Tuesday

Sometime you just have to play with your food.

random stuff

Just a bunch of stuff that doesn't merit a post of all of its own.

1.  In the last week, Lily has lost 2 teeth.  She was worried that the Tooth Fairy wouldn't come all the way down to Brazil, but she did.  She even left the Brazilian money that Lily requested.  And took her teeth away - when she asked why the Tooth Fairy took teeth, Mac told her that the teeth magically turn into pearls when she crosses into Fairy Land, and that pearls made from childrens' teeth are highly prized.  Just in case any of you run into her and she tells you this, you know where it came from.  Here she is, proudly showing her gap-toothed grin.  It's not totally gappy because her adult teeth have been coming in behind her loose baby teeth for over a month.  I thought the baby teeth were never going to come out, but she ended up falling down and landing on her face, which sped up the process a bit.

She's also finally figured out how to skip, which she is very proud of.

2.  The glass house over at the Jardim Botainco turned pink for a while.  The only thing I can think of is that it is for breast cancer awareness month, which seems to be celebrated down here as well.  It started on October 1.  But, since I"m not exactly up to date with the local news, it could be just about anything.  Either way, it looked neat and the girls were excited.  It turned back to regular white lights a couple of nights ago.

3.  We found collard greens at the Mercado Municipal a few weeks ago and had a little taste of home.  It was really really good.

4.  Although she has one of her own, Lily has been stealing my camera.  Here is a picture of tabasco sauce (I was so glad to find my favorite kind!)

This is an extreme close-up of the top-

5.  A picture from the live performance of the Floppy Puppy Singing and Dancing Show

6.  A picture of a near-empty city bus.  The capacity listed on the door is 270 people, but I've been on buses that I think have had more people.

Here's a picture of a bus at a tube stop - stolen from the internet because I haven't taken one yet.  You can see the two articulations - so there are 3 separate compartments in the front bus, then another bus behind it.

7.  The girls and I went back to the bird zoo at the Public Walk the other day.  The pelican apparently was grumpy, or thought Lily was supposed to be feeding it, or something, because it kept squawking and snapping at her.  We all thought it was pretty funny.

8.  The picture on the door to the girls' bedroom

All-in-all, I'd have to say that my girls are just as goofy in Brazil as they are in the US

R.O.U.S.

First off, this...

is the Braziliam Telecom tower in Curitiba.  It's over 109 meters tall and has a 360 degree observatory open to the public.  The view is supposed to be pretty neat, and it is on our list of places to go.  Of course, when we wake up every weekend and look outside to plan our day, it seems like this is all we see...

The weather has been getting better, though, so maybe we'll get a clear day someday.

So, this weekend's adventure was Baragui Park.  Baragui is one of Curitiba's city parks that is a result of flood control efforts in the 1970's.  When other cities channelized their rivers, Curitiba used the available money and created parks along the rivers.  At least according to this interesting article on the city-
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/cities-of-exuberance/curitiba-story-of-a-city

Of more interest to us were the park's inhabitants - capybara.  Because the girls watched the Princess Bride for the first time a couple of weeks ago (and the second and third time), we've been calling them R.O.U.S.s - Rondents of Unusual Size.  Which they are, of course.  The largest rodents around.  But, we did have to reassure Maggie that they did not have big teeth, they would not try to bite us and drag us off, and we did not have to bring fire with us to protect ourselves.


Here is the Princess Bride version of a ROUS

Here is a capybara

More cabybara

Extra credit points for anyone with better google skills than I that can come up with what a group of capybara are called. I couldn't find it.  One site suggested that you should just go with animals that they are closely related to such as chinchillas (a herd), guinea pigs (a group), or a hamster (a hoard). 

And some fearless capybara hunters

There are also supposed to be crocodiles (caiman, actually, I guess) around.  Mac saw them when we was here a couple of years ago, but we didn't see any on this trip.  We had to be satisfied with this

playing crocodile deniststs

Walking around the park

Passeio Publico

Public Walk

Another adventure this past weekend.  The whole family did a test run of a trip that the girls and I need to take this week to make sure we got the right buses and transfers. Yes, I'll give you that the bus system is pretty great here - you can go almost anywhere.  However, figuring out how to do that can be extremely frustrating.  It took Mac and I four different maps (one paper, 3 online), about 1 hour of detective work and the help of a nice bus tube attendant to figure out how to get from our house to the terminal we wanted.  And we only made one mistake. 

As we went to the far northern terminal on one of the lines, we got to see a whole lot more of the city than we had before.  On the way back we stopped at the Passeio Publico, or Public walk.   It was the first public walk in Curitiba, opened in 1886.  My map describes it as "an area of leisure" with paths and lakes and bridges.    Here is the gate, which my guide tells me is a copy of the gate of the cemetery of dogs in Paris.  Why?  I don't know.  One of the girls, I don't remember which, pointed out the irony of the "no dogs allowed" sign at the gate.  Guess only dead dogs can go in.

 

Inside the park is a bird zoo.  There were several large enclosures with pelicans, flamingos, duck, doves and other birds.  Then there was a whole row of cages of tropical birds.  Pretty neat.

Nearby the park was another plaza with some more public artwork.  I'm not sure what this is all about.  I'll have to look it up.

I guess I'll also add to this post that Maggie has learned how to whistle, since I got a nice picture of it. 

This was pretty neat - the first 7000 times she did it.  She whistles all day, every day, and every time she finishes she asks "did you know I can whistle?"  Um...yes.

In the apartment

There's a reason most of my posts have been about what we do on the weekend - on weekdays the girls and I do a lot of nothing.  Just hanging out in the apartment.  The weather's finally getting better, so we're going to try to head outside some more, but our first month here was pretty cold and gray.

Actually, instead of 'the girls and I', I probably should say 'me and the animals.'  The girls are constantly pretending that they're dogs, or kitties, or horses, or ornitomimuses (that would be Lily's favorite dinosaur at the moment).  The puppies need leashes and need to be walked and have to eat off a dish on the floor.  The horses need bridles and saddles.  I've made "nests" of boiled eggs for the dinosaurs to eat.  Sometimes I feel like zookeeper.

Here's a picture that Lily took of Maggie as puppy.

They also like to go "camping"

And do their own sort of dress up

And do some art projects

And, lest I forget, they play with pipe cleaners (I guess they're called "chenille stems" now, but I still call them pipe cleaners).  I wish I would have brought a suitcase full of them.   One night the girls staged a pipe cleaner wedding.  They worked so hard on it that I even bought them a cake to use for a wedding cake.

Cashews

An overheard snippet of conversation from a few weeks back-

Two girls sitting at a counter eating trail mix:
Lily: "Maggie, do you know what these curved peanuts are called?  Cat shoes."

I've been thinking about cashews quite a bit lately.  First of all because we bought a bag of delicious roasted and salted cashews at the municipal market the other day.  Unlike most of the nuts, they were very inexpensive.  Turns out that the cashew, or caju as it is called here, is native to northern Brazil.  It was spread to Africa and India by the Portuguese.  The other thing that interested me was learning that the cashew isn't really a nut - it's techinically/botanically a fruit - and that it is attached to a big "pseudo-fruit" that is used to make a fruit juice that you can buy around here.  You can also by the fruit whole at the market.

Here's a pic

The part we call the cashew nut is in the "boxing glove" shaped green area at the bottom (I always love it when the same adjective pops up in all different articles about a subject on the internet. "Boxing glove-shaped" is one of those).  The larger part on the top is the "cashew apple."   

As I said, you can buy the whole thing at the market.  You have to be careful though, because the part around the nut has the same compound as poison ivy and can be irritating. 

You can also buy caju juice at the grocery store.  I think we're going to pick some up when we go tomorrow.

I know.  It's all very fascinating.  But the weather's been pretty yucky lately and I don't have a lot of pretty pictures to share.  And, if you're reading this, you probably already know that I can be a bit of a plant nerd.