You'd think it were Christmas

Traffic yesterday in São Paulo was a nightmare. At midday, it took me close to an hour to get from the Consulate to a meeting in the historical centre, a ride which should only take 30 minutes without traffic. At the end of the day, the traffic was so bad, I remarked to a colleague that it was probably a good thing that we had made dinner plans near the office. Otherwise, his trip back to Jardims [five to six kilometres away] would easily have taken an hour and a half to two hours!

When I mentioned the state of the traffic to a local colleague, she said that it was all because of Mothers' Day and that people were either out shopping; going out for dinner; or taking their mothers out of town for the weekend! Indeed, when I got home, I noticed an annoucement on the local website that because of Mothers' Day, some malls in São Paulo and Rio would be open until 1am on Saturday night! Now, the malls in Canada do stay open later than usual during the Christmas season, but as far as I can tell, we normally manage to get our Mothers' Day purchases done in time!

As for dinner, my in-from-Canada colleague and I went to a local Churrascaria and ate a lot of amazing cuts of beef. This time we were quite smart about it, ordering copious amounts of the amazing cuts (picanha and fraldinha) and lesser amounts of the really-excellent-but-not-quite-amazing cuts. Needless to say, we made very good friends with the waiter who had the picanha on his skewer. He was very pleased to come around every few minutes to practice his few words of beef-related English. Rumpsteak rare. Rumpsteak rare. Rumpsteak rare.. He even proposed that if my colleague wanted to open a Churrascaria in Canada that he would be pleased to move there and work for him! In all, a good evening. Plus, the traffic was totally gone once we were done and I got home in record time.