Churrasco a.k.a.: Pessoas! Meet Meat!!!

I rarely eat meat, other than chicken and fish.  In fact, before last summer's visit here, I hadn't eaten beef for at last five years.  But today, I ate so much meat that at one point, I thought I was drugged.  I felt like I was about to go under anesthesia.  I felt that if I stood up, I'd fall over, so I stayed seated.  This only made things worse, because if you're sitting in a chair at a Brazilian bbq (churrraso), someone is gonna bring you a big hunk of delicious meat (sorry to all of my vegetarian friends, but I must speak the truth here). 

This afternoon, I had lunch with my friends Bahia and Patricia and two of their adorable kids.  We went to a churrasaria called Villa Brasas.  I hadn't even had my morning cafe before the long skewers of all kinds of meat began appearing in front of me. I tried a little of almost everything including chicken hearts which were pretty tasty in small doses.  Oh and I had salad too.  I was pleasantly full when we left, and very happy to finally have been able to see them.  Bahia drove over to the area nearby where Edinho teaches classes to about 100 kids at a time, we made plans to hang out again soon, and he dropped me off to meet Jad, who was taking me to his friend's birthday party/world cup party.  And it was another churrasco.  At a rich person's house.  Oh my.

 Within the next two hours, I was totally high on meat. Here's how this bbq went:  Appetizers were small plates of bbq-ed beef, chicked and bread (yes, I wrote bbq-ed bread, and it was delicious.)  Then someone brought out rice, farofa, and salad, and we filled our plates with that and, you guessed it, more meat.  Then more small plates of meat were placed on the table.  Then more.  Then a big plate of fruit came out. Then....yes....one more round of meat. I admit I ended my carnivorous evening much sooner than the rest; I gave up before the 2nd round of small plates.  But by then, my high was on the verge of turning into an "I need to go lay down on that very expensive couch over there" kind of feeling.

Thank goodness for the special "curing pills" my sister the amazing acupunturist gave to me before I came here.  Last year, I learned to carry them with me at all times.  I don't know how they work, but they get rid of the meaty overload feeling pretty quickly.  

Needless to say, I'll be taking a break from the carne for a few days.