Our daily bread

This is the bakery where I buy bread most mornings. I hop on my trusty, rusty cruiser, often with Grace as my co-pilot in her little saddle, and pedal up to the mouth of our street. Then it's past the feed store, the general store, and two butcher shops. Just as the hill starts to get steep, there is: "Mais que delicia," More than delicious, a little hole in the wall with a yellow storefront.

Our main interest is the so-called "manual bread" that the fellow with the helmet is grabbing out of the bin on the right. You can look through that window into the kitchen, and they slide the bread through from the other side. If you are lucky you get it right when it comes out, and it heats up your leg as you pedal home. Sometimes we buy other stuff, too: little chocolate cakes, sweetbreads of various kinds, sliced "form bread" as they call sandwich bread here. Sometimes in the evening they have pizzas, too.

It's all pretty cheap: the manual breads are 25 Brazilian cents per, about 10 cents each; a loaf of bread costs a little more than a buck. Sometimes in the evening they have pizzas, too, which you can take home and bake, for 3 or 4 bucks.