Indian Lunch

We had planned to take a long Uber ride to see the Digital Tower that looms over the Federal District from a hill top on the other side of Lake Paranoá. However Sunday dawned cloudy and gray so we pulled in our horns and had Indian food for lunch.

Layne found them on Google Maps and the reviews were excellent so we thought to give it a try.

Garlic naan was buttery and  chewy as I like it. We had samosas to start and they were among the best I’ve had, filled with chicken and chickpea flour in a pastry that more baked than greasy and fried. 

We try and find Indian food as we travel and we’ve had some good stuff in Belize and in Arequipa Peru and now Brasilia. Layne having malaria out a crimp on locating Indian takeout in Guyana but I’m betting the former British colony would have some pretty good food from the subcontinent. 

We had leftovers for dinner from lamb Rogan Josh and chicken tikka masala and best of all the waiter spoke English. He said he’s been in Brasilia  ten years but it took the first two for him to start feeling like he could hope to grasp Portuguese. He was about half my age so I guess he also had a head start. After lunch we went for a short walk in this strange urban layout unique to Brasilia.

Actually as I stepped off the restaurant patio where we had lunch I was looking up and failed to spot a weird half step in the walkway. 

My  fall  was     spectacular  apparently as after I got to my feet a restaurant full of shocked  faces gawking at me. I was fine as I’m used to playing Mr Bean in the trail and just the other day Bruce was reminding me of the time I tripped on a bridge in the Keys and scraped my knee. History repeats itself:

It will take more than two scraped knees to stop me and the camera and lens were fine with only a slight scratch on the lens case to irritate me. My legs and the camera worked fine.

We didn’t need the Subway but we did stop by the pharmacy and bought some antiseptic and gauze to repair bloody knees. Easy peasy. 

We wandered briefly through the apartment buildings that constitute a super block, a planned neighborhood, pedestrian friendly with stores and restaurants nearby. 

I wouldn’t mind living a short walk from the Namaste restaurant.

Cars are kept away and separated by trees and landscaping allowing pedestrians to walk and residents to live without engine noise. 

Somehow they manage to make banal apartment buildings look interesting with shapes, colors and… check them out: 

UNESCO has declared the city a cultural site making it impossible to build this pricing workers out of the city and forcing them to commute. I like how it looks but I am aware of the drawbacks. 

And at home here he was snoozing. 

Capybaras

Rusty took me for a walk this morning under gray skies and there was a capybara asleep half in the water. And I just needed to make sure the photo uploading is still working properly and as you can see it is. My cup floweth over. 

 

Another Sunday

I owe Jeffrey a word of thanks and if you are reading this page so do you. My cookies expired three days ago and I was locked out of uploading pictures to this page. Please don’t ask my wife but I admit I have been a bear with a sore head. After 18 years you can imagine posting pictures here is something I enjoy. 

See? I just uploaded a photo and with fewer hoops  than I had to jump through before Jeffrey helped out. I used to get questions asking if I wanted to give permission toggle to download pictures. Now I get to upload the pictures with ease. Not necessarily great pictures, the one above shows a sliced cucumber appetizer we had for Layne’s birthday lunch at La  Cheminée in Brasilia. 

The main course was fish with a cheese sauce and as anyone knows you don’t pair fish with cheese except in South America quite often you do. It was supposed to be a blue cheese sauce but it was pretty mild and was more like a cream sauce, so we lapped it up. Jeffrey’s expert help from South Florida also made this photo download possible:

There you see my pudding, tropical fruit crisp with ice cream. I’ve known Jeffrey and his family for years since I started this page in 2007. I hate dealing with the internet and electrons and when things go wrong I have him on speed dial thank god. What took three days to drive me mad he fixed in 20 minutes and I still don’t know what he did. He has my password so if things get weird here you know it’s him not me. There is a price to pay for help and giving him access was it.

We had a French croissant for breakfast after I Ubered to L’Amour du Pain in downtown Brasilia at eight in the morning, something I’d only do for a birthday.  I didn’t photograph the yoghurt we had for dinner so you’ll have to imagine that with blueberries and strawberries. But what I did realize is I miss being able to put photos here. 

The result of my funk was I didn’t pick up my camera as I walked around like a sore headed bear. Nowhere to put my pictures I sobbed, so what’s the point? So…today I have no pictures. Oh the irony. 

Anyway things should proceed smoothly from here on out. It’s rainy season but the rain hasn’t been making itself known here, so the idea is to go to the digital tower to get a scenic view of Brasilia on a sunny day therefore I expect rain will now become imminent. 

I have random photos like these flip flops for sale at Carrefour supermarket. They call them Hawaiians and they don’t sell Crocs, probably because Brazilians tend to be fashion conscious. I’m still using Crocs I bought in Colombia, poor me. 

From the random picture department above GANNET2 parked on the street in Ushuaia, Christmas 2024. Below a traffic jam on the road to Brazil on the Peruvian side of the border near Mazuko:

Can you sense we miss the road? Below buying lunch on Isla Chiloé, Chilean Patagonia a year ago. We’re headed back next month we hope. 

I think this one is Colombia, 2024, a mobile juicer. No idea why it cropped up but here it is. 

Barichara Colombia, the classic South American street scene, tiles, cobbles expansive Andean views. 

Brazilian road train December 2nd on our way here. We’d stopped to let Rusty sit in the grass for a break under the trees. 

He loves apartment living but I wonder if he too isn’t getting bored.  Probably not. 

By the dawn’s early light :

Home sweet home. It hasn’t helped that Rusty likes 4am walks. I am less keen as I like sleeping at night in retirement, but what Rusty wants Rusty gets. 

Happy Sunday. Mine’s pretty good, thanks to Jeffrey. Here’s to many more posts. 

GANNET2 Update

Had you told me on December 3rd we’d still be in Brasilia I’d have despaired. However with some weeks left to go I am holding my own.  We are hoping to be in the road February first driving to Iguazu Falls on the border with Paraguay and Argentina. Some days that goal seems ambitious but yesterday Alessandro assured us he intends to be finished on the 23rd.  That would give us a week to clean inside and out and sort out our new storage systems. We are getting some drawers.

On the left we have a slide out trash can and below it is our new two gallon gray water tank to catch what comes out of the sink. On the right our troublesome large drawer has been cut down into two. Layne is happy.

The two gallon gray waterctabknreplacesxthdcunder chassis tank we used to have which hit every rock in the road until we got to Panama and removed it. That left us draining to the ground which though it’s only sink water was aesthetically unappealing especially sleeping on city streets or in campgrounds where I had to wield a bucket. This way we can easily vent it in  a toilet or down a suitable drain.

The electrical system is coming along with the wiring ready to receive our new appliances. We have new bus bars and new control boxes for solar energy and the alternator and they are installing a new 220/110 volt automatic selector to cope with any shore power we may plug into. Up next is the arrival of the solar panels expected by Wednesday. Two 430 watt panels should give us plenty of power in sunny South America. 

Alessandro (on the left) is confident he can meet his January 23rd deadline so we are keeping our fingers crossed as he installs a new 12 volt compressor into our fridge to replace the 110 volt original and he’s also building a frame to house our Starlink antenna in the roof. It seems a lot but he isn’t worried. Meanwhile we live in our apartment and plan a deep clean for GANNET2 before we retire our lives onboard. I hate hoarding stuff so this will be an opportunity to clear stuff out which is a bonus.

I have been having some difficulty uploading photographs after my iPhone downloaded a cursed update. I think I’ve solved the problem with one more workaround using Chrome for the blog instead of Safari. If there was any doubt I’ll never use Artificial Intelligence on this page as mine own  seems barely enough as it is.