We never thought that cooking Indian food in brazil would be such a challenge. At least not for the reasons it was going to be challenging.
Our group at the Klien Hosten in Foz do Iguassu was a bit of a hodge podge mix of people...
But first let me explain the environment. Out of the entire 6 days I was there I was the only American. It was during the World Cup so there were people from all over the world. I was there by myself so every morning I woke up I never knew if anybody else spoke English. If I wanted to talk to people I usually started off by asking what languages they spoke and sometimes I had to stumble through asking in more than oone language.
There was a group of us one night. We consisted of a French girl who had been living in Brazil, her boyfriend who was visiting her from France, a Brazilian, an Indian who had been living in Canada but was really just traveling the world, and myself.
We decided to cook Indian food one night. So we walked to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients.
Little did I know this was going to be the most complicated shopping trip I have ever taken part in...We had to somehow get from Hinglish (though our Hindusthani friend spoke English) to Portuguese.
Since I was familiar with the ingredients and my brain was still in Hindi mode, the Indian man told me the ingredients he couldn't find. So I explained them in English to the boyfriend. He translated from English to French. France, the girl from France translated from French to Portuguese and the Brazilian asked the man at the register.
We were not able to track down all of the spices is this small grocery store, but we did get a whole bunch of a couple.
After this we went back to the hostel and cooked the hindusthani meal.
I must say cooking in foreign languages was a blast and it is a great wat to learn language and new cooking skills
...so is joining a dance group...but that's another story.
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