Thursday, July 17
Location: Porto Alegre, Rio
Grande do Sul, Brazil
Today's weather: 17░C, Sunny
Today is my last full day in Porto Alegre before I fly
to Manaus. This morning I got up late again (if you can
call 8am late). I replied to more email and did some
writing.
I'd promised Susi that I'd make one of my special
pizzas for her. I'd complained about some of the pizza's
that we had been served during our earlier Amazon
Adventure. I'd said that I could do better – so now
was my time to prove it. I went shopping at 11:30am for
the ingredients, but this was difficult because
everything in the supermarket was labelled in Portuguese.
But, fortunately, with the help of my Portuguese-English
dictionary I was able to find everything that I needed.
The pizza-making didn't quite go to plan. It seems
that the Portuguese word for "Yeast" is the
same as for "Baking Powder". In Portuguese it
is "fermenta". Unfortunately I needed yeast to
make the pizza base. I make the base in a similar way to
Italian focaccia bread. Using baking powder didn't do a
very good job. Figuring out Susi's gas oven was also a
problem. In the end, I closed the oven and let the gas
run for about a minute. Then I threw in a match near the
gas outlet. This is dangerous (I almost singed my
eyebrows) but it worked. The pizza was a success despite
the base. Pizza was accompanied by a bottle of 1986
Wolfblass Black Label wine which I had been nursing
carefully for several years.
After dinner, Susi and I went to a local club where we
could dance, play pool, and bowl. Susi's plan was to keep
me up late so that I was tired and could sleep on my
flights to Manaus. On the way to the club, we stopped at
a local high school where we picked up Susi's friend,
Simone, who is a high school biology teacher and teaches
night classes. The school was quite basic and had lots of
graffiti spray-painted on the walls. The school library
had many books – but most of them were quite old. I
read through a computer textbook which had been published
in 1969. I also browsed through their English literature
section where they had Portuguese language versions of
books by Aldous Huxley, John le CarrΘ, Frederick
Forsythe, and Sidney Sheldon.
As we drove, Susi tuned the car radio to listen to a
soccer game involving her favourite team, Internacionale.
It was difficult for me to understand what the announcer
was saying because it was all in ver rapid Portuguese
– but after a few minutes the announcer became very
excited. "Goooooooooooooolllllllllllllll" he
yelled, stretching the word out so that it lasted for at
least a full minute. Susi also became very excited. She
started yelling and cheering, and tooted the horn of her
car several times. Then I noticed that the other cars
around us were all tooting their horns, too. Soccer is
certainly a popular game in Brazil.
At the night-club (called Strike 401), we met
up with more of Susi's friends and colleagues. She has a
lot of friends. We talked for while, then we all went up
to play pool. This was followed by dancing in the
discotheque downstairs. We all danced and talked for
several hours until late. Susi and I finally returned
home at 2am.
   
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