One Final Day in Rio and Home

I am writing this back home, where it is in the low 70s and cloudy.  This is my kind of weather, but my wife begs to differ.  She already misses Brazil: the weather, the food, the family, the sites and the lifestyle.  I only miss the last four!

For breakfast on our final day, we went to the world-famous Copacabana beach.  Following a recommendation from my cousin-in-law, we went to a part of the beach that is actually within the grounds of a military base.  Here we are waiting in line.

This was the view.  Totally worth the wait!

I ate one of these!  It's something called a Ninho De Ovos.  Basically, it's egg and sugar whipped into egg threads that are then stacked into this ball shape here.

After leaving the base, we walked to Ipanema Beach. 

It was quite crowded, but we found a nice and relatively secluded spot here.

Oh ocean, I shall miss thee!

We kept on walking down the sidewalk lining the beach.  It was extremely hot, and yet oh so scenic.

A shot of the beach at one of its more crowded points.

After the beach, we went to my wife's cousin's house for some Guarana soda, Pao de Queijo bread, and Brazilian carrot cake.  I was not a huge fan of the carrot cake.  I prefer the American version myself.  But then again, that's what I was raised with.  The Pao de Queijo was, as always, amazing!

At the airport, my wife and I had one more chance to get a tapioca.

I ate this on the plane, sadly only too aware that the vacation had come to an end!

But when we got home, my mother had made a wonderful and gigantic dinner for my wife and I,  as well as my sister!  Collard greens...

Ham and Mexican corn...

Asparagus..

Ceviche!...

And cake with marshmallow frosting!  It's good to be home.

My wife and I had a wonderful couple of weeks on vacation full of spending time with loved ones, from my sister and her boyfriend to my wife's amazing family in Brazil.  They say family is what it's all about, and as I sit here writing this, I have to agree.  The feeling of communion, of spending time, with family is a wonderful thing second-to-none.  Of course family can also be a tremendous head-heart-and-soul-ache, but this trip had none of that.  Many of my wife's family I had never met before, and many of them spoke little to no English.  Despite this, I felt incredibly welcomed in their homes and they treated me like they'd known me my whole life.  I don't have a very big family, so this is all incredibly new to me.  I absolutely loved it.

I also enjoyed getting to know a whole other side to my wife!  Until this trip, I had only ever known Brazil through her and her mother.  I knew a good bit about the country, but had no first-hand experience.  These last few days gave me the chance to see and to know her homeland from my own perspective.  It was really interesting to discover the context of her upbringing, if you will.  The Brazilians are a really interesting people.  They have a thing called Jeitinho Brasileiro, which is a term that refers to a unique kind of ingenuity that is particular to Brazil.  It describes an attitude of 'making things work', and finding a way towards a solution no matter what.  It has a good side and a bad side.  In terms of the former, my wife's own embodiment of Jeitinho Brasileiro allowed us to skip almost all of the line to the Sugarloaf Mountain tram.  While en queue for the ticket booth, with the sun quickly setting (as well as our hopes for seeing it from the top of the mountain!), my wife spied a ticket counter with maybe two people in line for it.  She walked over, and found that a tour guide was getting special entrance tickets that allowed her to miss most of the line.  My wife asked if we could get in on it, and she said that we certainly could.  This saved an hour of our life, and allowed us to witness the last of the sunset from high above Rio on Sugarloaf.  The negative side of Jeitinho Brasileiro has paved the moral path for a lot of Brazil's political corruption, however.  Cutting corners and throwing a little money around to get something to happen can definitely be considered a part of Jeitinho Brasileiro as well.  Luckily for me, my wife is a shining beacon of morality, and only uses her powers for good!

My mother and father are going to meet a breeder on Monday, so there probably won't be a new post until Wednesday.  Thanks so much for reading all these entries and coming along with us on this amazing journey!

-Blog Tech & Wife of Blog Tech