Greetings from the country of the future

That's Brazil. Everyone knows the old joke, so I won't repeat it.

This morning, a couple of hours after breakfast but still a couple of hours before lunch, I got hungry. I didn't have a lot of options in my kitchen, and I didn't want to go out to buy a snack. So I made popcorn. I poured the oil into a pan, and then the popcorn. And out of the bag of popcorn (Prato Bom, if you're curious) fell two beans. Better still, two different kinds of beans. One was black, perhaps to represent the Southeast of Brazil. The other was pink (I'm not sure what its name is in English), in Portuguese feijão mulatinho, perhaps to represent the Northeast. It made some sense. No matter where you are in Brazil, if you have a tv, you have the Southeast in your living room. And on the streets of any city in Brazil (except for Recife and the surrouding area, and maybe Salvador) outside of the southern half of Brazil, you see jerseys of teams from the Southeast. But I'm in the Northeast, and at lunchtime it is much, much easier to find restaurants serving feijão mulatinho (any restaurant that is not Chinese, Japanese, or barbecue) than black beans. So there it was, Brazil in a bowl of popcorn. Or something. I hope the extended metaphors get better as this blog goes on.