Here are some bits that I wrote up while still in Brazil. I hope to fill in the last couple days soon, too, and share more of my photos.
(more of) Day 4:
The conference banquet was on Thursday night, and I was excited about going to it largely because it was held at an old coffee farm. It was a cool building, from what I saw, but it was already well after dark by the time we even left the conference hotel. So I saw very little.
I did enjoy the banquet, though the food wasn’t terribly exciting for me as a vegetarian. I got to eat a couple of hors d’oeuvres, the salad, the rice and the vegetables. I did like the couve (sauteed, finely shredded collard greens) and some sort of little dish of polenta with mushroom sauce that came in a ramekin (and looked like chocolate mousse). We also got to have this traditional Brazilian dessert:
The white bit is cheese, the orange is a sweet made from pumpkin, the green is made from orange peels, the red is a goiabada (guava paste), and the brown is doce de leite (basically, a dense caramel).
I had been commenting to people that I had yet to hear even a little bit of Brazilian music on my trip so far, so I was pleasantly surprised that there was a live band at the banquet playing MPB (“musica popular brasileira”) and various other Brazilian styles. (When the buses arrived at the farm house, there was also a guy with a saxaphone playing Garota de Ipanema/Girl from Ipanema, which actually made me laugh a bit. It seems to be the anthem played especially for foreigners.)
I got to sit next a new Brazilian friend of mine, F, and her husband. The music was so loud that I couldn’t actually have a conversation with anyone else at the table. But it was cool to sit with my new friends. We talked a bit about poverty in Brazil and the US, and I got to learn some things. For example, that there were about 40,000 people that had moved to Campinas since 1997 or so, and set up favelas just out of sight of the resort where the conference was held.
I tried to see the favelas from the hotel the next day, but the resort has high walls and trees all around the perimeter that block the view from the ground level. As I walked around admiring the gardens, I thought a lot about the contrast of the 5-star resort, with its sprawling recreation areas and mounds of expensive food, being so close to thousands of people living in cramped quarters and stark poverty.
collecting tokens 
I think about this a lot, particularly given my role in sending people here, there and everywhere. Is it ethical to lounge on other countries’ beaches like a western capitalist pig? Are we using resources they need, or are we helping to support their local economy? Is the environmental degradation caused by tourism better or worse than the slash and burn forestry they might otherwise conduct to make money? Am I encouraging the flow of ideas and information, or the spread of communicable diseases? I don’t really have an answer. It’s a little from column A and a little from column B. I try to assuage my own guilt by carbon offsetting, volunteering and making donations in the countries I visit. Also by not going overseas for the last three years. Embarrassing, I know. But think of the carbon savings.
I want to try them all!
When I traveled to China, I was still a vegetarian. Most times, I’d get the same dish at each of our tour restaurants. Um, it got old.
Glad you otherwise had such a nice time and have new friends now too.
we were in Mexico – south of Cancun – last year and it was the same thing. One side of the road (towards the gulf, of course) was resort after resort, while the other side were all these little huts. I wondered where our maids laid their heads at night.
This looks delicious. I will be interested to read what you find about the favelas.
Yum that food!!! How neat to read this.
How does the orange peel thing end up green?
“I tried to see the favelas from the hotel the next day […] I thought a lot about the contrast of the 5-star resort, with its sprawling recreation areas and mounds of expensive food, being so close to thousands of people living in cramped quarters and stark poverty.”
I think about this a lot when I visit Jamaica. The 2-3 hour drive from the airport to the place I stay gives a chance to see just how much money people don’t have. And when I walk or bike around town once I’ve reached my destination, the lack of money is so clear. There aren’t any 5-star hotels in the area, but folks like me who come to stay in the guest houses clearly have much more money than the people we’re having breakfast with at the coffee shop. It’s a strange, and sometimes uncomfortable, feeling/knowing.