This week was not your ordinary week. I could say everything that could go wrong, went wrong, but that would be completely wrong and unfair to life. Let's say most of what could go wrong, went wrong, but the things that do matter, were kind enough to us to just stay calm and without creating problems.

About a month ago ( time flies when you stop posting and life gets all complicated ) we asked a repair shop to come fix our air conditioner. It needed some cleaning, and was really dirty and maybe needed a recharge of gas. Well, what the guys did, I don't know, but they broke it. They just took our money, the crooks, and broke the air conditioner big time. Yes, it's still under warranty, but took us two weeks to get it back from them ( broken ) and I wonder if we called them again, they would just finish the job and juice the two suckers here for more money.

So, we phoned in an authorized Electrolux repair service. And they pretty much said that the old air conditioner is dead, whoever took it simply destroyed it, and buying a new one would be much simpler and cheaper than trying to repair the old one.

Last week, feeling that would be the case, we got a brand new one for our bedroom, air conditioners are something you don't live without in the Brazilian summer, and we're in November already ( we're upside down to folks in the states, we're going towards summer as you come to winter ), and I kind of felt we needed one working air conditioner, and if we fixed the old one, we would have one for the guest room. If not, we would just have one, and be very sad.

Well, so, picture our day, some money out of savings to buy an air conditioner and we were basically told we were screwed for the last one, giving us a really good dent in our savings. Another one, adding up to vet bills, medicine bills for the dog, car repair and other stuff that shouldn't have happened at this time of the year, but did anyway, and as you know, bad things have a way of not waiting.

And Susie, my dearest loved one, wanted some cigarettes badly. So, I could honestly go buy some cigarettes and ruin two years of effort of her quitting smoking, or, I could go to the kitchen and make something up to kill that stress.

Roaming the fridge I came up with some frozen passion fruit, and started creating this which was a very refreshing, not so strong, pure relaxation, which I called Sunshine Love. If there is another drink with the name, sorry, I had no idea and apologize.

But here it goes:

Jessica's Sunshine Love

• 1 litre of fresh mineral water
• 200g of peeled passion fruit
• 80ml of coconut milk
• 3 Tablespoons of sugar
• 200ml vodka

Throw in the water in the blender with the passion fruit and start blending. Add the coconut milk, the sugar, and just before finishing, pour in the vodka.

Take a perfectly clean and chilled glass, with much ice in it, and throw in the mix. It's ready to serve.

That portion would serve 3 adults nicely in a hot summer day. The idea is to have the taste of the passion fruit up the front, but balanced well by the coconut milk, which should be a background nuance. The vodka should be mild enough to allow for someone to drink the whole litre without going funny. If the passion fruit or the coconut milk you have available are either too mild or too concentrated, you should be able to adjust portions to fit that description, the passion fruit present and marked, with a discernible nuance of coconut milk coming on the back, and greatly refreshing. The sugar comes in just to even out things and leave a not-so-sweet drink.

I hope you like it, we loved it here. Have a great weekend everyone :)

When we stayed in Paraty, we stayed at the Pousada Morro do Forte, one of several to pick from the web. It was really appealing for two main reasons. The first, it wasn't amongst the top priced ones. The second, the view from the bedroom veranda was gorgeous. Both turned out to be true: from the hotels we saw, it's really the prettiest.

What we didn't count on was the fact those were pretty much the only good things about this inn.

If you read my review about Paraty, I sure don't have to go over the road mishap again. And honestly, I don't think it was a problem of the hotel, it's all up to the mayor and local authorities, and the city as a whole, in my way of seeing it. Of course, a note on their website, or a warning over phone when I called prior to hitting the road, would have been nice.
But having a security guard actually laugh at my face in the phone, without any kind of formal or informal apology, was horrible. And it's the actual service that is the Aquiles heel of this whole hotel. The lack of sheer respect for the guests started on this phone call, but it didn't end here.

The first thing I have to mention, because it's really a serious drawback, is that the hotel owner thought it was a great idea to follow the “17th Century stone pavement” theme. Sure, irregular stone paving is great for pictures, but in reality you have to move the same way you have to walk around really carefully around the city, for the sake of your ankles, teeth and neck. Specially down the slope from the pool area to the bedrooms, and going upstairs if you get a room with a veranda, cause there's no hand rail on the staircase.

When we arrived, I didn't have a chance to photoshoot the room, because it was 04:00 am, and we just wanted to hit bed. I was under the impression that, after spending the next day out, we would return to a cleaned, tied up room I could shoot, so I didn't worry. The cleanup didn't happen. So, the fault for the lack of any photos of the actual room we stayed in falls in the hotel staff. Which is a pity, as it's a really nice room for the price we paid.

What can I say? We had a nice bed, where we could really sleep well. Enough pillows and blankets to face the chilly night (it's still winter in Brazil in August), which is not usual in most hotels we stayed at.
Cable TV, not usual at all in many hotels in Brazil, and also, air conditioning, while most hotels in Paraty offer fans, which in a hot Rio de Janeiro day (or night) isn't enough.
The shower was hot enough and the water pressure was decent for a great shower.
Our friends in another room though, only got hot water, regardless of complaints, a couple of days later, on the morning of the day we left, and had to shower in our room.

Breakfast consists of 2 different kinds of bread, cold and hot milk, granola, assorted fruit, coffee, 2 kinds of cake, ham and cheese, and eggs made to order: sunny side up, scrambled, or boiled. It's served from 07:00 am to 10:00 am. There are also 2 different juices, orange and passionfruit. There is no refill on those, only one jar of each for all the hotel guests, so, if you like orange juice, you better get up early, because it finishes first.

The hotel has wireless internet, the router being visible at the reception, but, talking to the owner, she made it clear she doesn't want to extend the range so that you could access it from your own laptop, in your room. Considering she charges for access in one slow, old computer (which by the way is right next to the reception's computer, so you'll most likely than not be checking your emails while the owner or an employee works beside you), by the hour, you can see why. I guessed asking for a password, to use my own laptop there, was out of the question.

There is no room service.

There is a written request on the bathroom door to discard used towels on the floor, so the staff could know which ones to replace and which ones to leave ( ridiculous if you ask me, to have to toss towels in the floor... they could have provided a better place to discard old, used towels ). Well, we went out for lunch and sightseeing, and when we returned, in the evening, we had the same pile of wet, dirty towels on the floor, and just a couple of clean ones that we hadn't used, to shower.
Also, the room was exactly how we left it. Nothing was done, not even the bed.

The hotel also doesn't have any form of internal phone network. You can't phone out of your bedroom, unless you have a cell phone with you. And there is no way to get anything from the reception, unless you want to walk there. Even then, nothing will be brought to your room.
If you want to have breakfast in your room, you'll have to go get it, and the dishes to eat it in, yourself, and balance the tray back down the stony slope to your room.

Also, the hotel closes the reception, and “kitchen” service - that isn't a real kitchen service, either: they just order stuff out from a local pizzeria, whose phone number they don't disclose even if asked for (I did), or fry up pre-processed appetizers (think turkey twizzlers and fries) – at 08:00 pm. After that, the only hotel employee to be seen is the security guard. Who, let's be fair, gave us some cutlery to eat the pizza we went out to get at Saturday night.

Oh, and another highlight: even though the place has no parking lot, and we had to leave our car in the street, near the hotel, it wasn't stolen. Hooray.

The new chick hip place in São Paulo, at least the one every reviewer is talking about, that can be found in the central area of the city, in the Lower Augusta area, is Tubaína. We went there for my birthday, and I invited some select friends to join us. As usual, some came, some didn't, but it didn't affect the experience at all, because, even if I didn't fall in love with the place, I surely liked it, and would love to come back for a second time.

If you're not familiar with the theme, Tubaínas are a popular designation for cheap, poor man's sodas here in Brazil. For most of us, when we were kids, drinking actual Coca-Cola was a stuff for weekends, or maybe just very special occasions as your birthday. Back then, we would be very lucky to have my parents buy a 1 liter glass bottle for a weekend lunch or dinner. Most of us, on a normal saturday or sunday lunch or dinner, would instead have a tubaína, usually a local manufactured soda, sold in re-used beer bottles with badly designed and very colorful labels. And those were the drinks that stick to our memories. The bar deco is set around this imagery of the usual middle-class family dinning room of the 1960's to the 1980's. You sit and eat on vintage tables and chairs, the toilet washroom reminds you of old public school wash basins, and even the lamps over the bar have iconic images of Atari joysticks and other kids toys kids today may have to hit a museum to see with their own eyes.

Being from Rio, my favorite tubaína is Mineirinho, curiously, not from Minas Gerais, but Niterói ( a region in Rio de Janeiro ), and it's not really well known here in São Paulo, so, they don't sell it in the bar ( most tubaínas are local brands, almost indigenous, and it would be hard to have any bar actually have in their stock every possible single brand available for every possible childhood memory ), but they did have around 6 flavors of tubaínas and sodas, that, not counting the usual Coca-Cola / Brahma / Antarctica major brands you'd normally find in any good bar or restaurant in Brazil. Also, they didn't have Guaraná Mantiqueira, a delicious, maybe the best indigenous Guaraná soda me and Susie have ever had, ever. The waitress said they're still building and taking in suggestions to grow their stocks, so, who knows? Maybe in six months we won't have much to complain anymore.

Note to people who like ginger ale: There's two different brands of gengibirra in the menu. Gengibirra was supposed to be the Portuguese/Brazilian version of ginger ale; however, those we found on the menu were NOT made from ginger, they were just ordinary lemon sodas. Why do they sport themselves as ginger ales when there's no ginger in them, specially with ginger being cheap? Beats me. Why don't they sell Cini Gengibirra, which actually DOES contain ginger, and counts as Tubaína? Dunno either, probably cause it's from Paraná, not São Paulo.

But, when you leave that behind, and focus on the appetizer menu, you're in for a treat. A warning here, the chef was adventurous, and these are not amuse-bouches, they're big appetizers, themed around childhood memories as well as adventuring in deeply rooted brazilian flavors often unknown on major cities. Another warning here, this is not a light menu. It's bold, good and fat, tasty and strong, with a lot of character. A sheer contrast to the usual appetizer you see in many bars today where calorie counting seems to supersede flavor.

To start with, Susie and Monica went for a portion of Mandiopã, something out of their childhood.


(This is the reason for 80% of childhood burns in Brazil, back in the 70's and early 80's)

Mandiopã was usually bought in boxes, and deep fried. Susie mentioned this is something of many memories of delicious afternoons and serious oil burns, as they were never to keen on waiting for mom to fry those, and more than once tried to do it themselves ( after all, looks so easy ) and ended up with a few marks, and mouthfuls of Mandiopã. Marcio joked about the name, simply saying it could have been an Astec God for all he knows. But regardless, the taste is supreme. Mandiopã at the Tubaína Bar, is simple, clean, light and perfect. Not any different from what a childhood memory should be. And here's the tricky part many don't get. We often embezzle our childhood memories, making them sweet spots, and usually, a childhood memory, once gone, is hard to be recovered, because even the real thing won't be as good as it's own memory. It's common to just hear “Oh, it used to be better when I was a kid” and so on. So, it's quite a feat for two people who have this as deep, cherished childhood memories, to just pop them in their mouths, and yum, roll and say it's EXACTLY as they expected. This is a Ratatouille moment guys.

I hate to say this, but I loved the thing. It's highly addictive. The chef actually brought the small complimentary portion to our table herself, after we had ordered, which made me think that she knows her game, and how good this is. It comes in a medium sized portion you could mistake for chips, but it's much much lighter. The mix has some spices, and has a very light taste of fresh onions in the end, that is just over your head.

Alongside, we ordered what they call, coxinha de feijão. There has been some time that feijoada dumplings have been sold in bars in Brazil. Last couple of times we were in Rio, we tried to hit the bar where this delicacy was born, to no avail. It simply seems to run out before we get there, so, it must be good. This is a revisit, mixing with the concept of a coxinha de galinha. The original coxinha de galinha is a deep fried dumpling made out of chicken, and shaped as something that reminds you of a small thigh, hence, coxinha ( coxa = thigh, coxinha = small chicken thigh ), a chicken broth and flour dough, shaped by hand, and filled in the middle with chicken meat, and sometimes, some sort of cream or cheese to melt and mix. This is the same, done with black beans. You can already see where the concept becomes very heavy and very fatty and very delicious in a perverted way. The cooked beans are mashed with a bit of manioc flour, shaped by hand into small thigh shapes, filled in with bacon, sausage and cooked jerky, rolled in breadcrumbs, and then deep fried.
You eat one, is knock out delicious. Two, you've been greedy. Three, you better have a very resilient stomach. The serving comes with 5, served in a cute salt box, just like the one my mom had on the wall of her own kitchen. Some people will say this place is starting to delve into the dark realm of kitsch, but I say, it works.

I am a food shooter, and this is something I'd ask the chef for a re-styling for photos. Do one set her way, one set my way, and later on, decide in the light table what worked better.
But to be honest, I think I'd like more to work their styling, trying to capture the whole ambience, because everything together is really kitsch, but it works in a weird way. Possibly it wouldn't be published, or make a magazine cover, but it would be in my portfolio for sure.
Anyway, I wasn't there as a pro photographer that night, so, I took some crappy photos with a snapshot camera, just so you don't have to take my words for it.

Next, Susie ordered something she have always wondered about, Inca Kola, a tubaína from Peru. Well, I have to say, people always said it's horrible and you just can't drink it. But, to be honest, to my taste it's fine. I think it's tutti-frutti flavored, just like bubble gums. You do get the taste you'd have, that brutally artificial taste of bubble-gum, in a soda.
Susie, on the other hand, firmly believes it's undrinkable, and that it's taste is, for lack of a better word, unique to it. She'd also like to note:

"I have never had such a hard time drinking a soda in my life. Couldn't do it by myself, too. Not an experience I'm ever going to repeat."

And we also asked for something I saw on the menu, that made me a bit frightened, because that mix of flavors would be really new for me; if it worked, wow, if it didn't, it would risk being inedible. Toasted coalho cheese with coconut and sugar cane syrup.

The coalho cheese has a property of getting toasted without loosing much of it's shape, making it a favorite for barbecues. There are other cheeses you could think with similar texture and qualities, but you could imagine it being a cousin to feta cheese. This was diced in small cubes, toasted, and topped with flaked coconut. A dip dish was served with sugar cane syrup, which is a little thinner than molasses, but with a very mild burnt caramelized taste to it, which I love. Like I said, this is something that could have not worked in a bar menu, but a mouthful proves it does. However, I was drinking cachaça with this (Dona Fulô at room temperature), and it didn't clean the palate enough to allow for really feasting on it. Remember, cachaça is also a product from the sugar cane industry, so, pretty much, I was having the full sugar cane circle here.
Maybe sodas would have cleaned my palate faster out of the thick syrup, allowing for new bites, but since I was always left with an aftertaste, it became a bit too much for me quite fast. This is not as addictive as the Mandiopã, and you can't just gulp portions all night without dealing with the strong sweet flavor, and I'm definitely not a sweet tooth.

To close up, we ordered some pastéis ( deep fried pastries with fillings; imagine spring rolls, but with cheese, or sautéed mince meat, instead of the original filling; and the pastry isn't rolled, it's just one layer folded over the filling ), some with cheese, others with meat. These are also childhood mementos, we grow up eating these in street markets while buying vegetables and fruits every week with our parents. Each city has their own culture to this as well, and here in São Paulo, they're often sold in stands sided by a garapa stand ( garapa is just the juice right out of the sugar cane, served with lots of ice, and sometimes lime or pineapple juice ). I think a nice bottle of fresh garapa would have been a nice touch to make us go “Oh, come on!” all night in smiles and cheers, because then they would have hit all the right spots.
But, to be honest, pressing your own sugar cane juices in a restaurant or bar is really too much to ask. And the option would have been frozen or pre-pressed stuff, which is not good, and everyone would have noticed it was off, and would have ruined the experience.

I guess they didn't even think about the childhood theme on the pastéis, because many bars serve them these days in all kinds of formats and fillings. But, as far as pastéis go, they were really good. I'd bet they do their own pastry, because it was a taste apart from normal street market variety, and also from other bars we went to recently.

Note, they serve the cachaça shots cold; first time I saw a bar do that. I prefer cachaça at room temperature, and for seconds, I asked for it. My favorite brand ever (Magia de Mulher) was not in their menu, and my second favorite ( Salinas ) was not available at room temperature, just frosted, which was a pity.

All in all, this place is all thumbs up. Service was so good, I didn't even need to mention here, and I love when service is so good that you only remember you should evaluate it, after you have finished writing and there's not so much room for it anymore. Everything is spot on. The place is not, and doesn't advertise itself as, five star dining. We didn't even pay attention if the menu actually had dinner options or not, because I went straight to appetizers and then, drinks, but I should come back to check that sometime in the future. I have already the friend to be taken there in mind.
But it's a really nice bar, in which you won't regret spending a night at and venturing on the menu, which was designed to inspire and make you go yum.
All in all, if you think everything is too adventurous and you like staying on the safe side of the road, order the Mandiopã and you won't regret. Cross my heart!