Dinner & Breakfast with the Host Family

Every day I have breakfast and dinner with my host family, In Brazil the breakfast is very light, usually consisting of bread, fruit, and coffee, also cheese and ham are common as well. 

This fruit is local papaya, and the yellow fruit is called star fruit, it's citrusy like a lemon and an orange combined. 

I like to make banana sandwiches for breakfast, they bananas here have a lot more flavor and are a lot sweeter, so I eat them on some toasted fresh bread with canela  (cinnamon), yummy! 

Breakfast is usually eaten early in the morning before people head off to work or school. We eat breakfast every morning at 7:00 am before our host mom Clausa (Clay-ooza is how you pronounce it) goes to work. On the weekends we usually have breakfast around 9:00 am. In Brazil lunch is by far the largest meal of the day, they eat a lot of rice, beans, meat, and a little veggies (not much), but I don't eat this meal with my host family during the week because I have class and that meal is not included with the ISA trip. Then we have dinner together every night usually around 7:30-8:30 at night, which is pretty early for Brazilian standards, they usually eat dinner around 9:00 or 10:00 pm here, and they usually don't go to sleep until midnight or even two in the morning. Here it is common for kids to stay awake until midnight or later, and people on average only sleep about 6-7 hours a night. For dinner we have had a lot of different meals so far, we had pizza on the first night which was very good, very different from US pizza, but there is a very large Italian influence in Brazil because a lot of Italians immigrated here during WWII. There are even cities through out Brazil that look like Italy in the architecture and the way the people look and they speak Italian there, there are also cities like that with a German influence. The pizza we eat the first night was half "Calabrese" which was a type of sausage on it with onions and bell peppers, and cheese, and the other half of the pizza was "portuguese" which was hard boiled egg, ham, onions, olives, and cheese. 

They both were very good, the crust is thin but not crunchy. Some other meals we have had are clams! which were very good, they are caught right off the coast of the island and my host dad cooked them in a light sauce, and they eat it with a Brazilian lime that is orange on the inside, they were really good. 

Another one of my favorites was when he made a pot roast/veggie stew, he put carrots, potatoes, two types of pumpkin, a brazilian squash called chayote, onions and beef. It was very very good, I really liked the pumpkin (which tasted like yams) and the chayote.