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Get ready. You're about to find out a bit about Brazil. Sure, it's Brazil in photographs, Brazil on paper. Colorful, brilliant, beautiful, well-presented, but Brazil on paper nevertheless. One that you can take home, leave on the shelf, on the desk at the office, in a place where it stands out. One you can 'visit' from time to time by leafing through this book, or show your family and friends. It might be simply Brazil on paper, but this is certainly an unforgettable souvenir of a unique country. Of course you can rest assured that all this wealth and beauty that you hold in your hands is just the briefest sample of what exists in reality. And however good it may be, it can only offer a mere taste of the exuberance and enormity of Brazil. Because the real Brazil, with thousands of different landscapes, a huge blend of colors, sounds, smells, and above all people, is so much more than this. There is simply no comparison. For a start, Brazil is very, very, big. The fifth largest country in the world in area, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Just have a look at a map. It's practically a continent. Do you have any idea how large 8,547,403 square kilometers is? It's almost inconceivable. It's so big that if you take line from end to end - from the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, to the capital of the state of Roraima, Boa Vista, in the extreme north, a commercial flight takes more than 9 hours! By way of comparison, it's worth remembering that a commercial flight from New York to Paris takes 8 hours, but with one small detail; you're flying between two continents. In Brazil you can fly for 9 hours and never leave the country. Think about it.

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General Aspects

Brazil is the biggest country in Latin America. It covers almost the half of Latin America Continent (47.3%) with an area of 8.5 millions of km². It is the fifth biggest country in the world coming first Russia, Canada, China and The United States. Except for a small amount of islands, Brazil is constituted by a whole and continuous territorial extension. On the world map you can observe that the shape of the east contour of Brazil is in conformity of the concave curve of west of Africa. The Equator Line crosses the North region of the country, next to Macapá; the Tropic of Capricorn crosses the South of the country, next to Sao Paulo.
Its extension on the east-west direction (4,319.4Km) is almost equivalent to its major distance on the north-south direction (4,394.7Km). Brazil has its frontier with ten countries: French Guiana, Suriname, Guiana, Venezuela and Colombia north frontier; Uruguay and Argentine, on south; Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, on west. The Ecuator and Chile are the only countries, of South American Continent, Brazil has no frontiers with. The Atlantic Ocean extends for all its east coast coming up with 7,367Km of coastal waters.

A Country Open to What Is New
Few places in the world have the grade of openness and for innovation like Brazil has. The motive of all of this is just the fact that we built a democratic racial system through the years. Nevertheless, there is still the occult type of prejudice demonstrated in a subtile way by a part of the elite group. Occult by the racial discrimination by some parts of the elite. However, it vigorates in a much mitigated way (if we compare to The United States of Europe for instance). There has been a culture that helped to build an effective political democracy in a country that had everything not to have it, as a matter of fact.

On the basis of the initial population was built a slave society, which has never left the tradition of a particular way of miscegenation through the years, since its discovery in 1500. This miscegenation generated children from White people with African American, African American with Indians, mulattos with White people, and White people with Indians. From this racial mixture, it happens to appear an identity so strong that managed to keep the integrity of the territory. The nation was built on the basis of settlements that many times seemed weird to the eyes of the Europeans – and at the same time to most of Brazilians too – but that worked well then and nowadays still works in its singular way.

The democracy in Brazil translates itself into the distribution of power and from mechanisms of political representation, since the XIX century. Since 1823 there are national elections in the country, with a progressive openness to the inclusion of voting population, uncommon fact for the patterns of the European democracy. The National Congress works with the regularity of a watch, since its first elections. Only on three occasions, in all Brazilian history, elected deputes didn’t complete their mandates. The Congress force is so huge that not even the military dictatorship, which was vigorating from 1964 to 1985, could dispense it. The dictators knew that Brazil is ungovernable without elected representatives

The power of National Legislative Authority exists because is anchored in a great social force. The society of slaves was able to transform themselves, absorbing an immense quantity of immigrants and, above all, mixing with them. The habit of considering attractive any possibility of marriage, independently of the ethnical origin, got to prevail on the tendency of closure, which was a characteristic of the major part of immigrant groups. The way Brazil absorbs people from outside country without losing its identity, Brazil absorbs companies. The first foreign company had established in Brazil in 1825 and works here since then. A foreign company never had any alteration of its regimen of property outside the strict terms of law.

These are only some consequences of the fundamentally democratic structure of the country. Brazil is one of the last provinces of the earth where nobody is a foreign, where it is possible to change a destiny without losing its identity. For this characteristic many people use to call it “country of the future”: since the Colony (1500-1822), going through the Empire (1822-1889) and during the Republic (1889 until nowadays), the openness to the exterior and to the different is part of the nature of each Brazilian. Maybe now Brazil could be seen like a seed to a cultural reality where the community pride is not above the possibility of accepting the newness.

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History

The Portugueses discovered Brazil during a crisis period and important changes on Europe. Between the XII and XIV centuries, the feudalism was being replaced by a new kind of social organization.
The One Year Old War, between France and England, and the Black Death, that was being spread throughout the continent, disorganized the feudal society. The hungry stimulates rural rebellions out of control of the nobility. On the urban center, the transformation process is accelerated. The commerce blooms, and causes the beginning of a new social class: the mercantile bourgeois. that financed the great navigations from the XV and XVI centuries, which resulted on the discover of America and Brazil, on the conquest and colonization of Africa and Asia.

In April, 1500, the Portuguese navigator, Pedro Álvares Cabral, arrived at the coast of the current Brazil and claimed formally all the region in the name of Portugal. Before arriving at firm earth, he claimed the region of Monte Pascoal. After, the territory was called Terra de Vera Cruz. One expedition conducted by Gaspar de Lemos, on which the Florentine navigator Américo Vespúcio participated, was sent to Terra de Vera Cruz (Land of the True Cross) by the Portuguese government in 1501. During the exploration, they baptized many capes and bays, including one bay denominated Rio de Janeiro. The name Terra de Vera Cruz was changed to Santa Cruz (Holly Cross), and finally Brazil in allusion to brazil wood, tree abundant on the region, which the expedition took in great quantities when returning to Portugal.
Nowadays, the commemoration of the Discovery Day of Brazil is on April 22nd.

Culture and religion of the Brazilian people

The Brazilian people come from a mixture of races. Portuguese explorers, natives and African slaves (most of them coming from Yoruba and Quimbundu that correspond to Nigeria, Benin and Angola nowadays) constituted the racial base. French and Dutch explorers also had been on the northeast of Brazil. On the XX century, a lot of German, Italian, Polish and Japanese immigrants added new elements to this mixture. Maybe Brazil is the main country with miscegenation.
Formation of population
The following races participate on the formation of population: white, coming from Europe; black, coming from Africa and Mongolian people, the Indian born on Brazil. The miscegenation is intense from the beginning of the colonization. The small number of white women among the Portuguese explorers makes them to be an acquaintance of Indian and black slaves, many times by brute force. This miscegenation originates other racial groups, like mulattos, originated from the miscegenation of white and black; cooper-colored or mameluco, originated from the miscegenation of white and Mongolian; cafuzo, originated from the miscegenation of black and Mongolian. People that arrived late on Brazil, although in many cases they have stayed in restricted communities, also miscegenated with other races.

Immigrants
The number of immigrants on Brazil always was greater than the number of emigrants. The immigration officially started when Dom João VI promulgated the law that permits the possession of lands to foreigners, in 1808, November. The purpose of this law is to facilitate the occupation on the South of Brazil, ensuring an attractive country to Castilians. They also are interested in "becoming people white"; on that time the majority were black. The presence of immigrants causes changes on the country’s life. They introduced new growing products and techniques, the notion of small property, the subsistence economy and the small domestic industries (textile, food, leather and ceramics).

Main currents – The people who immigrated to Brazil are German, Austrian, Hungarian, Slavic, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Syrian, Lebanese, and German Swish.

Religion
There’s no official religion on the country. Almost 88% of the Brazilian inhabitants are catholic. However, approximately twenty million Catholics also participate in some kind of ritual cult of African origin. There also are at least five million protestants, including an important number of Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalian and Jewishs.
Most of the Indian profess traditional religions.
The Church and the State are formal and completely separated.

Cuisine

This huge country has a rich regionalized cuisine, which is almost impossible generalizing it because of so great differences in just one territory. The food of one region seems exotic to the other region of the same country. Many times, the same native fruit known in one area are unknown in the other. For example, a city baby could have a kiwi juice every day of his life without even have tasted a tapioca mingau with açaí, or even getting to see a fruit called araça, or cumbucá or sapoti or even jenipapo.
Our pioneers of colonization hadn't found here a developed cuisine but the impact of the environment, and of the new ingredients were of great importance to them especially when they meet the native Indians, that's when they got to a cuisine vortex. The cassavas, the fruit, the pepper, the hunting and the fishing are getting mixed together with the olive oil, with the dry codfish, with the all kinds of soup, to the sweeties.

The Portuguese starts to bring the African slaves to Salvador, capital of Bahia, to the plantations of sugar cane. That's when we incorporate immediately the oil called dendé , the coconut, the dry shrimp and other ingredients, getting together to form the trio : Aborigine, Portuguese and African, later on characterizing our cuisine.

Each region has, of course, its own characteristics coming from the past and from the geography that determines its typical food for the festive time like in Bahia with its saints, June parties, Reis parties, fasts and everything else there. Typical food for its especial festivities or in the restaurants specialized into this typical food.

Each region has its festive food, but the feijoada , from Rio de Janeiro, is considered by many the most typical Brazilian dish and even a source of inspiration for the poems like “Feijoada a minha moda”, by Vinícius de Morais. It is often served to visitors that are enchanted because of the big casserole of black beans with a thick juice cooked together with much salty fresh and smoked meat. Most of the time, they serve the meat separately, in one different bowl from the black beans. There are other food to have together that could be a type of cabbage chopped very tiny with a bit of garlic and oil, manioc meal or farofa – a type of flour with butter - and slices of fresh oranges. Every one likes to arrange his/her own plate in a certain way, but no one leaves behind the famous caipirinha , the national drink, made of alcohol called cachaça, lemon and sugar.

Nevertheless, going across North to South Brazil there is what is a river, figuratively, a flow: the everyday food, the basic food for lunch time and dinner time that varies not much with slightly differences from one place to another.

Which, then, should be characterized a typical menu in a Brazilian medium class home?

Breakfast: coffee and milk, bread and butter. Wishing to have some more? Well, then a piece of cheese, called queijo-de-minas (type of cottage cheese), a fruit just like papaya or an orange. Or the typical breakfast from countryside of Minas Gerais state, on the 20s, evocated by our great poet Pedro Nava:

“(…) cutting queijo-de-minas up into pieces getting them soften into the hot coffee. Fluffy, smelling good German bread like a wheat field. Provencal Bread into those roll shapes and when divided you have two rolls. And the cuscus of sweet corn meal made of half cheese cans perforated with nails and when the ingredients were cooked above the vapor of a pan. From the garden we could smell the coffee, the bread, the corn meal, the brown sugar.”

The lunchtime and the dinnertime are alike. They reflect the season products bought in fairs or supermarket.

An especial characteristic is that the dishes are put together at the same time at the table, except for the soup that comes before the main meal and the dessert that comes in the end. The menu is almost always rice and black or brown beans with tick creamy juice, meat, poultry or fish, green salad or cooked vegetable and a fried pastry. There is always manioc meal, or farofa , a glassy jar with long pepper preserved or pepper sauce.

At dinnertime may happen to have a soup, and the most appreciated of the soups are the bean ones or chicken with rice soup. This sacred panacea is ready to solve all problems, since breast-feeding to existential nauseas.

The dessert could be a sweet with cheese (also a Brazilian singularity) or fruit, or all of those at the same time.

After lunch or dinner there is always a coffee to follow.

Between lunch and dinner there is a snack that is sometimes a coffee or cake or cookies or a juice, or anything you can grab from your fridge or even eaten standing up at the snack bar corner next to your job.

These days there are no elaborated meals or snacks. However, in the countryside, we still like to have mingau, a pap . Mingau has our own way of being, a mixed Portuguese with African kind of food, or, who knows, only ours? Mingaus could be not so tick, warm enough, in mugs, sweetened but not much, with a bit of salt to balance.

This could be add to the corn meal with a cube of butter above it and some pieces of cheese (minas cheese – queijo-de-minas), getting a long string that comes directly to your mouth. There is also this typical baby pap (mingau) with oatmeal but now a little bit more full-bodied, just a handful of oatmeal and milk. The baby pap with corn flour is sweet with just milk, corn flour served in a cup powdered with cinnamon.

Brazilians love a category of food that could be taken to your mouth with your hands and that ends in only one single bite or two. Those are what we call “ salgadinhos ” a kind of savories. They precede a dinner or lunch, just like appetizers, or even come as the main meal of a wedding, baptism celebration party or birthday party. Sweeties or candies, all of them in a small size, often follow those; we call them fondly in the diminutive.

The food from the streets, the one that are always outside, in front of churches, in the parks, side walks, or at the beach to be sold, is also very appreciated by Brazilian people of all social classes. It's possible to have a good meal, all over Brazil, walking around those food carts. There is the acarajé in Bahia, corns, or cocada de fita (a kind of “cookie” made entirely of coconut), tacatá, pastry from the fair you go, the barbecue on the streets ( churrasquinho in Portuguese). First of all, at the first place there is the winner of all the pastry, or pastel in Portuguese. They made this with meat inside and olives, when you shake the pastry you hear the rattle sound. There is also the pastry made of cheese, the object of desire, at the last bite, becoming crusty after a while. There is the one made of heart of palm ( palmito in Portuguese), blessed because of its humidity, all of them made in a big casserole where the oil had fried many of the same.

And to drink there is “ garapa ” or caldo de cana (sugar cane juice) grinded at the moment you order, cold, sweet very sweet.

At the corner bars there is always something to tempt you, even if it's only that egg that is painted red. On the bakeries there is crunch torresmo (pork fat skin fried) packed in brown paper to go. Sliced gammon meat with a lot of sauce made for a sandwich. Fried chicken coming with the bones are much tastier than any others, could be made with shrimp filling. There is also bread and mortadela (kind of salami) with a drop of lemon. Fried Pepperoni, toasted manjubinhas (a kind of fish).

In all of the bars of the streets, there are some juices mixed with milk that are called in Portuguese vitaminas , that are made of an infinity of mixtures with fruit like mangoes, acerolas , pineapples, bananas and milk, oranges and guavas and there is also the alcoholic drink called batida , the very Brazilian type of drink, mixed with ice cubes, fruit and sugar.

This food from the streets forms an interesting mosaic of the people's preferences.

The visitor, stranger to the place, could get scared with the food of restaurants and hotels, especially at the places much more populated in the country like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The level is international and mainly in Sao Paulo where you could get the cuisine of almost everywhere in the world, good quality food and reasonable prices, because of the diversity of the immigration. You really can travel gastronomically around the globe without leaving Sao Paulo neighborhood. The Italian food is naturally the most appreciated and the even say that Brazilian pizza is the best even better than the Napolitano kind of pizza. The Chinese were the first to present the exotic food and, were promptly accepted. Today they have fast food chains and delivery system. The Japanese restaurants, a long time unknown, became fashionable, there has been some years now, and they are to stay. The new generation wouldn't know how to live without a sushi. The French made of Sao Paulo their own house, many of them are married to Brazilians. Eating good food in good restaurants is not cheap in Sao Paulo, but it's very easy. The city could already be considered one of world's great gastronomic centers.

Weather and Temperature in Brazil

The weather changes according to the altitude and the latitude of the place. The seasons, in Brazil, are the opposite from Europe and United States, except from the North area of the country. The medium annual temperature is approximately around 28o C on the North area and 20o C on the South area.
There are places, in South of Brazil, that even have negative temperatures, with frost and snow. In Rio de Janeiro, on summer time, the temperature reaches 40o C.

Brazil, with its vast territorial area, and continental dimensions, has a varied climatic typology. Beyond its territorial area, other factors are influential in the variety of Brazilian climates, which could be classified as the conditions of temperature, altitude, pressure and proximity of the ocean. This great climatic difference of the country results in a variety of different vegetation. That's the reason why Brazil has the most varied and complex ecosystem of the world.

Brazilian territory is divided into climatic zones. That means that 92% of it is between Equator Line and Tropic of Capricorn. Nevertheless, Brazilian climate is predominantly tropical it has temperate climatic zones distributed among the rest of the 8% of the territory. The higher temperatures are the outcome of the most predominant low altitudes. The medium predominant temperatures are around 20oC.

Brazil seems to be one of the only countries in the world to have what is called Equatorial Forest (besides Congo, in Africa) within the Equatorial climate. This climate is common in the Amazon Forest with medium temperatures that oscillates between 24oC and 26oC.

The tropical climate is on the area of Planalto Central (Central part of Brazil, a plateau region) besides the Northeast and Southeast Brazilian areas. This climate is characterized by two hot different seasons a year, presenting medium temperature superior of 20oC.

On the high areas like the Atlantic plateau on the Southeast, and on the regions of south of Mato Grosso do Sul and North of Paraná , the predominant climate is what is called Tropical of Altitude. Medium temperatures oscillating between 18oC and 22oC characterize this type of climate.

The Atlantic Tropical Climate predominates practically on the littoral area of Brazil, coming from Rio Grande do Norte and reaching out Rio Grande do Sul. This climate has annual medium temperature around 18oC and 26oC.

The semiarid climate goes from the interior of Northeast of Brazil ( sertão ), including Vale do rio São Francisco - Sao Francisco river valley, to the north of Minas Gerais state. Nevertheless, the annual medium temperatures are the highest of Brazilian territory, oscillating around 27oC.

The region with the coldest climates in Brazil is the one on the territorial area below the Tropic of Capricorn, going through the south states, except the north of Paraná. The Subtropical climate of these regions presents medium temperatures inferior of 20oC. This region has the most rigorous winters in the country, including the areas of higher altitudes, where sometimes have blizzards.

Sources:

• Ministério do Turismo