Day 8

Day 8 - Stingray is for Eating?

We headed out to the beach today and met up with some more of Ana's relatives for lunch. Aunt, uncle, cousin, brother, sister, niece, and their assorted boyfriends and girlfriends. Which brings me to another point about Brazil. Family seems to be very important here. Extended family units are often found living together, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sister commonly live only a few miles from one another. They don't seem to subscribe to the "move out on your own and then you only see you family on holidays" theory that seems so common in the USA. At any rate, it has been a bit intimidating meeting so much of Ana's family in such a short time and trying to make a thousand different good first impressions when I don't speak more than a few words of Portuguese.

After we were done drinking some beer and hanging out at the beach restaurant, we headed to another restaurant to really eat lunch. Ana had been keen on me trying stingray or muqueca de arraia, since I had expressed my desire to try new things while I am here. I had no idea what stingray would even look like, and was a bit surprised with what showed up. It looked like thin, stringy shreds of white fish like meat. It was served in a yellow sauce with some vegetables and, of course, manioc flour on the side. I tried it and it wasn't half bad, probably not something I'd order on a regular basis, but certainly an interesting experiment.

That night we went out to another bar and had some pizza and a couple beers. Ana also purchased, for 5 reais, a pair of earrings from some guy that apparently were made from discarded aluminum cans. I never would have been able to tell if he hadn't told us. After we were done, we headed to the grocery store because we had decided that I would make cookies and she would make cheesecake for the family Christmas Eve get together tomorrow. It was hard to find the ingredients for both of our dishes, as they aren't commonly made in Brazil. There were no chocolate chips for the cookies, so we had decided to go with chocolate chunks from a chopped up chocolate bar and we aslo had a hard time finding brown sugar and cream cheese (they have cream cheese in Brazil, but it's an entirely different consistency, so we needed American style cream cheese). We eventually found everything we needed, more or less, and got in the shortest line in the store and waited, and waited ,and waited, watching as people who hadn't even been in the store yet when we got into line get into other lines and leave before we could get checked out. However, we did get to witness a few guys purchasing an entire shopping cart full of whisky.