Bell-or-ee-zone-ch

6/21/14

Sadly, it was time to say goodbye to Fe and Filipe. They have to return to work and their adorable children for the next two weeks, but we will miss traveling with them. [Nick: What is work? Can’t remember it.] Fortunately, we’ll meet up again in Salvador for quarter finals. They left early in the morning and our flight didn’t leave until a few hours later in the afternoon, so we spent the morning in our hotel room watching “The Daily Show” on our computer. Thank goodness for the internet! It felt so fabulously indulgent to be lazy and watch U.S. tv after the last 10 days of non-stop travel.

We headed to the airport early so we could catch the 1^st half of the Argentina v. Iran game. Sadly, we missed the last half of the game to catch what ended up being a horrid flight on Gol airlines (I kid you not, Brazil has an airline named “goal”). Our seats were unfortunately amidst a family of at least 15 people that included no less than 6 kids (there may have been more that I couldn’t see) between the age of newborn and 6 years. The family was spread across several rows and we were smack dab in the middle of them. So they had no qualms about reaching, leaning, and shouting across my seat into the next row, passing food and children back and forth, and allowing their mobile kids to run up and down the aisles, littering the plane. Awesome. [Nick: I concur; the family was totally unthoughtful of others. Particularly, the teenagers whom the parents did not parent at all but rather seemed like self-involved teenagers themselves.] I couldn’t have been happier to walk off that flight. To my sheer delight, as we were exiting the airport, there was a GIANT crowd of people sitting on the floor and standing around a single tv, watching the Germany v. Ghana match. Priceless! We stopped a guy and asked him how the Argentina game ended, though we should have been able to divine the answer from the roaring crowd of Argentinian fans that were chanting and dancing around, making their jubilant way through the airport. [Nick: Messi was their savior in the 92^nd minute.]

Airport crowd watching Germany v. Ghana

“Bell-or-e-zone-ch” is how Brazilians pronounce the City of Belo Horizonte – the first big cosmopolitan city (third largest in Brazil) we’ve visited so far. [Nick: Though later our guidebook also said Salvador was the third largest city in Brasil, so maybe everyone knows São Paulo and Rio are the largest and then everyone else claims 3^rd.] It was nice to be back in a large city, not to take anything away from the charming beach towns we’ve been in up to now , but we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we arrived. [Nick: “Charming towns” are not the right description for Fortaleza or Recife, they are HUGE cities of over a million people filled with skyscrapers that happen to have a beach in front. Much bigger, more developed, and denser than Waikiki or Cancun. The skyscraper is very popular here in Brazil.] Our hotel (unbeknownst to us, another “Official FIFA” locale) was situated in the neighborhood of Savassi, south of downtown, which just so happened to be designated as a pedestrian-only zone during La Copa. It was blocked off to accommodate a nightly block party of DJ’s, street vendors, and sidewalk bars in front of the local restaurants showing the games.

The term “block party” feels like an understatement. Our cab pulled up to a roadblock where each intersection in a 3 block radius was literally packed shoulder to shoulder with human beings, drinking, eating, making out, urinating, and generally celebrating Argentina’s win in all ways, shapes, and forms. It would have been great to join in the merriment if we weren’t wheeling around our luggage and unsuccessfully trying to find the doorway to our hotel amid the sea of immovable bodies. After a four block detour, we finally found our hotel and gratefully slumped in front of the tv to catch up on the games we missed.

Vegging Out

We splurged and ordered room service, which sadly turned out to be a pizza made with all manner of canned goods, and settled in for a very sleepless night with the block party raging on until 3am (I couldn’t believe how well sound traveled 15 flights up!).  Normally, I would be thoroughly annoyed by this but how can one do anything but laugh at such a genuinely heartfelt celebration by Brazilians and Argentinians (huge rivals) coming together over a soccer match :o) [Nick: The pizza was not actually from our hotel but rather a pizzeria in the city that I saw one magazine rate as the best in town, which is basically just advertising. I don’t know if it is that fresh ingredients are impossible to get or Brazilians actually prefer the taste of canned vegetables. The Brazilian pizza places we go to in L.A. use fresh ingredients. I realized U.S. (and Costa Rican) pizza tastes were different than Brazilian when we went out for pizza with Fe and Filipe on one of our first nights. We ordered several pizzas, most of which were heavy with a white catupiry cream cheese and another that just had some light cheese and arugula. Cat and I found the lighter arugula delicious but I think Fe & Filipe thought it tasted too much like a salad. We liked the catupiry cheese, but it was too heavy for us to eat more than a slice or two.]