***To Brazil With Love

To Brazil With Love By Dr. Charles D. Schmitz and Dr. Elizabeth A. Schmitzr "the marriage doctors" Authors of the “Best Relationship Book of 2008” INDIE Book Awards Gold Medal Winner Golden Anniversaries: The Seven Secrets of Successful MarriageAvailable at Golde Anniversaries.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and at Bookstores During our just concluded trip to Brazil and Argentina, we made a wonderful new friend. Her name is Maria Elza. Her friends just call her Elza. That’s what we are privileged to call her now. Elza is Italian by ancestral origin. And while she and her husband, Paulo, reside in Rio de Janeiro, she is all Italian! She is funny, expressive, and a true romantic at heart. Elza and her man are very much in love. While we were with Elza, Paulo would call 3-4 times during the day checking on her. Our purpose in going to Brazil was to interview some happily married couples for our new book, “Simple Things Matter in Love and Marriage.” Elza played a key role in that effort. Every time we travel we meet new and interesting people. And the good news – the people we meet are rarely ever boring, no matter what the country. On this trip we met a variety of very charming people, but none more so than Elza. For seven days she drove us around the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area in her car. We saw magnificent coastlines full of people enjoying the beaches of Rio (Copacabana, Ipanema, LeBlon, Barra), beautiful mountains, elaborate favellas of poor people put together like puzzles on the hillsides, gorgeous forests, and busy streets. Without Elza’s thorough knowledge of Brazil, and Rio in particular, we would have missed so much. We also had the good fortune of eating at a number of magnificent restaurants like Baracuda and Armando & Federico. We ate at fun ones like La Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema). All the while Elza told us stories about Rio and the Brazilians as we munched on the magnificent food and drank the spectacular Brazilian wine. Speaking of Brazilian wine – we were flabbergasted at the quality of their wine, and frankly, had heard nothing about it prior to our trip. We are connoisseurs of Chilean and Argentine South American wines but had never purchased a Brazilian wine until this trip. Their wine industry is one of the best-kept secrets in the world, but we doubt that will be true for long. We have already alerted our neighborhood shop to be on the lookout for us for these great wines. We were pleased to note that their quality was recently recognized in a San Francisco, California wine tasting. We fell in love with the people of Brazil. They are warm, friendly, passionate, caring, and family-focused. We went to Brazil to discover the people, learn about love Brazilian style, see the beautiful sights, dance the Bossa Nova, enjoy their food, and learn all we could about marriage in Brazil. The trip exceeded our very high expectations and while it is good to be home, we will miss the many friends like Elza we met along the way – friends like Lucia, Cristiana, Attilio, Arlette, Paulo, Daniel, Hector, and Sonia, to name a few, who will always have a place in our hearts and minds. We witnessed love Brazilian style and we liked it! Love well!