Went on a day trip today with Rafaela, who I met at the CISV party last Saturday to Ouro Preto, a city about 1.5 hours from Belo, still in the Minas Gerais region.
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| Minas Gerais has mountains all around. The view on the drive to Ouro Preto. |
On the way to Ouro Preto we stopped at a small restaurant, Jeca Tatu. It's a small rustic place with lots of vintage decoration and antiques like records, posters, paintings, guitars, phones and sofas.
We stopped to try some
pastel de angu, a sort of fried pastry with different ingredients inside (meat, cheese, etc.), kind of like an empanada. We tried the one with meat and it was really good.
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| Pastel de angu. (Picture from google since I forgot to take one) |
A little after that we stopped for lunch at Rafaela's friend's house on the outskirts of Ouro Preto where we had a nice home cooked meal. I tried some
feijão tropeiro, a typical Minerais side dish made of beans, flour, bacon, and eggs (that's it on the right, and yes, that's
chicharon on top). Lunch is typically the biggest and heaviest meal of the day in Brasil, and people usually eat rice and beans.
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| Meat and feijão tropeiro |
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| A typical Brasilian lunch |
Then we had some
arroz doce (sweet rice) for dessert.
After lunch we headed to the city center of Ouro Preto. Minas Gerais is a mining state, and they have a lot of caves and mining spots all over the region. They mine and export a lot of stones. Ouro Preto is one of the mining cities in the state that mined a lot of gold, which can be found in the churches all over the city.
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| The city center |
As it is located in the mountains, most all the roads are steep (very hilly, you go up and down all over the city). The roads are also made of cobblestones and are very narrow. It reminded me a lot of the city of Toledo in Spain. And like Toledo, it was also declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but for its Baroque architecture.
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| Steep roads |
Ouro Preto is full of churches, the interiors of which are built with the gold that was mined in Ouro Preto in the earlier centuries. We visited the Nossa Senhora do Pilar Church which has the most gold. It was a very small church but the interiors were lavishly and ornately decorated in gold (no pictures allowed, unfortunately).
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| Nossa Senhora do Pilar |
We also stopped by the Igreja São Francisco de Assis to admire the interiors. Ornately decorated in gold, though it didn't have as much as the Nossa Senhora do Pilar.
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| Igreja São Francisco de Assis |
Outside the church there was a small
feira (fair, bazaar) selling mostly handicrafts made of
pedra-sabão (soapstone). Very pretty designs.
We walked around the city some more and visited the
Casa dos Contos. Now a historical museum, it used to be a house where the gold that was mined from the city was counted. It was also here were they made coins and money. Also, the downstairs were the living quarters of the slaves, and shows how they used to live.
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| Casa dos Contos |
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| View of the road from the house |
We tried some liqueur made from
jabuticaba, the fruit I
mentioned the other day. It's made from
cachaça and
jabuticaba; it's not as strong as I thought it would be and a little sweet.
We drove back to Belo Horizonte and ended the night with dinner at
A Pão de Queijaria, a restaurant specializing in
pão de queijo (cheese bread). It's basically bread baked with cheese in it and is a very popular snack or breakfast food in Minas Gerais. In this particular restaurant, they served it in a variety of ways, including as sandwich buns. The one I got below has
pão de queijo buns with a mixed meat patty served with a side of fried polenta.
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| Pão de queijo hamburger with fried polenta |
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| With Rafaela |
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