Who wants to be a Brazilianaire?

Last spring, I competed in a speech contest at the district convention in Rapid City. One of the other contestants told about her adventures as she swam in the Amazon in Brazil…with piranhas, mind you.

That caught my attention because my wife Belinda and I have been to Brazil three times in the last six years and never have we even seen the Amazon let alone swim in it. But we have our own adventures. Most of them have dealt with two things we hold most dear – food and money.

So let me tell you about our adventures and they occur in three different places – the megacity of Sao Paulo, the small city of Bebadouro and the beaches along the Atlantic Ocean.

The reason we fly 4000 miles to Sao Paulo is that’s the home town of our daughter-in-law Camila. It’s a city of about 25 million people to 30 million people – second only to Mexico City as the largest city in the western hemisphere. As the late Anthony Bourdain said, “It’s so large it makes LA look like Hooterville.”

Now imagine if you will a Sunday morning street fair in Sao Paulo. There are fruit and fish vendors lined up for miles along a thoroughfare. As we get out of the car and walk toward the crowds, my son – who is married to Camila – feels it necessary to tell me, “And whatever else you do here today, don’t get lost in the crowd.”

Well, imagine my surprise when I’m hanging out with my gang of about 12 people at the street fair only to turn around and find them all gone. They have vanished. All I see is a sea of people and what’s worse is they all look the same. They all have brown skin and black hair. I can’t use my cell phone because it doesn’t work in Brazil.

I don’t know if I should move and start looking for them, or should I stay put until someone notices that I’m gone and comes back to find me.

Alas, I see Camila’s sister – or at least someone who looks like her sister – but, sadly, no. It’s just another of a thousand people at the street fair who looks exactly like my Brazilian relatives. At last, I find my wife. She’s ordering something from one of the vendors. So I walk over with happy elation written all over my face. Then I come upon my son who scolds me for getting lost.

“You are a known flight risk,” he says. “Stay with the group.”

Belinda is ordering homemade candy. And they are making it in front of our eyes. They have a hot iron skillet that they fill with tapioca flour and fry it over a blue propane flame. They flip it and then pour sweetened condensed milk on it, fold it over, take it out of the pan and hand it to Belinda. It’s simple to make and tastes like you are eating a Mounds candy bar.

We love it so much that Belinda buys a small bag of the white tapioca flour. The vendor tells us that once the bag is opened, it needs to be eaten at once or it will spoil…thus the small bag.

Well, this is perfect. We look forward to taking our bag of tapioca flour back to North Dakota and making our own homemade candy, until we get to the airport in Sao Paulo. A bag of tapioca flour looks a lot like a bag of cocaine to airport security personnel. So after having our luggage x-rayed, opened and examined, the tapioca flour passes the smell test and we are allowed to keep it with us.

My second story about food occurs in Bebedouro, a city about the size of Bismarck. Camila’s grandfather and a couple of uncles live here. After Sao Paulo, Bebedouro seems like Mayberry. Everyone is friendly and in the center of town is a park. It is at the park that we come upon hot dog vendors.

Now, we are no stranger to hot dogs. We’ve eaten hot dogs in every major league baseball park and a few minor league parks. We’ve also eaten them in New York City where they are affectionately known as dirty water dogs. So no, it’s best not to invest too much time into the integrity of the sausage. Simply close your eyes and bite down on them.

But the Brazilian hot dog is a different breed altogether. While American dogs are generally dyed red, the Brazilian dogs are orange….no, not just orange, sort of a florescent orange….like the color of the vests worn by hunters in North Dakota.

So here’s a street vendor selling orange hot dogs. But instead of the normal condiments like ketchup and mustard, the Brazilians are used to eating their hot dogs smothered with cooked green peas and mashed potatoes.

Okay, here’s where I draw the line. First, I’m not sure if I could even eat an orange hot dog, but I’m sure that I can’t eat one covered in green peas. So while the rest of the brave people downed a hot dog, I waited for our next stop – the ice cream shop. Only to my dismay, the flavors of the ice cream are also like the hot dogs. Anyone eat ice cream that tastes like sweet corn before? You can in Bebedouro. I stuck with more familiar flavors – chocolate smothered with the ubiquitous sweetened condensed milk.

My third stop on this journey is a beach – this particular beach doesn’t need a name because they are all over the place a hundred miles or so east of Sao Paulo. Some are coves, some are jetties, some are white sand and some are rocky. But they have a few things in common – they are full of people and they have young men who wait on your every need.

It's best to get there early so you can pick out the best spot, which is in front of the food and beverage cabana. Here you want someone who speaks Portuguese to set up a tab for you and your group. If they know you are American, you’ll probably end up paying too much. But if your name is Claudiney or Guilherme, they’ll treat you right.

So at the end of the day after devouring high octane sodas, mixed drinks over the rocks and a host of foods on a stick, it’s time to pay the bill. Generally, our little group averages about eight to 10 of us. The Brazilian dollar is known as real (pronounced HAY-eye). For every American dollar, you can get somewhere between three and four reals. So it’s a good thing to be an American.

Rather than splitting up the bill eight ways, the young men who have kept our drinks fresh and fried our food on a stick to perfection, would just as soon that one person pay the bill in full and leave them a tip. This is where Belinda comes in. She hands them a credit card. Any translation is done by our daughter-in-law who speaks fluent English and Portuguese. In an instant, the bill is paid and our credit card shows that we paid one-fourth of what the bill actually was.

Because of the amazing exchange rate, we are what is known as Brazilianaires…just average run of the mill Americans who can pay a fraction of what someone from Brazil would pay. It’s a great system…for us and our relatives.

But the real cherry on top is that the vendors like the arrangement so much that they are more than happy to give Belinda a free drink…the proverbial one for the road. It’s a concoction of fresh fruit, ice, wine and the ever present sweetened condensed milk.

So while we haven’t swam with piranhas, we have had our share of Brazilian adventures. Hopefully, next year, we can add to the list.