Brazil: the land of football and food

During the first week after my arrival to Sao Paulo, I was given the most appropriate answer from Eduardo, trainer and social worker of Gol De Letra Foundation, to describe the essence of Brazil:

“You will see, Brazil is all about football and food!”

Maybe he exaggerated a bit, but I can already bring up a set of examples to prove his statement.

When my girlfriend, Szimi, arrived to Guarulhos International Airport, we took an uber ride back to the city. For curiosity I started a conversation with the driver, and just by mentioning the name of Palmeiras football club, he took us to the other side of this enormous city (without us acknowledging the change in travel plans) to take a look at the newly built Allianz Parque, home of Palmeiras FC. Needless to say, he was a Palmeiras fan and a self-made tourist guide without any knowledge of English.

In contrary to others, Brazilians don’t just talk about football, but they practice it. During this short time, we have seen as many football games as homeless people randomly sleeping on the sidewalks. The game is played basicly everywhere:

Football in the city park

Football on the beach

Football on the street

Football on the walls

Food is another essential part of Brazilian everydays and we already had the opportunity to taste various local specialities, like the one and only feijoada. Taking advantage of the generosity of our hosting organisation, we were invited to the 16^th best restaurant in Latin America, called Mocotó. At one point we lost in the huge variety of the North-East Brazilian dishes and exotic coctails.

Last weekend we visited Santos, a city lying on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, about 50 kms South-East to Sao Paulo. Accidently we run in to the yearly coffee festival which made us possible to freely enter the famous Coffee Museum and consume as much caffeine as we have never done before. Santos played an important role in making Brazil one of the major coffee exporters of the world as a significant portion of Brazilian coffee production was shipped overseas from the city’s port. Maybe the only mentionable attraction of the run-down city enter is a tourist tram, called streetcar by locals, offering a 30 minutes ride around the colonial buildings of the old-times Santos.

Just like Brazil, Santos is also characterized by huge social-economic differences. Taking a bus from the run-down city centre in the direction of the always busy Southern cost reminded me of a quick time travel from the colonial times to the modern Brazil. Undoubtedly, Brazil has experienced a robust development in the last decades which made it one of the biggest economic powers of the world. 

And what do I do on weekdays?

I follow the activities of Gol De Letra Foundation, a Brazilian NGO funded by two outstanding football players, Rai and Leonardo. Gol de Letra uses the magical power of sport to educate young people from marginalized, disadvantaged communities, such as Vila Albertina in the North part of Sao Paulo. Unfortunately, I arrived just before a three-weeks long school holiday (called winter break) during which the foundation runs limited activities. Still, I managed to take part in some outdoor programs organised by young people (called monitores) to young people:

As a great honour, I was also assigned to teach English for some Brazilian youngsters at the office. As you can see below, I not always succeed.