Once you pop...

We have observed the weirdest thing here and it's really alarming. People here don't seem to drink wine! It's r-e-a-l-l-y hard to imagine, I know! Can it really be possible?

We thought it was some kind of a wicked mistake when they weren't selling any wine at Universo Paralello. The closest to wine you could get there was this local cheap, sweet, remotely wine-kind-of-thing, Catuaba. I think it's more like campari gone bad or something similar. But thinking back, I guess they didn't sell it there because it doesn't really seem be a part of their habits. (yeah, I know...weird). In restaurants you seldom see wine on the menus and there are very bad selections in the stores.

Instead of wine they have more hard liquers that they make different kinds of drinks from. They also use lots of different fruits to make various kinds of caipirinhas and caipiroskas (or caipivodkas as they call them here) - caipifrutas. It's actually really cool the way they have stands on the streets with lots of fruits, ice and vodka bottles. It looks really inviting. And the drinks are really good too, I'll give them that. But no wine? Why stimpy, whyyyyyyy?

Here's a funny story: We were celebrating our last night in Itacare and decided to get crazy (hehe) and order a bottle of wine with our pizza. We asked the waiter for their wine list, but there was no list; they had Santa Helena. And it seemed somehow uncommon for them that anyone should ask for wine. We ordered a bottle of Santa Helena. A special guy was fetched from the kithcen to do the wine bottle opening. Wau, this was a big thing!

There was a lot of hazzle with the glasses and the napkins, like it was some great occasion with a huge ceremony for just a bottle of wine. The special wine opener guy started to open the bottle and the three of us were observing him. Soon we all agreed that "there was a guy who had never opened a wine bottle before". It took forever. The cork was almost out but he kept twisting the opener although the cork was almost broken. He didn't use the lever on the opener's side that you should use to get the cork out from the bottle, he just went on twisting it. We just stared and commented his unfamiliar actions to each other. He twisted and twisted. We stared and commented some more. All the time we grew more impatient. I'm telling you, it was really agonizing to watch it.

Soon we started to try to give him some points on how to get the bottle opened, but he didn't speak english and we didn't speak portuguese so it was of no use. So he continued twisting the opener and we continued to stare.

Finally Mickus couldn't take it anymore, so he grabbed a hold of the opener and pulled. PLOP! The bottle was opened! And we were like "there you go, that's how it should be done!"

A while later a guy who spoke english came to work. The guy who had tried to open the wine bottle asked the guy who knew english to translate something for him to us: "The reason I didn't want to open the wine bottle so fast was that some customers don't like the 'plop' sound, and I didn't want to get any customers angry".