A Little Protein in Your Salad Never Hurts

The other day I was going to lunch with some girlfriends. I am going to call them O and E. O is from out of town, hence the O, and will be moving here this July sometime. Can't wait! And E is an Ex-pat like me, hence the E. So I tell the girls what restaurant we will be meeting at. So I arrive at just before noon, and the restaurant is closed. Which did not worry me, because most do not open till noon. That is until I saw the hole in the wall on the side. No this was a permanent closing. S**T! O does not have a phone that I can call! E's phone is going right to voice mail. What should I do?

Then I saw a taxi at the next corner pointing my way. Okay O was here. Great. So I try to pull away from the spot I am parked in, but there are workers behind me. I have to wait for them to cross the street. By that time the taxi is pulling away. NNNOOO! So I pull away and chase after the taxi. Now, no one really honks their car horn in Sao Paulo. So when I am laying on the horn I would expect the taxi driver to wonder what that noise is. Nope. I am banging on the horn and trying to make him pull over when he FINALLY notices me and pulls off the road. Now I am pretty sure this was my friend, but not 100%. Luckily it was her. She pays the cabbie and gets in my car. Now what? Well E is still not answering her phone so I assumed that she could not cut the meeting she had and was not coming to lunch. Where should we go?

Well I started driving and chatting. I was actually paying attention to the road too, which is unusual for me. I called my husband, yes I was on the phone too. Hey I am a multi-tasker! He gave a reco on where to go. Okay! So I am blocks from the new place, and E calls. "Hey where are you? The restaurant is closed!" Umm, about that. Well come to find out that she kept on pocketing dialing people so she had to shut off her phone. Oops! So we head back to the same street we just came from because E said the restaurant down the street from the closed one was good. So we head back. In lunch hour traffic. It took some time.

The restaurant is named Olea Mozzarella Bar. Yum, sounds Italian. Well not really, but they did have bruschetta! And it was the best I have tasted so far. It is a buffet style restaurant. So what you do is go to the salad bar and then get appetizers, and then go back for lunch. As many times as you want. They had chicken, fillet mignon, snapper. So let's start with a salad. I get field greens, arugula, oh and you point what you want and they make it for you. Nice, don't have to do a thing. Okay, I get my salad with balsamic vinaigrette. And we sit down and talk. And talk, and talk. I am almost done. I have a few leaves still on my plate. I look down. What is floating in my vinaigrette? A grayish looking garden grub. Not a big one, maybe only a half inch long. YUMMO! I hope the vinegar killed it.

So I call over the proprietress. Her explanation: "Oh I am so sorry! You know we are very organic here. No pesticides. It makes the food healthier."

Um okay. But now I am wondering how many grubs I ate. O and E are laughing once the lady leaves. Cracking jokes about how organic my meal is. Did we stay? Yes, they had fillet mignon on the main table! I needed more protein people! Or just to wash the thought of the grub out of my taste buds.

In the end it was a fun lunch with friends, despite the grub. Of course they did not comp anything. Why should they, it was organic! Bonus!

Can't wait for O to arrive so we can do lunch again. And in the meantime, E and I will just have to find more bug salads to eat!

New Shocks and a Bruised Rib

March for us was a month of travelling. We hit the beach several times. One such beach was Praia Juquehy, pronounced joo-kay-ee, or close enough to it. This beach was beautiful. You know, every time we hit a different one, we say, this is the most beautiful beach I have seen outside of Rio. Of course, until we hit the next one. Juquehy is about a 2.5 hour drive outside of Sao Paulo. It is really not that far actually. But to get there you have to go over 38 speed bumps, one way. Really they are speed reducing mountains due to the size of some of these things.

We picked the boys up from school on a Friday and headed out. It is really a nice drive over bridges in the mountains. Scary at times, but really nice, see?

I wish I could take a picture of the road with all of the speed bumps. It is about 40 miles long, so that works out to be about 1 bump per mile. However, I could not because, well the bumps. But we finally got to the beach. We hit the turn off but it did not look right. It was a dirt road with construction all around and it looked like we were heading into the jungle. So we took the long way around. Not the best idea either.

See they built this little city by the sea. But they did not build infrastructure around it. The bridge to go over the run out path has no boards in the middle of it. If you jerk the wheel? You are in the ravine.

I thought I took a picture, but this is a different bridge that we took to leave. But you can see where there are no boards. Also, the road that they built for this little town was very interesting. They did not grade it, they did not put draining in so that the rain would be taken away. So the road was EXTREMELY bumpy. I think I have a picture of that.

Okay, so I did not take a good picture again. It is not my strong suit. However, can you see the car in the corner? That is not due to camera angle. It is due to street angle. By the time we got to our hotel my youngest was trying hard not to pee his pants, which was difficult considering the jarring, and I bruised my rib on the door handle.

But get there we did. And, oh my, what tranquility. We relaxed for two days. It was so nice. The first night we lost power due to a tremendous storm, but we did not mind. The weekend was wonderful. We ate very delicious food. We played cards. We took walks on the beach, and we rested by the pool. We needed the break and felt rested coming home. Here are some pictures of the paradise we found. The first is the best of the weekend, taken by my nine year old. Actually, I think he took all of these. A photographer in the making?