an ode to Guarana

The food in Bahia is fantastic. Most of it is seafood, and comes with this semi-optional little cup of hot sauce which if you take more than a teaspoon of it will pretty much just desintegrate your brain. But I'm guessing there will be plenty of other opportunities to go into detail about the food, which I'm sure I could write volumes on. I'd like to take this little slice of our time together to talk about one of my favorite indigenous Brazilian phenomena (besides the women, beaches, architecture, literature, etc. - you get the idea), Guarana, pronounced Gwah-rah-NAH. Guarana is a shrub indigenous to Brazil and Venezuela that has fruit which is the source of the taste in a number of caffeinated soft drinks referred to under the umbrella term "Guarana". Any respectable Brazilian restaurant in New York or elsewhere serves it, and I think you can buy it in some stores in some of the outer boroughs. There's a Brazilian restaurant on Central Ave in Yonkers that definitely has it (can't remember the name, something like Brasilia), and my guess is that Churrascurria Plataforma in midtown has it too. If they don't they suck and don't go there. If they do, they're awesome because the food is really good, albeit a little expensive.

Guarana Antarctica, the most popular brand of Guarana soda, distributed by PepsiCo (see the Wikipedia article) tastes a little like 7UP or Sprite, but frutier. And it's brown. But not in a gross way. Anyway, just check out the picture. It's the coolest thing in the world, and I've been belching the alphabet and obscenities in honor of it since I got here.

I would also like to point out that it totally kicks the ass of Hazelnut Spread, a concept so absurd that it could only be the brainchild of people who spent their childhood watching television and getting beat up after school not only by the jocks, but by the nerds too.