Shops and the importance of mothers...

I have now been here in Brazil just over two months and I have managed to get most things organised. I have mentioned before that most things take a very long time and that everything is extremely slow, and it really is! For example, it takes ages for cashiers to scan your groceries. That is, if the scanner works at all!
Talking about shops, they are crazy about splitting up payments here. Often, you can choose between paying the full amount immediately or dividing it over a few months. Most of the time it's a bit more expensive to spread out the cost, but most people do that anyway! It's also really annoying to check prices, look at the picture below. You would expect the numbers with the largest font size to display the full price, but of course they don't...

I found something funny in the shop as well, a siamese twin (or conjoined twin) banana. The peaches were also really tasty.

Another interesting thing is that for almost everything you do, they need your mother's permission name. They require your mother's name when you book flights, open a bank account, register with the police, sign up for conferences and so on. It doesn't matter if she lives half way around the world or even whether she is alive or not! An 80 year old professor was here for a conference, and she was required to submit her mother's name to be able to sign up for the conference!

Exploring the countryside

Last week, everything was set up for a great weekend. The plan was to go to a place about an hour outside of the city. This place is basically located in the middle of nowhere, well, there were only a few neighbours within several square km, but the nature is wonderful. We had also bought a lot of meat for barbecues and some other necessities for a barbecue, as you can see below. Brazilian barbecues are really good. There is never too much meat on the barbecue, but there is always something there, for hours and hours. The meat is really tasty and it keeps coming forever.

Unfortunately, the weather was not great. It was raining the whole weekend (which is NOT supposed to happen in Brazil)! Of course we still went on the trip, and it was great!
This was the view from where we were staying.

We followed some trails into the forest and found many nice things. A large home for termites:

A tree marking the entrance to the home of a physicist:

And several beautiful waterfalls and natural pools:

Pets

In Edinburgh a lot of people (I'd say too many) have mice running around in their walls and sometimes coming in for a visit. Here in Belo Horizonte there are a lot small lizards running around on the streets or in parks, but never indoors as far as I know. They are typically about one foot long, but I have seen much bigger. I get a lot of visits from a different kind of animal, see below.

The ants are incredibly organised, look at how perfectly aligned they are. There are about 40 of them feasting in this picture and all of them are aligned straight out from the poison food I had put out for them. They are far more organised than the people living here. A lot of Germans moved to Brazil in the 19th century and I have been told that they have significantly influenced some parts of Brazil. I just never realised that they were talking about ants.

Cachaçaria

I went to a really nice cachaçaria yesterday. A cachaçaria is basically a restaurant/pub where they have a lot of different kinds of cachaça. Cachaça is the typical strong drink of Brazil and is for example used to make caipirinha. This place also had a projector showing a football match from the Brazilian league. They had 707 different kinds of cachaça! Many of these were put in a bookshelf next to the tables. The bookshelf was so big that they had a latter ladder in order to be able to climb up and get all the cachaças. Having all these along one of the walls definitely enhanced the atmosphere of the place. We only tried a fraction of the cachaças, but they were all good.

Via Cristina website

Holiday!

Sweden beat the Netherlands in football yesterday and thereby qualified for the European Championship! In order to celebrate this, today was a holiday in Brazil. Well, some people claim there was some other reason for the holiday...

We celebrated this by going to a really good Chinese restaurant. It was really tasty and only cost approximately £20 for a two course meal for two. I also went to a supermarket where they had a lot of international things. They had a lot of different kinds of beers. This was quite nice, since in most shops they only have Brazilian food and drinks. I ended up buying some food from all over the world and three different kinds of beer; one American that looked funny, one that supposedly is as in the medieval times (or at least is called medieval), and a Kölsch (it is brewed in Brazil so it is a fake Kölsch, but we'll see if it is comparable to Kölsch from from Cologne). It is also a little bit funny that they have a brewery called Eisenbahn when they almost don't have any railroads in Brazil (eisenbahn means railroad in German).

Water

I went to a swimming pool this weekend. It was quite warm, so it was really nice to cool down a bit. However, already after a few minutes one of the guys working there came and told me to get out of the pool. I was thrown out because my swimming shorts were not revealing enough! Apparently it was compulsory to have swimming shorts that were tight and not bigger than normal boxer shorts...

I was also walking around a lake. It is always so nice with some water, see the pictures below. The stupid thing is that they don't take care of the lake at all, so there is a lot of garbage everywhere and it's not really a place where you want to go swimming. It still looks nice though.

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are being announced this week, which I hope that most of you already know. The most important one was announced today; the one in physics. The winners Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess won "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae". You can read more about it here.

Stadiums

The stadium in the picture below is called Mineirão. It is one of the biggest stadiums in Brazil with a capacity of more 70 000 people. It is currently being renovated for the world cup, but there is still a lot of work to be done... The worst thing about that is that the teams who normally play in this arena now are forced to play their matches in different stadiums. These can be located about 100 km away, or more! Therefore, I have unfortunately not been able to watch any matches yet.

There is another smaller stadium located just next to Mineirão, called Mineirinho. This one is an indoor stadium mainly used for basketball or volleyball. Mineirinho is on the left and Mineirão is on the right in the picture below.

The picture below is taken from my flat. I think I know what team at least one of my neighbours support. Cruzeiro is the biggest team here in Belo Horizonte, Altetico the second and America the smallest of the teams in the top league. Cruzeiro finished second last year, but are currently the last team to not be relegated next season. Both Atletico and America are about to be relegated. The Brazilian football season starts in the spring so it's only 12 matches left to go of the season. It would be pretty bad to have all three teams from the city relegated in the same year.

Zoo

Yesterday I went to the zoo. It is quite nice and they have quite a lot of different animals. The problem is that it is so warm that a lot of the animals are hiding from the sun in places where you can't see them. If you can see them, most of them are sleeping. Monkeys are the exception, they are never boring but jump around all the time. It was cool that there were a lot of different kinds of parrots. They had parrots which were red, green, blue, yellow and combination of these colours. I also really liked the Toco Toucan, the black birds with yellow beaks in the pictures below. The anteater was another highlight. Below are some pictures from the zoo.

There is a lake on the way to the zoo where we also saw some exotic animals, e.g. a turtle and a capybara. The capybara is supposedly the largest living rodent in the world.