Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Brazil: Gramado


Gramado

While I was working in Porto Alegre, friends insisted on taking me “up the mountain” for a day, a phrase they delivered with the same reverence Californians reserve for “up the coast.” The destination was Gramado, a small town tucked into the Serra Gaúcha, where the air cools, the pines thicken, and Brazil briefly forgets it is tropical.

Gramado looks as if a Bavarian architect wandered off course and decided to start over in the Southern Hemisphere. Steeply pitched roofs, half‑timbered façades, tidy flower boxes — the whole place carries a German accent even before anyone speaks. It isn’t a theme park imitation; it’s the lived inheritance of the German immigrants who settled the region generations ago and left their mark in everything from the architecture to the bakeries.

And then there was the chocolate.

I had been warned, but nothing prepared me for the sheer devotion to chocolate in that town. Shop after shop displayed glossy truffles, molded animals, pralines, bars wrapped like small gifts. The chocolate was impossibly smooth — Swiss in style, Brazilian in soul — and I remember thinking that if I stayed another day, I would need to be rolled back down the mountain like a barrel.

What struck me most was the atmosphere: cool air drifting through pine trees, families strolling arm‑in‑arm, the faint scent of melted sugar escaping every doorway. It felt like stepping sideways into another continent, yet unmistakably Brazilian in its warmth and ease.

It was only a brief visit, an alpine detour with chocolate on the side, but Gramado stayed with me — a reminder that Brazil contains multitudes, and that sometimes the sweetest discoveries are found in the most unexpected corners of the map.

  

From the forthcoming book:

In with the East Wind...A Mary Poppins Kind of Life

Volume 1: ABC Lands

by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver


For more posts about and from this book, click HERE.

For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.


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