Behind the Scene on our Family Adventures.

Lately I've been posting about our family adventures in Rio, and yes, it seems that we can't even last one weekend without some kind of exploring. We try to stay home. Geraldo tries to get household repairs done and I have fun with the kid in the pool and the playground downstairs, but a day later we're itching to get out of our apartment. I guess that's our "family thing". Some families like to renovate, cut grass, bbq, lounge around with cats, take dogs for walks in the rain, go for hikes or sails around a lake and we like to get in the car and go see.

On our last adventure we went to check out Madureira park which was really great, but what I failed to mention was a bunch of other interesting (maybe only to us) things. Things like when Geraldo slowed down past the abandoned university where he studied engineering and how sad it was to see the weeds growing out of window sills and gutters. It went bankrupt. It was weird to see. Maybe it's because I'm used to being in a city where if things are not being used, the very next day trees get cordoned off and in one quick swoop everything is torn to the ground and carted away to make space for a condo. In Rio, I've noticed, if businesses, factories, warehouses or houses close down, they stay there to collect tagging, feral cats and weeds for a long time.

Geraldo behind the Madureira park fountain.

After our visit to the park, we were looking around for a place to eat lunch. Even after a year and a half in Brazil we are still on "Canadian time" meaning we eat lunch at noon, and dinner at 6pm while the rest of the population eats lunch at 1 or 2pm and dinner well after 7pm which means most of the time, if the restaurants are open, we get the whole place to ourselves!!! Unfortunately, that day we had so much fun exploring we fell into "Brazilian time". Lucky to find a restaurant that was open when everything else is closed on Sundays, we pulled up to an "all-you-can-eat" buffet restaurant and took a chance. The place was packed! It was like walking into a Chinese restaurant back home; where families go to eat with their grandmas, and grandpas, and cousins, and in-laws, brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles etc..., but the tables were super close together, everyone was talking really loudly over the "pagode" music which was blaring in the background.

We took out plates up to the giant buffet, squeezing back behind occupied chairs doing our best not to spill the food on our plates as we balanced our meals over other people's heads. As we sat down, I couldn't help but notice, perhaps snobbishly, what people chose for their meals. It just blows my mind to see how so many Brazilians eat badly;  their plates over-filled with meat, deep fried cheese balls, or fish balls, or chicken balls, or french fries all swallowed down with cans of soda pop. Piles of white and brown food. Even though I was pretty impressed by the salad bar, which yes, included a whole lot of mayonnaised salads and the desserts, there was choice to eat color. Oh, well.

We headed home, on the big highway, paid the toll, saw the new "World Cup" flags hanging on the center-line posts and tried to guess which country was which with the kid. We arrived home just in time for "Brazilian time" coffee and cake, a 4-5pm daily ritual with my in-laws. That and a game of play-doh/dinosaur/destruction with the kid. And that is behind the scene of our adventure to Madureira park.