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, bar...