Fortaleza/Teresina & Vacation Food

So our last night in Fortaleza we hit up Aztec de Oro. It was really good Mexican food, so good that my son who has been spitting out almost everything lately (to be honest I feel like that lately too), ate up everything. The guacomole for R$10 came in a big plate, with a small plate of chips. So no slight dipping, you could scoop the goodness up.

The tacos are the fried crispy yellow corn tacos (American style), but were still good.  I do miss authentic Mexican tacos though.  We also got a Yucaton Taco, which was battered chicken served with onions and tons of purple cabbage, in a very delicious chewy flour tortilla.  You couldn’t eat it with your hands, it was more of a fork and knife dish.

We headed to Teresina on Saturday morning.  Teresina is in Piaui, one of, if not the poorest state in Brazil.  Our once 4 star hotel (Rio Poty) is rather pathetic, although the mini bar still charges 4 star prices… ironically.  I do have to say having 110V outlets however is nice, and the room comes with a blow dryer.  And I guess it’s kinda.

Anyway, I digress.  Because our son was exhausted we decided to grab a quick bite to eat. We made the mistake of a quick bite at Bebalu a burger place the other day…. I still throw up in my mouth thinking about it.  So we decided to try Subway. Subway is always fresh and yummy, and while I really hate the luncheon meat in Brazil, I thought we’d give it a shot. For the record, Subway in Brazil is definitely not the same.. except for the bread *yummmm* and the sauces.  Otherwise, the fresh veggies are very wilty and sad looking, the bell peppers are sliced very tiny, and are not very plentiful.  And the cheese, don’t get me started on the cheese.  You can see from the photo, it looks like the cheese you put in your 5 year olds lunch.

For dinner in Teresina we got together with some friends of my husbands.  Restaurants here are mostly outdoor it seemed, with large seating areas in front of the restaurants.. and these seemed to be nicer restaurants. We ate at Mallagueta, where you order meat dishes, and they come out churrascaria style.  Services was awful, like 3 hour dinner awful, but the food was delicious.  They served a bean dish, with bacon and farofa and green onions, that was sooo flavorful. And the Picanha was well perfectly grilled.

The next day we ate at Favorito, where they had cinnamon grilled pineapple… mmmm.

I also realized I need to buy a pair of the churrascaria tongs… my son was an “angel” relative to his normal self at the restaurant, simply because he had them.  He hate lots of meat with his dad. You can see they licked the plate clean.

Another interesting phenomenon here is the play areas.  All of the restaurants seem to have them, and they’re HUGE.  Usually the baba’s are there with the kids, so I think all the parents thought I was a baba.

The fact, that I love wearing my slippers (I really don’t care that the rich folks in Brazil don’t wear them everywhere, I’m from Hawaii and we wear slippers!), probably made everyone think I was a baba.

Even though we were right next to the indoor playroom, we also couldn’t just let the monkey go wild…as he figured out how to climb up the rock climbing walls all by himself. Overall Teresina is an interesting place. It’s city enough that I can see skyscrapers from our hotel, but country enough that horses were grazing a few blocks from us, and there are still several houses made from mud and sticks in the city.