Lunch with Miss Lizza

I had a very nice lunch with my friend Lizza yesterday. I met Lizza a couple of years ago in Rio when she came into the AP offices to work as an intern. She was very green and I busted her chops a bit to make what? Red? Well, anyhow she went back to the states and went to Colombia Journalism School and today she's a staff writer on the Village Voice. Congratulations. It turns out she's one of the few people from her class to get a job, so I guess double congratulations are in order. At our lunch, she did, however, express some of the discomfort all of us feel in this business for various reasons, but I won't go into details because we all know where that has gotten us on this blog. The point is that when you have a cool job, like her's certainly is, you kind of take it for granted. When you don't have it, it seems like a job to die for. As fed up as I got with my job in Rio I knew there was no lack of fools dying to take it. The fact that the pay is never very good doesn't come into play much until you get hired. But she's youngin' and the Village Voice is a cool (though not as cool as it used to be) paper to be hooked up with. I mean cool in the way that you can hear about cool things happening around town, you get paid to have your ear to ground and hang around others in the same situation. The thing that appeals to me is being able to go around the city and ferret out stories. I never did that in New York, sometimes I think I'd like to be metro reporter or even a cop. I knew a guy in Rio who used to go back to Berlin for vacation and work as a Taxi driver just to get back in touch with his home town. I just like walking around different neighborhoods and seeing what's going on, I'm interested just to discover what is there. Niether would I mind being one of those reporters who does the kind of column showing cool things you can buy around town, I just dig checking things out. But now I have a wife, two kids and a dog to support so I'm not going to be doing that stuff I don't think.

The other thing during my lunch with Lizza is that I noticed that we are both in different stages of Brasilophilia. I know it sounds disgusting doesn't it? But she arranged to meet at the Brazilian coffee shop where I waited for her drinking, what I consider, awful espresso and piss poor pao de queijo. She is still at the point where it all seems marvellous. (I'll explain below why Brazilian coffee just aint't that great, though toward the end of my stay in Brazil I was beginning to be able to find export quality coffee which was decent if expensive.) I'm past that, I think I have a pretty realistic take on things, I pine for Brazil fully aware of how shitty so much of it is and how shitty so many things are here. Lizza said when she met me I was very down on Brazil, which is probably true, but then I haven't wonder if I'm not very down on everything _ maybe I'm too much of a complainer. I should probably stop it. Whatever. Lizza took the above pictures so I thought they were fitting for this post, I'm not sure why she sent them to me but what the hell.

Below please find the low down on Brazilian coffee for your reading pleasure. It's a little out of date, I wrote it in 1998 but you'll get the idea:

^Brazil is land of coffee, but good luck finding tasty cup to drink<
^By MICHAEL ASTOR=
^Associated Press Writer=
¶ POCOS DE CALDAS, Brazil (AP) _ Sure, Brazilians down enough thimble-sized "cafezinhos" to make them the world's second-largest nation of coffee drinkers after the United States.
¶ It's also true Brazil is the largest producer and exporter of coffee.
¶ But that doesn't mean it's easy finding a steaming cup of good coffee.
¶ "Brazilians have gotten used to drinking bad coffee," laments Jose Barbosa do Rosario, who edits Coffee Business magazine.
¶ Brazilians grew accustomed to bad coffee in the 1960s, when the government decided that instead of destroying the accumulating mountains of coffee beans it was obliged to buy from growers, it would practically give surplus beans away to domestic roasters.
¶ Because good quality beans commanded higher prices on the international market, the coffee left over was usually poor, and Brazilians got used to it.
¶ "It doesn't pay to produce quality coffee if there's no market for it," grower Oswaldo Aranha Neto says.
¶ There are, however, some encouraging signs.
¶ The Association of Brazilian Coffee Producers is running a school to train restaurant and cafe operators how to make good coffee. And the Brazilian Coffee Industry Association recently began awarding a seal of purity to roasters who can prove their coffee is pure.
¶ Purity does not necessarily spell quality, though. Because of the harvesting techniques employed, Brazil ends up with more bad coffee beans than some other countries.
¶ In Colombia, for instance, coffee berries are picked from the trees only when they are ripe. In Brazil, the berries are taken in a single swoop. Unripe, overripe, bug-eaten and broken beans are sifted out later by machines.
¶ It is those rejected beans that are the raw material for all those cafezinhos _ "little coffees" _ that Brazilians know and love.