It sounded rather tropical to me, ‘Belo Horizonte, beautiful horizon’, but the blunt truth is that I had zero clues about what to find there. So I decided to fill up that initial hollowness of perception with some meaning of my own. I decided that for me Belo Horizonte would be the city of visual arts and vegan food. Why? Because I fucking love visual arts and vegan food.
I thought a good start would be staying in the house of a vegetarian guy, Alex, who I met in a hostel in Ouro Preto and who had invited me to stay over. Although in retrospective I must confirm this generosity was mostly intended to satisfy his own lack of carnal satisfaction, he did show me the hidden treasures of his eternal homebase and provided me with some valid pointers on my vegan pilgrimage. Plus, as he didn’t trust mankind enough to provide his guests with a set of keys (I might load all those flatscreen tv’s he didn’t have in my tiny backpack you know) I had to leave the house together with him at the un-Christian time of 8AM, which provided me with plenty of time to scrutinize every single patch of the city.
A city that wasn’t tropical at all, by the way. It was a modern maze of millennium-buildings and shiny mirror-glassed frameworks, sprouting out of the network of tumultuous streets smoking of the non-moving polonaise of honking vehicles trapped in the congestion staining this business boom-town. Luckily, in between this concrete labyrinth vibrates a cultural energy hardly leveled by any other Brazilian destination I recently checked off the budget bucket list: Arthouse cinemas, hedonistic brain-fart-art, classic opera, open-air theatre, you name it! And embrace yourself for the good news: you won’t pay a dime. All cultural activities are free free FREE.
I felt this was going to be good.
To get a bit of a feel for the city I kicked off with the Museu Historico, for which I had to wait 2 hours before it opened (see, it doesn’t make sense at all to rise and shine early, it’s a contemporary myth). I would love to write that it was worth the wait, but to be frank with you, I don’t know. You see, the security guard thought it was great fun to let a gringa get sunburnt outside in the inner-city swelter without informing her there were no exhibitions whatsoever inside. Luckily, to soothe the pain I could comfort myself with a little stroll through the connected art square stuffed with place-specific historical artifacts…
… and enter the temporary exposition about Belo Horizonte’s bygone times of protest. For example, in 2010 the city ordinance prohibited the holding of events of any nature in the Praça da Estação… upon which the Belo Horizontinos decided to turn the entire site into a beach, showing up in swimwear to bathe in the fountains, tan horizontally on beach chairs and dance the hot evenings away with sultry beach parties. I appreciate that stuff. The rebel in me approves.
I continued to Praça da Liberdade, the cultural aorta of the city. I entered the Centro de Conhecimento to find an expo about the rivers of Minas Gerais. Not really sure what a museum has to add to that, but I’m sure it attracts the interest of some lost souls. On the other floor someone had taken the effort to outline the history of our planet from cosmology to human influence, which actually caught enough of my attention to read the displays. Not bad. Not great either.
Food. I needed food.
Following the trail of my empty stomach I took course to the Mercado Central, a place Alex had recommended to me. Probably he did that because he’s a vegetarian, as the only thing you can find there besides meat and fish is cheese.
… and hot sauce in all shapes and fires, 3x hurray!
To me killing an animal by exhausting her body by eternal pregnancy is even more cruel than just ending it on the spot with direct slaughter (a normal cow can turn 25, a milk cow dies at the age of 4-5 after a life of suffering), so besides some nuts and fruits I didn’t trace down one piece of nutrition no one had to take the beating for. At least not there. Belo Horizonte is literally filled to the brim with vegan restaurants, and every ‘mainstream’ eatery has at least 2 to 3 full-vegan options. O Vegano is one of those.
I kind of gave up the hope to try the Brazilian specialty of linguica, as sausages generally tend not to be plant-based. O Vegano makes it happen though! Like most of us I wasn’t raised vegan, so yes I DO know what a sausage tastes like and NO I’m not missing out… because this tastes exactly the same! Great food for an even better price.
Properly fueled for another cultural hotspot: Memorial Minas Gerais.
A place that, without blinking, I could label as the best Belo Horizonte has to offer. Weird art flirting with history, a right-in-your-face-interpretation of locality and high-end interactive technology to play and simply be amazed. Brazil for sure knows how to make museums fun! (The memory of Rio’s Museu de Amanhã swiftly fires through my memory). The municipality pumped a whole lotta cash into this place and you can see that in every single detail. This museum got everything right.
Maybe I should celebrate this little find with another vegan meal?
Alex agreed, so he dragged me to some underground hang-out far above the ground. Maleta is a decayed shopping mall that got some life pumped into it again by swanky New Agers.
Beer-brewery-barbershops, vegan(!?)-tattoo-studios-with-organic-ink, hare-krishna-mindfulness-bookstores-serving-green-tea-in-recycled-glass-jars… you get the level of hipster I’m talking about right?
I passed Las Chicas Vegan, but decided to go for Boteca Vegano Olympia. I was just really surprised by the sign stating this wasn’t just a normal vegan restaurant, but a FEMINIST vegan restaurant… I had simply no clue what feminism tastes like. Non-vegan feminist food could maybe be a steamy dish of mussels or some no-nonsense crumpled rose of raw beef with a little chickpea on top… but plant-based? In reality it came down to two cheerful lesbians serving a plate of saltless pumpkin soup accompanied by some drinks coming out of a fridge blemished with on-purpose-imperfect female nudes and combative statements. Close enough.
To even it out we ended the night with some machismo at a local language exchange event (only in Brazil two men attack each other in front of the female to settle who spoke to her first), to go to bed early forced by the brutal morning alarm.
After an energizing açaí breakfast (I stayed 90 days in Brazil which means I ate açaí 90 times) I hit the road of culture once again. Museu da Imagem e do Som existed, so I went there. I learned without doubt something very important here: just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s worth your time. Next.
Museu Inima de Paula, named after a local painter that for sure couldn’t be blamed for a lack of productivity. The good news is that quantity didn’t beat quality in his case, which provides us with a rather extensive collection of colorful fauvism and expressionism. Something that really grabbed me positively by the throat (yes, you can be grabbed by the throat positively, I’m sure… like during nice raw sex or when someone saves your life by a Heimlich maneuver, to give an example). If Gauguin had some lost brother in Brazil, this guy is probably him.
Museu de Moda then? I used to be a ‘fashionista’ once and even earned some bucks modeling my way around anorexia-paradise, but today I entered with fluorescing hiking shoes, jeans and a shabby rain jacket. People change. However, I wasn’t that much out of tune, as the only people around were the construction guys preparing a new exposition. The building itself was worth the shot though.
Vegan 'o clock! Time for Yan Shan Zay, a veggie paradise where the food is so good you have to think in kilo’s instead of grams. Hardly ever did I see a buffet that rich, that wide-ranging and that mouthwatering delicious.
You see all that food?! Even if you take one spoon of everything you will stretch up your stomach to sizes you didn’t even know it was capable of. I literally ate until I was absolutely miserable, but I had to finish as it was that damn good.
* Look at me being a greedy bastard! Sushi, dumplings, tempura, tofu, sun-dried tomatoes, soy ‘chicken’, garden cress and whole grain rice tipped with 9 different kind of superfood-seeds and hotter-than-hot-sauce. Just bury me in this and I’ll eat my way out again.
I could hardly move after this culinary neck race, but I still managed to drag myself to Palacio dos Artes.
I knew if I would do a happy dance all that sushi and soy meat would find its way up again, so I just quietly high-fived myself.
This place is all a cultural junkie could possibly crave for. A giant palace stuffed with weirder-than-weird brainwaves of mentally troubled creatives, cult cinemas and operette.
And once again, all freer than free. Have fun, my children.
What did I tell you? Weird enough for you?
Because I gained at least 3kg after that last meal I decided to be all responsible and healthy again by detoxing that shit out again with some bohemian fruit juices. At another vegan bar, while I’m at it. Camaraderia Gastrobar is a great opportunity if you want to make a statement against our capitalist society… by getting rid of all your money. Rich kid alert.
As Alex still wasn’t home yet I decided to kill my time with a visit at Centro de Arte Popular.
It was just that, killing time. You could see they really tried, but not one brain cell was stimulated in these dull rooms full of brain-desensitizing relics. Unless you’re dying to see 8 exhibition rooms full of scales, wood carvings and childish paintings made by adults, then please ignore my words and get your ass over there a.s.a.p.
If you want your killing-time-activity to be of a more inspiring nature maybe you should give Museu das Minas e do Metal a go. I kid you not. You think I give a flying fuck about diamonds or ehhhh let’s say, niobium? Yet, I had a marvelous time in this museum. Really, if you can make graphite interesting you’re good. Go, just… go.
Ok, enough, ENOUGH! You’d probably think I’d never hit my museum-limit, but I just did. If there are more I’m not interested. Bye. I just want to focus on eating now, thanks.
Veganza, that sounds like a place where I would stuff myself. Too bad for me they only serve after-10PM-dinners… for some unexplainable reason. So I stocked up on plant-based-cheddar-cheese-drops and soy-milk-caramels (stuff I suddenly realized I couldn’t live without after all these years) and marched to San Ro, another Asian buffet place. The place was slammed. You know that a vegetarian place is good if you see a bunch of carnivores punching each other to get that last scrap of tofu noodles. I decided to focus on the vegan sushi, as there are few things in life giving me greater pleasure. Some soy-meat-bapao on the side convinced me that dreams do come true if you simply keep faith.
That was it, I couldn’t eat any more vegan food in Belo Horizonte. Not because I didn’t want to or I had enough, but because I switched houses to Couchsurfer Bruno. And Bruno just looooves narcotics. And I love saying yes to things I never tried before. So XTC it was. If you’re under-aged and your parents just looked over your shoulder and told you to stop reading this, hold on, I have something wise to say: Kids, don’t try this at home.
Or try, yes please try, try everything, so you can cure your curiosity and conclude that this stuff sucks.
It was all fun and games UNTIL the pill did his job... then it throws you into this deep black energy-sucking hole of absolute apathy. I lost an entire day of my life lying horizontally on a couch, disturbing the draining thirst and headaches by tired moans once my heartbeat suddenly rapidly pumped through my veins, worrying if this might be the last time it beats at all… thinking back about the girls I heard my host ‘ordering’ at 5AM to quench his chemical need of sexual release.
[Your parents left the room? Ok, great: Trust me, just stay put with the marihuana, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca, that’s the real shit. Keeping it natural is always a good idea.]
So that was it. Belo Horizonte. I still had a day left to rent a bike to race those 19km around the Pampulha Lake in an hour. But museums and vegan food, that was what gave Belo Horizonte meaning.
What is it you want to find here?