Copper anniversary, toucans, back to Cocha

Brazilian food is really good! Brazilians eat rice and beans, and lots of cold salads (beets, cabbage, carrots, okra, green beans, lettuce, etc.), manioc, and delicious cheese bread, pineapple and tropical fruits. Meals are not as heavy on meat as they are in Bolivia. Meals are huge, and there are lots of all you can eat restaurants. I prefer the pay by the kilo restaurants, buffet style, and we select whatever we want. At the end of the line they weigh our plates and we pay only for what we took.

We had a wonderful visit with UWC-friends Christian (Denmark) and Camila (Brazil) and their darling daughter Leonora. We spent several days with them at their home in Brasilia, where we ate delicious food and Christian showed us around this interesting city.

Brasilia is a carefully planned city, in the shape of an airplane, and most of its residents work for the government. Did I mention the good food? Christian and Camila were wonderful hosts, and we had lots of fun playing with little Leonora. We also took advantage of the fact that Brazilians tend to be larger than Bolivians, and we are not giants here. So we bought a few items of clothing.

Christian and Camila are celebrating their 12 1/2 year wedding anniversary, known as the copper anniversary, half of 25. The copper anniversary is an important affair in Denmark, which I think is a nice custom because 25 years is an awfully long time to wait in order to celebrate a relationship.

In honor of their copper anniversary, Christian and Camila invited their family and friends to a four-day celebration at a beautiful resort in Pirenopoulis, a beautiful colonial silver mining town near the capital. We had a room with a hammock overlooking the pool and the beautiful valley, and we enjoyed meeting Christian´s family from Denmark, Camila´s family from Rio de Janiero and their many friends.

One evening we had Lebanese food and entertainment by belly dancers with assistance from Leonora and her cousin. (There are lots of Lebanese immigrants in Brazil). We enjoyed afternoon caipirinhas, a delicious Brazilian drink made of limes, sugar and cashaça, a liquor made from sugar cane, lazing in the hammock and swimming in a large pool beneath a waterfall. We also enjoyed watching the wild guinea fowl, introduced to the Americas from Africa during the slave trade, and the coati that live at the resort. I think that the way that Christian and Camila celebrated their anniversary was beautiful, and we were very happy to be a part of it.

We took a flight back to Bolivia and spent a couple of days in Santa Cruz before heading back to Cochabamba. Santa Cruz is in Bolivia´s lowlands, more similar to Brazil in climate than to Bolivia´s altiplano. To round out our Brazilian safari experience, we visited the Santa Cruz zoo, where we learned that the two species of macaw we saw are among many other brilliantly colored species. Nearly all of these beautiful birds are threatened because of loss of habitat, and because they are captured for the trade in exotic pets.

Speaking of exotic pets, our hotel has a patio full of hammocks, plants and two toucans! They have huge orange, black and yellow beaks with a surreal fiery design that reminds me of a 1970s sports car painted with flames. The beak feels like a very light plastic and makes a plasticky sound when the toucan taps trees or the ground. And the toucans have really interesting eyes - a pupil like a green marble surrounded by a royal blue "white." The eye is surrounded by a bright orange material that looks like fun foam or something synthetic.

The toucan feathers are mostly black, with a white patch on the neck which looks soft like velvet and a red patch under the tail. These birds´ wings are clipped, sadly. The feet are blue, and the toucan has a long thin toung inside its beak, which occasionally flits out when she drinks water. (I don´t know her gender, but I´ll call her a she to make up for society´s general default of "he"). The tongue is thin and transparent, like a piece of plastic.

The inside edge of the beak is semi-serrated, not smooth as I would have expected, and the toucan loves to clean her beak in the water, scrubbing it with her feet. One of these two toucans is playful and likes to bite my fingers and toes! It doesn´t really hurt unless she gets me just right, and even then it doesn´t break the skin.

I wonder about the purpose of the toucan´s huge beak. It seems great for preening, but not so great for eating. It´s kind of clumsy. This toucan keeps dropping small pieces of melon that I feed to it. It can only manage to grab and then swallow the tiniest of pieces.

The toucan makes a clattering noise with its beak, almost like the sound of human teeth smacking together when we shiver, and sometimes it sneezes!

We took the bus home to Cochabamba, where our house mate Miranda poured us a glass of wine and made us dinner. It´s good to have friends!