I’m in Brazil. There’s an Internet cafe in the hotel. It’s a bad place from which to post, but I thought I should check up on y’all and make sure Tom isn’t tormenting you. I have been trying odd things like Brazilian chocolate pizza.
Today was a quiet day punctuated by brief moments of victory. When you speak very little of the language, small successes are delightful. I was told most Brazilians speak English, but apparently there’s a huge class divide. This means that service personnel—wait staff, maids, clerks, cashiers—don’t speak English, and these are people with whom I need to communicate. So, ordering a sandwhich, asking the maid to clean my room, and telling a waiter my room number were all delightful (for both of us in each case). I would go mad if unable to communicate, but my what a treasure it is when hard-won.
Chocolate pizza? Hmmm…I’ve made mole pizza, which has chocolate in the sauce–is it something like that (i.e., a savory kind of deal that uses chocolate as an ingredient)?
I remember when I was traveling alone in Mexico for a week or so (my girlfriend had gone back to San Diego to visit her parents) and ended up not speaking English at all for 100 hours. It was immensely rewarding to be able to function without English…and immensely exhausting. At the end of it I ran into a guy from Wisconsin in the bank line waiting to change money and ended up talking his ear off…
Hope you’re having a great trip!
mmmmmmmm..mole pizza. Sounds like something the cats would like…
They really go for squirrel on bagel with a little shmeer of cream cheese.
LOL! Okay, make that molé pizza then.
Just thought I’d have a little fun while you’re here. You ARE going to share your pet sourdough starter with Deb, right? Slurm..that’s the drink they had on Futurama, right?
Oooh, good catch! Yes, that is the reference. And it seems so…appropriate. 😉
It’s a flat crust with an incredibly sweet chocolate topping; halfway between fudge and sauce.
Molé pizza sounds like one of those terms in other languages that freak out anglos and our sometimes used deliberatly by locals just to have some fun with the tourists.For example here in Québec City a local store had a sale on bread,so they put a sign in the window saying bread in French with big red letters.This however got a lot of strange looks from tourists because the word in French for bread is PAIN.
LOL! There’s actually a bakery chain in the US called “Au Bon Pain”–we joke about how it may be pain, but it’s good pain. 😉
Another word that can confuse as anglos is the word in French for seal(the animal)phoque that is pronounced fock.