Shopping and food in Brazil: Things to know

Not only possessing great landscapes, Brazil is also a gathering place for shopping and enjoying unique cuisine. Major shopping centers are concentrated in big cities such as Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, etc. Shopping: – To Brazil, visitors can shop in big cities like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, etc. – Shopping points are commercial centers or markets, pavements, etc. – Main items are souvenirs, handmade crafts, clothes, shoes, etc. – Visitors who love Brazilian music can go to Bazar Som Tres neighborhood – where a lot of CDs and DVDs are sold. However, the price here is so high. – Some popular shopping areas such as Mercado Modelo, Barra Shopping Center in Salvador, Manaus market in Manaus, Santa Felicidade shopping district in Curtitiba, etc. Cuisine: Brazilian cuisine is a wonderful blend of European migrant, African slave and Native Indian cuisine. – The typical dishes are: Feijoada, Bahian dishes,

Unique souvenirs you should buy when traveling to Brazil

Traveling to Brazil, you should find and buy unique souvenirs of this beautiful country as gifts for relatives and friends. The following travel experiences will suggest you to choose a good souvenir. Moqueca pot The Moqueca Pot is a slightly bulky souvenir gift, but many foreign tourists love to buy as souvenirs for relatives and friends. The Moqueca pot has a very tight lid, so it is suitable for storing meat, fish or steaming seafood. The flavor of the dish cooked in a clay pot is delicious and fresh. Cocktail Cachaça This is a very popular cocktail in Brazil. This drink is extracted from cachaca rum, lemon and sugar. Centuries ago, Cachaça cocktails were a luxury drink found only in luxury restaurants, but today, most households in Brazil use this drink. Buy some Cachaça cocktails as souvenirs so that your friends at home can also enjoy the delicious taste of

Unique gifts should buy when traveling to Brazil

In Brazil, you should immerse yourself in the passionate Flama dance, explore the wild Amazon forest and do not forget to buy unique souvenirs as gifts for friends and relatives. Colorful large woven hammocks, Havaianas flip-flops, Granado Pharmacies soap are all ideal choices for meaningful gifts brought from Brazil. Granado Pharmacies soap This is a soap that is loved by women because of its eye-catching appearance. Soap from Granado Pharmacias is a famous product in Brazil. They are stored in beautiful little bags with a mild fragrance. Especially, the beautiful, sparkling soap bars will be a great gift for friends when traveling to Brazil. Cachaca drinks This is a popular cocktail in Brazil. This drink is made from chum cachaca, lemon and sugar. Visitors can buy pre-packaged gifts to bring flavors from Brazil to your loved ones. Previously, cachaca was only used in restaurants or bars but today it has

17 interesting items you can buy in Brazil (Part 3)

Local souvenirs Brazil has some of the most iconic monuments in the world – Christ the Redeemer, Sugarloaf Mountain and Maracaña to name some. These famous tourist destinations have naturally been replicated as souvenirs and, although a little confusing, have created a wonderful and unique souvenir. Look out for small Christ statues, glass rocks with a carving of Maracaña inside and a classic ‘I Love Rio’ T-shirt. Musical instrument Brazil has a lot of typical Brazilian folk music like samba, forró and funk. Although the large samba-related steel drums can be difficult to bring back to you, there are other traditional instruments like banjo, mandolin and pandeiro that make great gifts for music lovers. Hammock A hand-woven hammock made by a local Brazilian is a great way to celebrate Brazil. Although large cities tend not to use hammocks, they are common in small towns, coastal or rural areas. Locals weave them on the patio or

17 interesting items you can buy in Brazil (Part 2)

Havaiana National flip-flops have become a global phenomenon, Havaianas is a distinct Brazilian brand and must be in the closet of any Brazilian. Although these sandals are sold around the world, buying them from the country of origin is a bit more special, not to mention cheaper. There are Havaianas stores dotted all over the big city with a variety of colorful models and styles. Bahian women Bahian women are actually decorations that are usually from Bahia and northern Brazil. Often painted in dark skin, they are sometimes described as thoughtful looking ahead when they place their hands on their cheeks. They were dressed in a typical Bahian dress – a large, ankle-length skirt bulging out at the hips and decorated with bright, cheerful colors. Brazilian Candy Brazil has a lot of delicious sweets. Some great sweets to buy include paçoca, a sweet-flavored nut-based sweet like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, pão de mel, a small

17 interesting items you can buy in Brazil (Part 1)

With its striking coastline, biodiversity forests and the world’s most cosmopolitan city clusters, Brazil is an interesting country.  And if you come to this country, remember to buy some souvenirs, exotic items that you can only buy in Brazil. Cachaça To buy the cachaça properly, you should definitely buy it in Brazil. Considered a symbol of this country, this sugarcane-based beverage is available everywhere and local distilleries guarantee you will receive real goods. The best place to get an appetizer is in Paraty, a small coastal town in Rio de Janeiro that has a lot of great distilleries. You can try it before you buy – Gabriela cachaça is especially good. Cangas Cangas is basically a Brazilian beach towel with many uses; It can be used as a scarf, a beach skirt, a floating dress or a sofa night. They are quite beautiful and useful at the beach and are a great souvenir to remember

Craft hunting in Pará

As part of our Brazil Craft Tour, where we will be visiting each of the 27 Brazilian states looking for representatives of authentic handmade creations of each location, I am visiting the northern state of Pará, the “Gateway to the Amazon.” I had never been to this part of Brazil before, so I didn’t know what to expect other than the craft production hubs I had researched. But as soon as I got off the plane, it was clear that this was a completely different place to everywhere I had been to inside my own country. First, the weather. While temperatures continue to plunge in my native São Paulo, in Pará there is no winter. This time of the year is actually referred to as summer, so the sun is blazing and the nature is lush, providing artisans with a whole world of materials to work with. Nature is also the

The nature-inspired art and craft of Pará

If you love craft, it’s hard not to fall in love with Pará. In the state, which we visited recently as part of our Craft Tour of Brazil,  lush nature provides a perfect springboard for artisans to produce an array of craft items just about as vast as the collection of plants that can be spotted in the “gateway to the Amazon.” The state in the extreme north of Brazil is also quite big – larger than all of France – so the diversity of craft styles is equally huge. Main styles include toys made in the city of Abaetetuba out of the pulp of miriti, a type of palm native to the region. The calabash bowls of Santarém, in the west of the state, are also obtained from the fruits of another native tree and are embellished with itricate, unique artworks. Crafters across Pará often take advantage of straw, twigs

The toy makers from Abaetetuba

Softly-spoken Pirias is busy. He is preparing several items to take to a market and still needs to prepare for a workshop he will be hosting in a city that is hundreds of miles away from his hometown of Abaetetuba, in the state of Pará, extreme north of Brazil. Still, the artisan, real name José Plácido da Silva, finds a bit of time to chat to us. Abaetetuba is the home of toys made out of the pulp of miriti, a palm native to the north of the country and Pirias is the most recognized representative of this kind of craft in the whole of Brazil. The toy maker credits his fame and recent success – which includes a host of exhibitions and workshops across Brazil, as well as being picked as one of the few artisans to represent his state in the shops set up by the government during the

Brazilian craft we can only admire

At Gift Brazil, we aim to make genuine Brazilian artisan art and craft available to the world. This means that our team is always on the road, all over Brazil meeting with artisans and encouraging them to join our collective. Recently we were up in the extreme north of Brazil in Belém. Then we went to the extreme west of the country in the Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland in the entire world – very close to the border with Bolivia. Some of the artisans we meet are in very remote places, but we don’t have many requirements for including someone in the collective – the main requirement is that they are producing interesting products that we would like to showcase online! Sometimes, we meet artisans that produce great work, but we just cannot include them in the Gift Brazil collective because they don’t use email or other basic technologies. All orders