airport, typing this on my laptop, drinking an expresso, listening to the new radiohead album on my ipod, a half OZ of extremely purple, vacuum-sealed marijuana stuffed between my butt-cheeks, absolutely DYING for a cigarette. The guy sitting next to me's daughter, a baby in a pink jumpsuit, is staring at me slack-jawed, a seemingly dumb-struck expression on her little face. When I turn my head to meet her eyes, she averts her gaze, shy, but a second later whips her head back around and smiles at me, flopping her arm around spastically as some attempt at a wave. This has been going on for 10 minutes or so....I didn't know infants had that sort of attention span. So here I am, an unwilling participant in some sort of variation on peek-a-boo...call it look-and-lookaway. Hopefully that's what this blog will be: a collection of my most degenerate/maudlin/ecstatic/morbid/hopefull but undeniably poignant moments over the course of my life here in Brazil; recollections that will both repulse and enthrall you. An unwitting game of look-and-lookaway.
Oh maybe a little back-story is in order.
Well, actually, you don't need to know that much. A californian by birth, I grew up in Berkeley, went to college in Oregon, and now I'm departing the country to tackle the next phase of my life. Why Brazil, you ask? Well, I was getting tired of the Bay Area, and the Bay Area was getting tired of me. I had grown to resent the people I was hanging out with, gotten burnt out on the exhaustive monotony of the post-college routine, and just over-all needed a change/escape. Fast forward, and here I am, sitting in this airport, ensconced in a 6-month old's gaze. I think, as people get older, they change, and their environment needs to change with them. The reason I'm choosing Brazil as my catalyst is I have a friend who lives there, who will put me up for a while until I find a job. It's a practical decision, plain and simple.
My eyelids are getting heavy. The pills I took earlier are starting to kick in. "Airplane drugs" my friend told me. I've had experience with these things before: When I went to Australia, a 24 hour flight, I bought some xanex off of my guy, 2mg bars. I popped one before I got on the plane. A half an hour in, I didn't feel anything. Being completely inexperienced with xanax—it was my first time taking it—I popped another one, thinking it was like advil or something; I always have to take two to feel any effect.
Well anyone who knows anything about benzos is probably chuckling right now. When it finally kicked in, I laid my head back and took a nap. I woke up to the stewardess putting a tray of airplane food on my seat-tray. Feeling disoriented, I turned to look at the person next to me (I had an aisle seat). The woman to my left was staring at me with a puzzled look on her face. Still drowsy, I reeled back to my food. Some abomination of an attempt at chicken souffle.
"Ugh" I said.
The sight of the food was making me queasy, so I picked it up and offered it to my neighbor.
"Hey, do you want this?"
The woman glanced at the food, then looked back at me.
"You've been asleep for 14 hours...you should probably eat something."
I must have looked shocked, because she motioned at my chest with her head, as if to prove her point. I looked down and saw half of the entire front of my shirt was soaked with drool. Embarrassment dully set in behind the xanex, and I apologized.
"Oh man, I'm sorry. Was I snoring?"
The lady looked down.
"No, but you were farting...the whole time."
Oh noooo! The situation seemed so overwhelmingly embarrassing that I just said 'fuck it'. I turned back to my meal, flipped it upside down, and went back to sleep. Another 12 hours later, I woke up in Sydney.
I can only hope this flight goes as smoothly.
They're calling for pre-boarding, cripples, babies, and rich people. I guess this is good-enough of an introduction. I'm sure you'll be able to glean more about who I am as this goes on. I have to go now, but next time you hear from me, I'll be in the mecca of samba, bossa-nova, and, most importantly, caipirinhas. Cheers readers. See you on the other side...