Where the Nuts Come From

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 140, 3 September 1927, Page 25

Where the Nuts Come From

(Continued from Page 24) this there is no charge. But, to leave this building you pass the roulette tables. You are not asked to play. A gentleman in an immaculate evening dress gives you a deep bow and . . . Well, you never pass. You usually pay heavily for your entertainment. The chief drink throughout Brazil is “cerveja,” a light or dark chemicallymade beer, similar to German lager. When sold on draught it is called “chop,” and it is a very common mistake of a Britisher, a stranger to the city and feeling hungry, to enter a restaurant and say, “Chop,” only to receive a glass of beer on a little plate. He does not pay for it, as you are expected to drink several chops and the little plates are counted up and paid for as you leave. He will drink the beer and wait patiently, believing his chop to be grilling. Becoming impatient, he calls the waiter and says again, “Chop,” when another glass of beer is put in front of him. It will then dawn upon him that “chop” is a drink and not something to eat. The food in Brazil is not anything to boast about, but it is better in Rio than elsewhere. You only get two full meals a day. Your coffee and roll, as in France, is brought to your bedroom in the morning, then the mid-day meal, “almoco,” any time from 10 to 12.30. This consists of a

dozen different dishes beginning with hors d’oeuvres, and ending with “sobremeza” (a substitute for pudding), consisting of fruit in season and a kind of solid jam made from guavas, bananas and a kind of peach, eaten with cheese. The next meal is served anywhere between five and eight o’clock, a five-course dinner. The cooks do not have an easy time of it, as catering is difficult. Owing to the heat nothing keeps for many hours, no matter what size ice-box you have, and the ants add to the general trouble. The chickens are brought to the door alive and they have a horrible way of selling them by tying about a dozen together by one leg on a pole, heads downwards, trading them in the burning sun. They often die before a customer is procured. They have little flavour and are stringy.

Everything that perishes is bought at daybreak. The cook does her own marketing, carrying a large basket on her head. She goes barefoot to the market, to fight the price of every article to her own figure. The Brazilian woman does little or nothing in her home. She spends her days when she is young dressing herself up and meeting her friends, doing fancy needlework and going to amusements, chiefly dancing: but when she marries she seldom dances, and, being married, she instantly takes a back seat, invariably developing from a slim, dainty and graceful fashion-plate into an elderly, out-of-figure, bad-complexioned matron who seldom leaves her home. families cling very much together and, I think, get a great deal of happiness this way. The daughter, when she marries, looks for a house next door to her mother, who will have her father and mother living with her,

and, most likely, her husband’s father and mother living next door. Then the son when he marries follows suit, so that when they go out it is often in parties of twelve and fifteen in one family. The Brazilian woman is sweet in character, intelligent, and faithful. She wants only her home, her husband, her children and her relations, and to see them well dressed. The Brazilian man is easy-going and lazy. He has no ambition to travel, but prefers to sit in the sun talking to his friends and doing nothing exceptional. He is exceedingly fond of dress and will wear several diamond rings and a diamond fob-chain and pin. He is out for show both in his home and appearance. He is a good husband on the whole, but the wife, like the Frenchwoman, accepts a good deal with her eyes closed to his affaires de coeur outside the house as long as he provides for her generously. Their idea of music is Carlos Gomez T-now dead one hundred years, but still their ideal. His greatest opera, “O Guarany,” is wonderfully. fascinating, but I do not think it has been staged in England yet. The people are poetical and romantic, and I have had to listen for two solid hours to a lecture on the glory of a woman’s eyes. You will ask me, “Can you get rich quickly in Brazil?” Well, it is one of the richest countries of the world in diamonds, gold and many other | minerals, but there is a South Ameri- | can Government to contend with, and if you are not prepared to forfeit threeparts of your gains to them you had : better stay where you are. There may be some, but for my part I have not yet heard of a millionaire Briton i who made his money in Brazil.