I flew to Sao Paulo in April and took a couple of buses out to a podunk little town in Brazil by the name of Concecao dos Orous where my family has rented a house on a piece of land. My son and his kids are raising chickens, cows and horses and growing their own vegetables.
However, my granddaughter was living in a one-bedroom apartment in this little town that has a small population of only twenty thousand or so.
The streets are bricks and the hills are steep. It's picturesque but difficult for walking.
What can I tell you about Conceicao dos Orous? It's old. The showers don't work. At least the showers I came into contact with didn't work. The water never got hot and there was no water pressure so you sort of shivered and stood under trickling water, trying to get your whole self washed but struggled to actually enjoy it.
The restaurants were few and far between. Two of them served full-course meals with hot meat and vegetables but they were only open for lunch. There was no breakfast restaurant as we Canadians would know it. For breakfast, people ate croissants and drank coffee con leche. That's the usual for breakfast in Brazil and other South American countries it seems.
People eat a lot of croissants as well as a sort of pastry thing made from fermented plants or grains of some sort. It's a long piece of airy, light, bubbly stuff. I don't know exactly how to describe it. I haven't seen it anywhere else in my travels but it's abundant in this little town.
As you sit drinking your coffee and eating your sandwich in the coffee shop, you'll often hear a horse come trotting down the cobblestone road outside. It's a soothing sound. An ancient sound. These are the cabellaros of Brazil we've heard of.
Waterfall in the town.
The red red dirt of Brazil.
One of the neighbour's cows who decided to take a walk down the road in front of my house.
This floppy-eared cow hung out on the cliff just outside my house where I rented half a house for a couple of months. My house stood in front of this cliff that sometimes shed its red dirt right into my backyard.
It was not bad for half a house except that the tin roof made a racket whenever the local cats decided to walk on it, which happened frequently unfortunately. Thus the reason I wore ear plugs to bed at night.
