Sao Paolo fruit market

Have we mentioned that Henry likes bananas?

And grapes!

Back at Ana's folks' house, helping Ken squeeze limes for guacamole (now a favorite)...

...while Sedi prepares sashimi. (Ana's family usually eats Japanese food twice a week, on market days.)

Henry gamely tried some raw salmon off my chopsticks - I think he liked it. (We've never gone out for sushi with him in the US.) But he preferred the miso soup.

Paula Lima live at SESC Santana

Henry attended this concert. All of it! It was an amazing evening.

We nearly didn't take him, but then one of us would have had to stay home, and it was going to be too good to miss. So we figured, it starts at 9, he'll sleep, or in the worst case we'll make a dash for the exit. Ha! We had third-row seats. He listened with rapt attention, joined the audience in clapping along to the beat, applauded between numbers, didn't fall asleep till the encore number two hours later. Even then he was applauding in his sleep. I think he must have been having delicious dreams about the sweet-voiced lady in the golden dress.

MASP

After the morning in Liberdade, we gratefully left Henry sleeping at the apartment with my dad while Ana Paula took my mom, Ken, and me to the Sao Paolo art museum and a stroll downtown.

Here's the MASP building. (Pretty cool, huh? Even better inside.)

A huge spider in the big, shady park across the street from the museum (one of those parks where a couple is always making out on every bench). We had a "Henry would have loved this" moment, as happens every time we see a cool bug or a fire truck.

In the park.

Liberdade

Liberdade is the traditionally Japanese neighborhood of Sao Paolo, maybe bigger than Boston's Chinatown. We caught a street festival (flea market, parade) in honor of some kind of holiday, and also commemorating 100 years of Japanese Brazilians.

Henry eating pastel, a kind of deep-fried cross between an egg roll and an empanada, introduced by Japanese immigrants. (Have you noticed that a lot of our Brazil photos are about food?)

Trip to the beach

Ana's family friend, a curator and daughter of a famous Brazilian artist, let us use her beach house about 3 1/2 hours north of Sao Paolo. It had an ice-cold pool (remember, this is "winter") which didn't intimidate Henry at all (his fearlessness makes me nervous sometimes, but I love it)...

...and a nearby white-sand beach where Henry enjoyed jumping in the waves and building sand-castles with Ana, and seemed likely to learn to swim. (Cute swimsuit courtesy of my mom.)

Coming home from the beach.

Lounging around the house (can you believe Ken is seriously trying to read a book on Avicenna?)

Seafood stew.

Henry and the Guacamole

For a long time, avocados were the only food in the world that Henry would not eat. (Usually, kids love it.) Just before we left for Brazil, there was a breakthrough: Ken told him a story about how Henry the King of the Blueberries (our new name for him -- he can eat his weight in blueberries if allowed) helped the lonely avocado find its calling by introducing it to its new soul-mates, the lemon and the garlic, and naming the result Guacamole. Henry was thrilled about the story and promptly started eating the stuff.

Now there was a beautiful avocado tree, with ripe fruit, at the coffee plantation. We ate some avocado on the spot. We also modified the story of Henry and the Guacamole: in Brazil, avocados are eaten sweet, either with lemon and sugar or in milkshakes. We made up a story about a Brazilian avocado who wanted something different from life, something saltier and spicier, but he didn't quite know what it was, etc. etc. Whatever works!

More from Fazenda Tozan

The farm had lots of cool flora

(200-year-old elephant palm)
and fauna (in the center of the photo below is a capybara, a rodent so large and odd that the Jesuits allegedly classified it as a type of fish and allowed its meat to be eaten during Lent.)

Clowning around on a driving tour of the plantation:

Afterwards, a spectacular lunch. Japanese and Brazilian fusion food, everything garden-fresh.



If I understood correctly, the lady administering the bananas is a semi-well-known Japanese actress/director who came over to film a miniseries on Japanese migrant labor at the farm, then liked it so much she stayed on. Now she handles the Japanese-language tours and the cooking. She and Henry got along famously.

Visit to a coffee plantation

Day trip to the Fazenda Tozan, Brazil's only Japanese-owned coffee farm. (The others were confiscated during WWII and not returned.) It now belongs to Mitsubishi. Henry had a lot of fun playing with the coffee plants...

and observing the coffee harvesting and drying process. Here's a canal-based transportation system for the coffee beans after they are picked and washed.

It carries them out to a big field in the sun to dry.

When the farm switched from sugar to coffee, Japanese migrant workers were brought in. They crossed the ocean in boats like this; many did not survive. (Sorry for the grim photo. Ana's mom, Toshimi, came over from Japan on a boat when she was 6 months old.)

That's how Japanese immigration to Brazil began, in 1908. (Lots of centennial festivities this year.) Nowadays the coffee workers are Brazilians, from the Bahia region. They earn about $3000 for the three-month harvest season. All the production is shipped directly to Japan.

Henry enjoyed the tour and was his sweet no-nap-required public-display self.

Kopenhagen chocolate shop, Sao Paolo

Aaron and Ana's favorite place to go for a cup of hot chocolate. (Henry got a cup of steamed milk instead, but ended up eating all the cookies.)

Big developmental steps

Henry is 25 months old. Did you know that he can climb steps?

In Brazil he also learned a few words of Portugese (nothing fancy -- bom dia, obrigado, bom noite, chau-chau, and our favorite: melancia por favor!) He also spontaneously learned to pee in the toilet, a practice he seems to be pursuing (fingers crossed!) with the potty upon arrival. Hurray, Henry!

He can sit at a table with adults (only losing patience if the meal goes on a veeeery long time) and often tries to chime in on the subject of the conversation. ("Actually, there are no mosquitoes in the park. There are bees in the park.")

The trip was clearly good for him in a developmental sense. But you can also see how it was sort of overwhelming. On the plane ride home (10 hours) he began to stammer: "Why why why did you say that, Mommy?" We think it's a temporary neurological hiccup as his little mind tries to process all the new impressions.

More from Villa-Lobos Park

A walk in Villa-Lobos Park

Lots to do in the Parque Villa-Lobos, named after the famous Brazilian composer. (I tried learning one of his pieces for classical guitar many years ago -- beautiful, fiendishly difficult, full of all these totally unexpected half-dissonant jazzy chords I had never seen before.)

They have a mist machine for cooling off after running and stuff -- Henry couldn't stop playing with it.

Several nice playgrounds at different points in the park.

All against the backdrop of the city skyline -- Sao Paolo is a city of about 21 million, nearly half again as big as New York.

"Winter" in Sao Paolo

Henry had a great time in Brazil. Everyone kept giving him treats (mango, watermelon juice, lollipops, toy cars, finger puppets...)

Ana's dad, Sedi, especially loved feeding Henry various fruits and juices. (They only call it winter. We still went swimming at the beach - and mangoes were in abundant supply.)

Ana's sister's in-laws hosted the pre-wedding barbecue. Delicious beef, Japanese shitake rice, etc. And to Henry's delight, a pet turtle! (Note his t-shirt in the photo below. It's the uniform of the Palmeiras soccer team, of which Aaron and Ana are enthusiastic fans. We went to a game, though without Henry, later in the week.)

The turtle (age 20+) turned up his nose at the tomato, but agreed to eat a banana. For days Henry went around saying: "The turtle ate a banana instead of a tomato!"