Are you disappointed that your idyllic beach vacation might cut into your shopping time? I have the perfect solution for your woes: Florianopoils.
Florianopolis is an island in the southern Brazilian sate of Santa Catarina, it is populated with pleasant people and boasts some of the most beautiful, pristine beaches in the world. Last weekend I attended a wedding there and discovered that you can purchase ANYTHING while laying on the sand. Seriously! I don't do well on the sun so my time on the beach was restricted to perhaps 40 minutes, and in that time this is a sample of what walked past me. sandals anyone?
cool shades...
hats and bags...
this guy was selling fruit salad
high fashion... or better yet, high fashion and shades
Hats
Iced coconut ... and finally
the ultimate alcoholic fruit drink, made with fresh fruit on a cart at the beach and served on a hollowed out pineapple.
Chocolate starts as a yellowish fruit about twice the size of a papaya. The fruit grows pretty much anywhere on the tree, any spot on the trunk or branches is fair game, (if you are familiar with jabuticabas, same principle). The fruit is picked and the seeds are cleaned and dried for a week, the dried seeds smell and taste like chocolate. The seeds are ground and presto, you have raw chocolate, add a little milk and sugar and you are good to go. The fruit is sweet but doesn't taste anything like chocolate. The cacao tree likes to grow in extremely humid, hot and shady conditions. The farmers plant banana trees, which are fast growing, to provide shade for the young plants. A tree reaches full production maturity in just 5 years and can be harvested twice a year.
Twenty years ago Ilheus in the north of Brazil was among the top producers of cocoa in the world until a fungus decimated the entire production. The fungus is called Vassoura de Bruxa (witch's broom) and has no known cure, the cocoa producers have had to learn to live with this plague. Once it hit the region's production was reduced to a fraction of what it had been, and now twenty years later it is no longer a profitable industry and the city of Ilheus has fallen on hard times.
Tourism is picking up in Ilheus since cruise ships started docking there. There are 2 or 3 cruise ships each week and a small tourism industry is contributing to the local economy, some of the more savvy cocoa framers who are still around cater to the passing tourists. The cocoa farmer's hospitality was impeccable and his wife made us some cocoa fruit juice and showed us her house. She has a flair for decorating and the wooden sink outside the bathrooms was a site to see. The bottom was lined with river stones and sprinkled with jasmine flowers which released their aroma as the water poured over them.
It seems to me that a threat to the world's chocolate production is a rather serious thing. If this spreads to other cocoa producers the results would be catastrophic (at least to me…) In twenty years the only solution found was a hybrid plant that has stronger resistance to the fungus. Chocolate may soon become a luxury item for the very few.
There are things about Portuguese that bother me. First, it's chauvinistic, if you have a group of 10 thousand women and one man, the group is referred to in the masculine 'eles' rather than the feminine 'elas'. Second, it has a formality that is disguised as respect but is designed to increase the divide between the social classes. And it all pisses me off a little bit.
However, there is one word in Portuguese that has no English equivalent. - There are several really, and vice-versa, but let’s pretend there is only this one. - The word is SAUDADE. It expresses an emotion. The emotion itself is felt by all people regardless of the language they speak, but for some reason the Portuguese decided to give it a name while the English decided that it was better not to discuss one’s emotions. In English you would say that you miss someone or something, that you are homesick for a place or that you long to return somewhere. You might even say that you miss someone so much that it hurts. But then you also miss ice-cream when you are on a diet, and the bus when you’re late. Saudade is more than that. It's the empty feeling inside, the gaping hole in your soul caused by the absence of the object of love, it's the physical pain that makes you sob with grief in the absence of someone you love. It's what comes over you when you watch a plane take off, carrying someone you love away from you, or carrying you away from a place you never want to leave. It's so powerful that when you make plans to see the object of affection for which you feel saudade you don't say you are going to get over, or get rid of your saudade. You say that you are going to “kill” it; because the power it has over you almost gives it life. Needless to say, it is a word often used in poetry and lyrics. According to some songs, if you don't kill saudade, saudade will eventually kill you. My favorite lyricist described saudade as tidying the room of a son who has died. It's a very powerful word and emotion.
It's not a depressing word. You only get to feel saudade if you have loved in the same measure. It may be the price we all pay for giving our hearts and isn't it always better to have loved and lost…
