Just Another Day on Vacation – We Like COLD Beer…

It was warm today – as warm as it has been since I have been here.  I took a walk this afternoon and saw a sign that said the temperature was 30 C – that’s 86 F.  Not uncomfortably hot, but nicely warm.  I did notice that I was the only person walking on the east side of the street – where the sun was.  Wisely, everyone else was walking on the shady side this afternoon.  It had me thinking a bit – wondering how businesses on the sunny/shady side were affected by the weather.  Would it be better to sell ice cream on the side that’s sunny in the afternoon?  Perhaps more folks would appreciate the refreshing ice cream, but most of the potential customers would remain on the other side.  Walking encourages thinking about silly things…

Yesterday, we had a visit from Monica’s niece and her kids.  The baby is a real handful – she’s just started walking and is at that very curious age.  She wants to see and touch (and taste) everything.  You literally have to watch her every second – she’s that quick.  Although she’s just walking, she’s a climber.  The first thing that she did when we put her down was to toddle over to the steps and pull herself up onto the first one.  We blocked off the steps with some stuff – one of which was a bowl of plastic fruit.  She went right for the banana and started trying to eat it.  She’s so cute…  Oh, she found the plastic grapes, too.   They’re dangerous, so we took them away, of course.

Last night we went out to a bar called Na Moita.  Here’s the address in case you want to drop by:

Bar Na Moita
Rua Vila Gran Cabrita, 42, São Geraldo (próximo a praça da Colina)
Volta Redonda/RJ
Telefone: (24) 3350-0838

The bar/restaurant is one of our favorite places.  There is almost always live music.  Last night there was a guy with a guitar singing a bunch of songs from the eighties – including some in English.  Most of the people in the bar were ignoring the guy.  We clapped a couple of times when he stopped, but nobody else was too concerned about what was going on on the little stage.  Here’s a one-minute video of the bar.  It’s a little dark, sorry.  I took it with my cell phone and I can’t do much video editing here.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1925124331751804755&hl=en]

Anyway, you get the idea.  We had some Bohemia, a premium beer here.  It was really cold – and kept cold by those cool insulated bottle holders that the waitstaff bring to the table.  The insulated thing is just to the right of the now-empty bottle.  There’s a cap that goes on top to keep in all of the coolness.  Beer is usually served in 600 ml bottles – about 20 oz.  You get glasses to drink from.  Keeping the glasses small and the beer in an insulated case helps keep the beer really cold.  Cold beer is important here.  The beer coolers proudly display their temperature readings in big red letters on the door in most places.  Last night it was almost -4C.  That’s cold beer.

When you get a chance to visit Na Moita, be sure to try their “carne seca Na Moita”  it’s really good and goes great with cold beer.

This blog is officially one year old today.  I’d like to thank my readers – both of them.  I just re-read my first post – seems like so long ago.

Oh the car from the last post was a Ford Maverick really…

ate mais tarde,

Greg