Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais: Weekend Activities

I am being spoiled. This weekend was a weekend of luxury for sure. Honestly I am so fortunate to have such welcoming and sympatica hosts. On Saturday I was invited to spend my day with Carol and Lucas at the weekend home of Lucas' family. His family, as do Carol and Lucas, live in a gated community, which are called condominios in Brazil. His home is in a valley surrounded by minimally developed mountains so that residents can enjoy the beauty of brazilian nature and get away from the crowded city life.

His home also has an outdoor kitchen and hosting area with three large permanent outdoor dinning tables, a pool, a billiard table, a tennis court and ample room to lounge. We played music ranging from unplugged shows of Eric Clapton to MPB (musique popular brazil).

I think the lunch was to celebrate Carol being pregnant because Lucas' three sisters and their family were present and we drank a very fancy bottle of Spanish wine with lunch. Alexia, one of Lucas' sister, is a chef who teaches cooking at a school in another province. She made a delicious seafood lunch for us to enjoy for the celebrations, after which we played billiards, swam, sun tanned and generally relaxed.

Meeting kids is always an enjoyable experience in a foreign country for a number of reasons. First, you're able to communicate more easily because the topics of conversation with a child tend to be more simple. However, in many cases, children are often timido with foreigners. For two of Lucas' nephews I was the first person they have ever met that doesn't speak Portuguese. For some of the older ones, they explained that they could understand me when I spoke English because they had started to learn in school or for one Fransisco (there were two) he said he would only be learning this coming year.

The pre-teen nieces decided later to make luxury dog cookies from a cookbook that was in English. They kept running to me to explain different ingredients and words in the instructions. For example, I had to explain what 'grated' meant and what 'dough' was in a couple different ways before the girls understood. Actually it is a little like playing Tabu - you can use all sorts of hand signals and words less ones (generally the most useful) that aren't understood by the people to whom you are trying to describe the subject. 'Grated' was difficult to explain because they had to grate carrots so I explained that cheese on pizza and nachos was generally grated and that's what they had to do to the carrots.

Luckily I wasn't the only foreigner at the gathering. Mat, a Turkish exchange student living with Alexia, was able to translate much because he has already been in Brazil for six months. When I asked him why he chose to learn Portuguese of all languages, he said it was because apparently Portuguese is the most difficult of the latin languages (which I believe), and he says he has been advised that if he learns Portuguese before Spanish and Italian it will be easier to learn all three than if he learned Spanish or Italian and then tried to add Portuguese.