Brazil: Curitiba

Faurecia Curitiba

So here I am in Curitiba, Brazil, recovering from a bit of jet lag and quite a bit colder than I expected to be.

The flight was as lovely as 11.5 hours in a metal tube in the sky can be. It was my first international business class flight, and I was almost embarrassed by the attention that was lavished upon me. Before the plane even left the ground I had a glass of peach juice and a dish of warm peanuts and cashews beside me.

I got to choose my own meal (vegetable foie gras, seafood soup, spinach ravioli, chocolate cheesecake), plus a selection from their wine list, and everything was placed on a neat personal tablecloth. They gave me one of those clever little 1st class plane kits with a toothbrush and lotion and all that nonesence, but this nonsence came L'Occitane and oooh I was impressed.

What astounded me was the space between the rows in business class. Between my seat the seat back in front of me I literally had to get up and take two steps. I guess we needed that space when our giant seats reclined back for sleeping.

Anyway, enough gushing about business class, I landed in Sao Paulo and caught my connector to Curitiba without a problem. I was picked up by my colleague José, who drove me to the office and brought me to lunch at the company cafeteria before the training class. We had salad and "meat" (the origin he couldn't think of), and fruit juice.

Brazil has more fruit juice than I could imagine. Peach, mango, grape, guava, pineapple, strawberry. And occasionally, orange.

After lunch I launched straight into training, and didn't start feeling wiped out until 4:00 or so. We closed the day at 6:00, and José brought me to dinner at a traditional Brazilian BBQ restaurant. It seems like all I can say about Brazil is about the food, but honestly, it's all I've seen so far, other than an industrial park and the roads in between.

The restaurant was fun. After we were seated, Jose ordered us "caipirinhas", Brazil's classic drink of sugar, lemon, and cachaca, a local liquor. Then a waiter came by and filled our table with little metal plates filled with salads, potatoes, polenta, strange vegetables, all kinds of things. Then the meat waiters began. A parade of waiters carrying sticks of sizzling meat marched up to our table in turns, offering us a bit of each. Some had rolling grills, some came with sauces, some carried giant hard cheeses hollowed out and filled with risotto. I was dizzied and overwhelmed and curious to try everything. But my colleague had gotten sick the previous night after eating cheese, so I steered clear from that.

Other than the strange food, I have little else to say. The stop signs say "PARE". There are horses with carts alongside buses and cars on the roads. The birds I've seen on the company grounds aren't colorful, but Jose tells me that they have barbs on their wings and are downright dangerous. They also scream like monkeys right outside our training room, which always startles me.

We leave for Sao Paulo this afternoon, and I hope to see more than the airport, industrial sector, and the roads in between. And I pray that I don't get sick.