Manaus Day 1

Day 1:

Today I went on the city orientation tour of Manaus and it was a pleasant tour but the overall weather was very humid so I was uncomfortable part of the time. We went to the Teatro de Amazonas which is the opera house in Manaus. It has an old Portuguese architecture design. Much of the nicer buildings in the area were generally from when the Portuguese colonized Manaus a few hundred years ago. Most of the buildings around the area are just boxes shaped and very boring type buildings however there was a church styled in almost a Victorian style architecture.

It was quite amazing but I have to say that in Manaus, every street is jam packed with vendors and just people selling stuff from fruit to souvenirs and everything in between. We did actually visit a fish market that sold so many different types of fish that I couldn't even count the amount of different types from the Amazon!

The big highlight of everything was the very interesting statue just outside the Teatro which is significant because it reflects the places that actually sailed to and helped shape Manaus to what it currently is today. It was such a fascinating experience to look at this statue and see who traded. (It is Europe, Asia,and America )

Eating the amazon was an amazing experience of being able to cook using the exotic fish of the amazon. I went to a culinary institute called Senac in Manaus. There, I was able to not only observe the making of the dish but also was able to assist in cooking the dish. The fish we cooked was Pirarucu (pronounced Pi-ra-ru-su)

We had this fish three different ways, fried, broiled and soaked in a sauce. We used many different ingredients including a native herb that numbs your tongue from the three different peppers that were being used. In the end I tried a very good extra virgin olive oil that tasted like peppers but it was very good.

As we went through the cooking process we created many dishes from one thing so our finished product looked like this plate below J