Dinner and Racing

After trying various ethnic foods on the island last week, Ryan and I decided to try out the Chinese restaurant in Angra, just a short drive away now that they built a highway on this island.  Well, our plans were not quite going to work out for us because, well, the owners went away on vacation for a month.  Interestingly, one of my students (from the American School) here told me he saw me the other night and I asked where.  He told me in Angra and I asked what he was doing there.  Turns out we were not the only ones who wanted to give the Chinese a try.  Better luck next month.

Oh well, there is plenty more to see and do in Angra, so we walked around a little.  This is actually the largest city on the island.  The main square was closed off and had some activity going on.  Sical is a brand of coffee here.  

Since Chinese was a No-Go, we decided to splurge and hit the fancy restaurant in Angra.  We have eaten here once before and it was really good.  

Welcome to Ambientes Com Sabores.

Nice warm bread to start.

They have very fancy looking appetizers that come to the table.  Ryan at most of it because of the prosciutto.  The purplish color spread is octopus, like a pate, and it is very good.

You can see the octopus better here.

Wine!  Oh glorious wine.  I can honestly say wine is super European.  I do not think there is a table without wine in the nicer restaurants.  You just order it and it is cheap and good.  Now, this was a little more expensive, but was recommended to us.  It was a Chardonnay and cost about $13 euro, or almost $18 US.  Either way, their expensive wine was nothing compared to even cheap wines on US menus.

For dinner I ordered the sesame crusted tuna steak.

It came with sweet potato too.

Ryan ordered the Cherne, which is sea bass (don't quote me on that one).  This was served with rice.  We actually split them so we both got to have some of each.  Ryan ordered the tuna last time and it was really good, so he was happy to share.

It was Friday night dinner, so we splurged on dessert.  At this time we did not know we were going to make all of those chocolate chip cookies, so dessert sounded very necessary.  We split both.  This was the brownie sundae.  Oh boy was this good.

Then we also had the 3 mousses.  There was light chocolate, dark chocolate and the third seemed more like vanilla than white chocolate.  These were really, really good.

So there you have our delicious dinner.  Now, while we were waiting for the restaurant to open, we discovered the roads were being closed off and we were curious about the set up in the square, so we asked about it and it turns out they were having some street racing.  I should mention these are basically cobblestone streets, single lane, curvy and it had just started to drizzle.  Sounds like disaster, but actually no one got hurt.  These are all pictures of the cars speeding by.  All drivers had helmets on and they were spaced out so no two drivers were competing for the road at the same time in the same spot.  It was fun to watch these cars.  Sorry for the blurriness of some, but they were going fast.

We wound up watching for an hour or so and the rain was holding off which was good.  It was really neat to see because I have never seen anything like this.  It seemed so Fast and the Furious!  

QUESTIONS:  Have you ever watched any street racing?  Do they do this in your town?

This is one of those busy weeks for me as I have a grad class going on now.  This was one that I was really looking forward to because it deals with adolescents and I currently work with kids here.  Sorry if I am unable to stay caught up on reading all of your great blogs.

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The fabulous Kristen from Swanky RD is having a purse giveaway on her blog to celebrate her 6 month blogiversary, so CLICK HERE to enter.