Outside of the wedding, the primary activity in Porto Alegre was eating and drinking. We had several meat-filled dinners at churrascarias. This was initially a source of confusion for us, since we had always heard these Brazilian grilled meat restaurants as rodizio. Through the magic of wikipedia I have now learned that churrascaria refers to a restaurant serving grilled meats, and rodizio is a style of service where you pay a fixed price and are served continually until you've had enough. In this case the servers come by almost constantly with grilled meat impaled on a sword, which they slice off for you.
We indulged. One thing we had not seen before was a dish which was a block of melted cheese, as seen here with Eddy. At first we were awed by this, but we quickly realized that it was the churrascaria equivalent of bread, meant to fill you up cheaply. We had to constantly disappoint the cheese guy by denying him the privilege of giving us his dish.There was also a slightly unpleasant matter at our first such dinner at Na Brasa, the churrascaria our hotel staff assured us was the best in Porto Alegre. The waiter in charge of drinks billed us for three more drinks than we thought we drank. I will allow the possibility that my recollection of having three drinks was incorrect (but not wrong by more than one), and he may have charged us for a drink we sent back, but there was no doubting that an error on his part was made. When I confronted the waitress who brought us the bill, he looked on, beside himself with offense at our question. He tsk-tsk'd at the waitress when she went to consult the manager, as though to even admit the possibility of fault was a grave attack on his integrity. We observed a three-way discussion between the drink man, the waitress and the manager, with the drink man clearly upset and gesticulating wildly. He stormed off, and the waitress returned to us with an amended bill.
We all felt a bit bad for what happened, and perhaps there was some cultural misunderstanding, but we certainly did not try to cheat anyone nor accuse anyone of trying to cheat us.
We went to a second churrascaria for the wedding rehearsal dinner. We were alarmed to learn that Na Brasa was one of the venues vetted; fortunately a different one was selected, and we were spared what surely would have been at best a tremendous embarrassment at seeing the drink waiter again, and at worst an ugly incident. In the event, we had a wonderful dinner, this time with unlimited sushi in addition to unlimited meat.
In what I now recognize as a serious planning error, I decided not to go to Rio de Janeiro with Eddy, Ben, and Karin. I felt (justifiably) that I'd been spending too much time not working on Kikini, so I was trying to keep the trip as close to a week long as I could.
I did at least have the foresight to book a side trip to Buenos Aires, which was tremendous fun, and will be covered by a separate entry.
