Floripa crunch

Tuesday night, Trae and I rode an overnight bus for 13 hours to get to Florianopolis, a cute little rich beach town on the south coast of Brazil. This was after we successfully applied for our Brazilian visas, for which I had to pay around $75 USD and Trae had to pay $140 USD. Brazil hates the U.S! (who doesn´t?).

We arrived in Floripa (as it´s known to the locals) Wednesday morning, hot, stinky, and tired as all hell. For some reason, Latin American buses are COLD. Really COLD. Even though I discovered this firsthand four years ago while busing around Venezuela, and again last week while busing from Rosario to Iguazu, I forgot to bring my hoodie on the bus and therefore froze and woke up every 10 minutes to the fact that I was FREEZING.

Trae and I were torn between staying near the beach and staying downtown - we´d read that the beaches (there are many of them in Floripa) are all really far from stores and restaurants. We rode the bus to the gay beach, where Trae was hoping to meet some lucky guys, and kind of wandered around looking for beachfront accommodations. None of them were affordable, though, so we took a bus back downtown, wandered up a hill (at which point I abandoned my pack), saw a sign for Lagoa Hostel, found Lagoa Hostel, and settled into our new digs.

As luck would have it, it was hot hot hot when we stepped off the bus and while we wandered around looking for a cheap hostel, and then, as soon as we were ready to head to the beach, it got windy and cloudy and drizzly. So we went to a smoothie joint and I had the best acai, grape juice, banana, strawberry smoothie EVER.

That night, Trae and I were excited to check out Florianopolis´s nightlife, as I´d read that Floripa is the Ibiza of South America, a.k.a party central. We wandered over to a local bar, ordered some Heinekens and caipirinhas (Brazil´s national cocktail, which is STRONG and lime-yummy), and watched the end of a football game between Peru and Brazil (well, I watched the end of the game, Trae was completely disinterested and distracted by cute boys). We eyed a cute French boy at the table next to ours, and eventually started chatting with some Spanish men who were looking to go out. We made our way over to a bar down the street that was supposed to the ¨best party in town¨. It sucked ass. We had to pay the equivalent of $7.50 USD to get in, the band played lame covers of bad American pop-rock songs, and the people were boring.

Thursday morning, Trae and I woke up and headed straight to Praia Mole, one of the many beaches in Florianopolis. The weather was shit again, though, so I laid around waiting for the sun to come out while Trae wandered around the beach. After it was clear that the weather wasn´t going to improve, Trae and I decided to eat a seafood lunch. When we arrived at our hostel, the receptionist had told us that the seafood here is world-renowned, and, since I´ve been eating a whole lotta fish since I started travelling, I thought I´d give it a go. We settled on one of the dozens of seafood restaurants that line the strip between downtown and the beach, and ordered the lunch for 2, which consisted of crab, fried shrimp, garlic shrimp, more shrimp, fried fish, french fries, salad. I was hesitant to even order this meal to begin with, given the high content of fried foods and the overarching presence of shrimp; shrimp is too insect-like for my liking (all those legs, that crunchy skin), and shrimp farming is bad bad bad for the ocean, killing dolphins and all kinds of other sealife. But I relented, thinking that I may only be in Florianopolis this one time (oh, how fluid the ethics!).

The crab came out. I ate it, it was delicious (and I didn´t have to tear any legs off). Then the fried shimp came out. I was nervous about the fatty egg-batter, but I ate the shrimp anyway. They tasted pretty good (besides the grease factor). Then the real deal, the shrimp with eyes and skin, came out. They were piled up on a plate, pink skins gleaming in the afternoon sun, boiled black eyes dead but pointedly once-alive. I felt my stomach churn, told Trae I didn´t think I could do it, and then a second plate of fully intact, dead shrimp (this time seasoned, garliced), was set down before us. Trae couldn´t get the shrimp down fast enough. He was lickin his lips and fingers hungry, and I just sat there, waiting for something to click.

David and I spent Boxing Day with his Aunt Marilyn and Uncle George at their beautiful home on Salt Spring Island. For dinner, Marilyn served us crab. Crabs with shells and legs, crabs dead at home. I just sat there, politely refused on sketchy, shifting grounds of veganism (oh, how those grounds have shaken), until David, 20 minutes into leg-ripping and crabmeat sucking, offered to prepare me some crab meat. I politely aquiesced, ate the delicious crabmeat, thanked David for being such an awesome boyfriend.

Trae, the good friends that he is, offered to de-skin some shrimp for me, and I let him. But I also didn´t want to interrupt his delicious meal, so I only let him de-skin a couple. I ate some fatty fries, some tomato and lettuce and shredded carrot, some fatty fried fish, beat myself up about all the fat, stared at the shrimp eyes, and then tried to de-skin some of my own shrimp. I cut off the heads with my knife, and pictured my dad laughing at me, remembered that when I was 13 and newly vegetarian (and what a haughty vegetarian I was!), he thought it was a passing phase. I´d proved him wrong, though, because, for the rest of his life, I managed to remain not only staunchly anti-meat, but staunchly VEGAN. Until I succumbed to a fish craving that followed me around for 2 years. It´s all been downhill since that first salmon bite 7 months ago, and I can hear his laughter now, could feel him smirking as I cut off those shrimp heads and then tried to tear off the shrimp skin. Oh, the legs, oi! Shrimp legs are so insect-like, all curled up in their boiled nonlife. I grimaced, my stomach churned, I thought I might throw up. Trae was thoroughly amused.

I decided that seafood is probably not a good idea. I´ve been wanting to read Bottomfeeder: How To Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood for a long time, and I plan to read it once I return home from this trip. Being vegetarian for half my life has made me incredibly conscious of the impact my diet has on the planet, and I don´t think I can continue to eat seafood without a clear understanding of the fishing industry, its environmental impact, and the amount of mercury and other toxins present in food from the sea.