When riding on the back of a motorcycle in Brazil, the driver assumes his co-pilot in back is going to turn his head to check out any attractive women passing by on the sidewalk at the same moment as him. This seemed unimportant to me at first but is absolutely essential to do if two men are riding together on the same motorcycle, for obvious reasons. Not only does the driver expect you to turn in unison with him as each girl passes on the right and left, he also expects your gaze to linger a few seconds if the girl is especially cute. It is never a safe assumption that the driver will not check out a girl just because he is going through an intersection. It is even more important to be in unison if the driver is wearing a helmet.
The first time someone said Bom Ghia to me I became confused. I thought to myself, no problem, this person must be illiterate and not know the correct spelling of Bom Dia (Good Morning). That's why he cannot pronounce it correctly. In Carioca (a reference to anything pertaining to Rio de Janeiro) Portuguese, all the D sounds on words are converted into G sounds. Instead of pronouncing dinero, like people in Spanish do, Cariocas pronounce it geenayro. The R sound is also very different from Spanish, it has an H sound. So, words like: Rock, Raggae, Rio and Enrique sound like, Hock, Haygae, Hio and En-Heque. If pronunciation was the only difference, that would be tolerable, but people in Rio have also changed the grammar quite a bit. When someone receives a call on their cell phone and they want to ask the person, Onde estas? (Where are you ?) They say Estas onge? This is like calling someone and asking, You are where?
Even the definitions of words change, in Spanish la gente means the people. In Portuguese la gente means us. So, if you want to say, We'll see each other later you say a gente se vê. In Spanish this is a highly ambiguous statement, meaning something like, the people see themselves.
While living in Rio, I ate like an animal. My plan was to maximize calories while minimizing price. I survived almost entirely on food I bought in the subway. The place where I ate decent food was at the restaurants around my school. One of these restaurants served food by the kilo. This is the most popular style of restaurant in Brazil. When it comes to eating, Brazilians are like most Mediterraneans, they are big lunch people. The difference between this restaurant and the others was the fact that this one charged $3/kilo while the rest charged $8/kilo. The $3/kilo restaurant's food quality varied to a great degree during the week. I can say that the quality of food was a lot better on Monday than it was on Thursday. By Friday, you were putting your life into somebody else's hands. This restaurant's motto seemed to be, If the food is good on Monday, why shouldn't it still be good by Friday? The food that was most adversely affected by this reincarnation policy were the desserts and lasagnas. However, these dishes were excellent on Monday and Tuesdays. So, I would eat lasagna and flan on Mondays and Tuesdays. On Wednesdays I would shift to salad, French fries and farofa (a typical Brazilian dish made of toasted manioc flour and served as a side dish along with feijoada). On Thursday I would have feijoada (a stew of pork, meat and beans) and more French fries. On Fridays I'd go to a higher-priced per kilo restaurant that had a great barbeque. I'd have a steak and usually strike out with one-or-more of the waitresses.