Cheap Eating on the Road

On Sunday morning, I left the LimeTime hostel at 7:45 in the morning. I was hungover, on three or so hours of sleep, carrying sixty-pounds worth of gear on my back, and sipping on a Coke Zero that I still have no idea how I acquired.

(All I know is that the Coke Zero was free, and I didn't steal it, but for the life of me, I can't quite remember who gave it to me. Maybe one of the Dutch guys sharing my room gave it to me when we were all stumbling around drunk, trying to get to bed at four in the morning.)

It was the pre-breakfast of champions. The caffeine and slight hydrating properties of that can of Coke were the only thing propping me up on the thirty-minute journey via Metro to the Tietê bus station (São Paulo's main long-distance bus terminal).

By 8:30, I had my ticket for Rio de Janeiro. My bus didn't leave for another hour, so I started looking around for something to eat. It being early morning, the only things that were open were coffee places, doughnut shops and one place that looked like a sandwich deli. I wasn't really looking to spend a lot, but I needed something in my stomach before starting the six-to-seven-hour bus ride to Rio. I knew the bus would stop halfway, and I could always grab lunch when it did.

I went looking for a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

Now, I don't know if it's because I'm Canadian and have been spoiled by cheap Tim Horton's doughnuts, but you can imagine my surprise when I looked at the prices and found out it was R$3.90 for what looked like a jelly doughnut. That's C$2.35 at the latest exchange rates. I couldn't do it -- not when I'd pay C$0.75 for the same thing back home -- even at the airport, where they have even more of a captive audience of people desperate for food.

I got a ten-inch-long sliced baguette filled with some kind of tomato chicken salad mixture for R$8.10 instead. It was more than I would have spent on the doughnut, but at least I got a lot more food for that money. And, as it turned out, that sandwich sated me until dinner time.

Dinner turned out to be the most ghetto meal I've had on my travels. (But, it's only been a week. I'm sure there will be times when I'm eating much more ghetto than this: cheap street meat on a stick for entire meals, I'm thinking.)

It was after dark by the time I was settled into my hotel in Rio. Again, I didn't want to spend a lot and, not knowing my way around Copacabana, wasn't willing to explore during the night -- especially since I was alone. (The only reason I was alone in a hotel was because the accomodation was included in the Project Brazil gig I booked with GAP Adventures. I was headed into the slums of Rocinha the next morning. More on life in the favelas soon.)

Since I didn't yet know how developed Rocinha might be, I stopped off at a supermarket close to the hotel to pick up some toilet paper for my two weeks there. While I was in the supermarket, I decided to grab food: a chunk of cheese ciabatta bread, a package of salami, a bag of churrasco-flavored chips and a 1.5L bottle of water. Total cost for dinner: R$2.53 (C$1.52). I paid nearly ten times that amount for an evening's worth of WiFi at the hotel.

That cheap-ass dinner kept me going until lunch the next day.