As Garotas De Laranjeiras

Déborah, Me, Juliana!

For a number of reasons, I’ve failed to write in detail about a lot of the people I spend most of my time with down here. One of the reasons for this is that I don’t want to leave anyone out. I’ve met and worked with so many truly wonderful people that I could spend my entire summer writing entries about them. Nonetheless, I’d be remiss to not write about the two most important women in my life these days: Déborah and Juliana.

These are the girls with whom I spent most of my summer. They relentlessly corrected my Portuguese and I got to teach them a few things about English. Besides being grateful to them for countless great lunches and laughs, I’ve got to thank them for making me love going to work every day.

Upon returning from Malta, I found my desk taken by this guy (he’s a really nice guy). Yes, I’d been cast out of the garden, but perhaps its better this way. I’d have grown more attached and it’d make it harder to leave the office next week if I were still in there.

Feijoada!

Here’s a picture of today’s lunch. Clicking here will take you to more pictures of it, and people. Feijoada is, according to Wikipedia:

…a traditional Angolan, Brazilian, Portuguese dish among other former Portuguese colonies, is a stew of black beans (in Brazil), white or red beans in Portugal, with a variety of pork and beef products such as salted pork trimmings (ears, tail, feet), pork sausage and bacon, and salted beef (loin and tongue). Angolan and São Tomean feijoadas uses palm oil. Northeastern Portugal includes vegetables and uses red beans, while neighbouring Northwest prefers white beans.

Read the rest of the article on it here. As you’ll be able to see from the other pictures of lunch, we live well down here. I’m going to miss working here.

One more thing, regarding yesterday’s mention of Victoria Ruvolo, my brother made an interesting and commentary on the editorial written about her. Go look, if you feel like it.