Eating my way through Brazil...

Afternoon all,

Time for another update. I have had a nice trip for a change. They send me off to good old Brazil. I had to do a job in Pedro Leopoldo. This is just outside Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais province. I know nothing about Brazil as this was my first visit there. The only idea I had about Brazil was that you stood a decent chance to get killed. That opinion was based about stuff from Rio de Janeiro. How wrong I was... Yes, Rio can be dodgy but the rest of the country is pretty much standard South America. I flew with Air Puke (Air France/KLM) from Heathrow to Paris to Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte. The travel was the usual unhelpful french crap until I got to Brazil. Why is it that airlines outside of Europe and the USA are so much more friendly and customer orientated???

I got to Belo Horizonte late in the evening and our rep Mr Emiliano was there waiting for me. He took me to the hotel in Pedro Leopoldo. After a decent nights kip did the work for our customer out there. The picture above is the view from my hotel room, not bad...

The weather was nice and warm during the day, around 3o C but at night because its quite a way inland and at height, approx 3000 feet, it cooled down quite a bit at night. I actually needed a coat in the evening, nice!
This is a view of the small town of Pedro Leopoldo. It is a nice small quiet town with a few very good restaurants. For example Kmin de Casa was a nice buffet style restaurant and there were a few others but as the beer was pretty good I can't remember the others hahahahaha!!!

This is Mr Emiliano stuffing his face with some decent meat in a resaturant in the hills somewhere. For a fixed small price you could eat as much as you wanted and that included the famous Argentinian beef. I learned something there about that meat. Not all Argentinian Beef comes from Argentina. There is an area where there is a type of cow that produces Argentianian beef that grazes in either Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay. Never mind where it came from, it was a meat eaters paradise. It has been a long time since I have eaten such good quality beef...

This was the view from the reastaurant at lunch time, very relaxing...

Same place, different view...

This picture is of a bottle of fire water. A lot of the food in Brazil is very tasty but they aren't really into really spicy food. I love spicy stuff. When we were in a italian/brazilian restaurant in Pedro I asked the waiter for some hot sauce to spice up the meal we were having. He brought out this crappy old bottle of gunk. It didn't look like much, but man, that packed a punch. That will teach me to use a hot sauce liberally... It burned my gob bigtime, Ace! All in all I had a fantastic time out there, very much helped by my new friends Emiliano and Fedayeen. They were the perfect hosts, always ready to convey me to another watering hole hahahahaha!!! If you are looking for a good night club, there is a club in Sete Lagoas, about 20 km from Pedro Leopoldo which I can heartily recommend. I have forgotten the name but I am sure Emiliano will put me right on that.

OK, I am on the countdown for my holiday now, only 13 days to go before I am off to Thailand, can't wait!!!

Cheerio,
Alex.