“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
- Buddha
Because I had a business meeting on Saturday, January 15th, Lone and I took advantage of the opportunity and spent Friday night in São Paulo -after delivering Fazenda Alfheim's beyond organic piglets to our restaurant customers. We dined at Lorena, 1989, with its head chef, Léo Botto. Delicious food and genial company. Lorena, 1989 will join the ranks of Fazenda Alfheim's customers in Q2, when we raise our piglet production to the next quantitative level. In the meantime, Léo graciously agreed to have his restaurant serve as a distribution center for our raw, organic honey. Therefore, all of you who are interested in purchasing 1, 2, 3 or more jars can do so by depositing money in our bank account and then retrieve them up at the restaurant, which I can also highly recommend as one of the premier dining spots in São Paulo. Well worth a visit.
In the meantime, for those of you looking to enjoy Fazenda Alfheim's Porchetta "Orgânica", I encourage you to visit Felice & Maria, Massimo Ferrari's enchanting rotisseria, which offers cozinha italiana casalinga, in Vila Olímpia.
When Lone and I returned to Fazenda Alfheim, we were met with a wet surprise: the stone bridge on our property was overrun with water, so much so that we decided to park our Mitsubishi L200 Triton HPE 3.2 Diesel and walk the final kilometer in the pouring rain to the main house, where Esben and his girlfriend, Camila, were looking after the fazenda. Esben, Camila and I returned a couple of hours later when the water had subsided and drove the pickup to the main house.
On Sunday, the bridge in front of the fazenda collapsed again, less than a week after it had been repaired, so on Monday we had no choice but to leave Alfheim via Bairro Alto and Posso Alto to Rodovia dos Tamoios to drop Camila and I off at the bus terminal in Taubaté. We ended up getting stuck at one point where part of the hillside had collapsed, depositing a mammoth amount of mud in the middle of what was already a poorly-maintained road. I was unable to rock the Mitsubishi loose, so I had no choice but to grab my belt from my travel bag, strap it on to keep my bermudas from falling down, and start running back to Alfheim to get help. Seven kilometers later…I arrived. Esben met me in front of the house, and I explained the situation. In his unflappable manner, he asked me to hump a 50 kg sack of corn up to the Mato Grosso do Sul piglets while he finished a couple of tasks. We asked João to join us, and he gathered the requisite hoes and shovels and started marching (he informed us that the brakes on his motorcycle did not work) to the pickup at a pace that would have run a British Special Forces lifer ragged. So while Esben drove the tractor, I tried to keep up with João while he tore through the kilometers like a Mini-Me version of John Henry.
Once we arrived, we quickly unstuck the Mitsubishi with the help of our fantastic Lego tractor (a genuine Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer moment for the little tractor that could) and continued on our way, though the road was treacherous: it took us three and one-half hours to reach Paraibuna, normally a one and one-half hour journey.
On the way we met the Mayor of Natividade da Serra, so we stopped and gave him a status report. It seems our joint meeting with the Promotoria de Justiça de Paraibuna a couple of weeks back had a real impact because the bridge was repaired that same day.
When we arrived in Taubaté, Lone dropped us off at the bus terminal, where she picked up Amanda Moropoulos (more action shots to follow shortly), the first of our four Q1/Q2 volunteers. Fortunately, we were able to text Amanda and let her know that we would be arriving late…very late in point of fact. Under the banner of all is well that ends well, I suppose we would have to say that the day was a success. An adventure...but also a success.
Finally, I would be remiss if I wrapped up without informing all of my readers that none other than that bastion of scientific rigor CNNGo has proven that Brazilians are the world's coolest nationality. So while Denmark might rank as one of the two happiest places on earth, the Danes themselves do not impress as hipsters…sorry Lone.
3 comments:
First. lol Sweet blog dad sounds like a lot of adventures :). I hope things dont get that wet again for a while hehe.
hugs and love
wow, was wondering how you were doing with all that rain we had. We had some fun too. I have joked in the past that the only thing we were missing here was waves for surfing and a nice waterfall. High season has brought big waves from passing lanchas and the rain brought a waterfall by the side of our house! Be careful what you wish for haha! We've been doing some work at the back to divert the water away, now we haven't had any rain for a week (not complaining even though would like to see how the drains work now) and hot hot hot weather. love from us, Simon, Fabi and Ana Luiza
Not only do the Danes not seem to impress as hipsters, they also fail to impress as cribbage players. hahahahahahahahh :)
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