After some more rest, some Brazilian medicine in form of a high octane Caipirinha made by Mauricio, followed by a highly camp movie about Liberace at the film festival (Michael Douglas is hilarious!) and a good night’s sleep…. I’m back in business, more or less.

Breakfast this time at another new favorite spot (I might have one every day): Gringo Café, just a few blocks away, with coffee, juice, scrambled eggs and hash browns, and on top the Rio times, a local monthly paper in English that runs some political stories and gives information about cultural events in English.

The place is run by a true Gringo from California, who has imported the West Coast’s breakfast habits to Rio. Ines von Behr should be here so we could eat ourselves through heaps of cheese cake!

I will sample their Bagels with cream cheese tomorrow. They do bake them there themselves….

After that: a stint to the local taylor, in order to get my jeans stitched up properly.

I don’t really have an idea what they will do, she was speaking Portuguese, I was speaking English, but the problem was pretty self-explaining and I hope I understood her right.

A patch inside, but the thread color will not be the same… We’ll see tomorrow. Maybe it’s a skirt by then.

Even though I manage to order a few things in Portuguese by now, trying to place all the vowels and ‘g’ an ‘j’ and ‘sh’ sounds in the correct order… I’m still lost in translation. It’s a pity because I can manage to read 80-90% of it, deducting it from Spanish and French.

But oral comprehension falls to zero pretty fast… That really limits the interaction with people, its practically impossible to have a nice chat over the counter, but they’re all nice and willing to accept my linguistic handicap.

On with the day then, off for a long walk around the lagoon!