Feijoada!

At the end of the day, Megan and I caught up with some of the other professors/graduate students from KU to have dinner. Given that it was Saturday, what better day to try feijoada! We ended up walking toward the upscale neighborhood, Leblon, and decided to give the restaurant Galeto do Leblon a whirl.

Feijoada is a very traditional dish in Brazil that constitutes an entire meal. A properly prepared feijoada includes black beans slowly cooked with a variety of meats, in our case dried tongue and pork offcuts, and seasoned with garlic, salt, onion, and oil. The stew is then served with white rice, finey shredded kale, fried farofa (manioc flour), and orange slices.

Feijoada finds its roots in Portuguese cooking, which is renowned for incorporating a wide variety of meats and vegetables; fried farofa (inherited from the indigenous) as well as kale are both favorite among the Portuguese. The African influence in the feijoada comes into play with the spices and the tradition of using pork offcuts, which was the only part of the pig that was given to the slaves.

Pontífica Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro

The Pontífica Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro hosted the LASA conference this year. After I gave my talk, I spent the rest of the day attending panels at the conference.

LASA Presentation 2009

All in all, my presentation went really well; it was entitled "Conjuros y ebriedades: (Re)negotiating Nuptial Tradition and Sexual Politics in Chiapas." Since it was so early in the morning, we didn't have that many people in the audience, which made it a nice environment to have an informal dialogue between the panelists and the audience. This is a picture of the other presenters and I after our panel.

Pre-LASA Presentation

I was a little paranoid about making sure that I was not late to my LASA presentation at an oh-so-early hour of 9 o'clock in the morning on Saturday, June 13th, 2009.

I arrived at the Pontífica Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUCI), the University where the conference took place, bright and early with plenty of time to check out the room before I had to give my talk.

Churrasqueria

We spent the majority of our second day in Rio at the conference attending panels and watching documentaries in the annual film festival sponsored by LASA.

Needless to say, by the end of the day, we were more than ready to splurge on dinner at a Churrasqueria. We each had a caipirinha and as much steak as we could hold, not to mention the pão de queijo, bananas, stuffed scallop shells, avocado pudding....

Garota de Ipanema

Originally, a small, open-sided bar called Bar Veloso, its name and anonymity vanished once two regulars, Tom Jobim and Vinícius Moraes, wrote the famous song here that changed history - "Garota de Ipanema" ("Girl from Ipanema"). Here is a video of the song that I found on youtube for your listening pleasure: Garota de Ipanema.

Our first night in town, we met Paul Sneed, my Portuguese professor at KU, for dinner at Garota de Ipanema. The pictures of the restaurant at the bottom were taken by Megan a few days later during a tour of downtown.

View from Hotel Augustos

We stayed in the Hotel Augusto's in Copacabana while we were in Rio de Janeiro, and this was the view from our hotel at the end of our first day. If you look carefully in the first picture, you can see a glimmer of the ocean. I suppose describing our room as "ocean-front" is a bit of a stretch....

Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro

After getting our fill of Copacabana, we ventured on to Ipanema for a paseo on the boardwalk.

Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro

A friend of mine from Kansas, Clarice, who is from Recife, Brazil was also spending the week in Rio de Janeiro for the LASA conference. As soon as we got checked into our hotel the first day, we met her before spending the day at the beach. Since we were staying in Copacabana, we started our beach excursion there.

Ultimately, we plopped at a beach-side café to indulge in a bolinho de camarão (shrimp fried goody), batatas fritas (fries), and an agua de coco (coconut water). I have to admit that my personal favorite was the agua de coco!!!

Rio de Janeiro June 2009

On June 9th, a friend of mine from school, Megan, and I got up bright and early to head to the Kansas City International Airport and fly from there to Atlanta, where we caught our connection to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Because the flight takes some 8 1/2 hours to Brazil, we didn't technically arrive to Brazil until June 10th.