I love a man in a uniform

Tonight Peter, Dave (Peter's dad), Nina ( Dave's wife), and I went out for pizza and beer at F & F's, a restaurant in town. While they don't have pitchers, they have beer that comes in giant 1 L bottles, so it's sort of like buying a pitcher. The pizza was amazing. It's funny, but Brazilians eat their pizza with a knife and fork. And they have napkins that are tiny and feel almost like waxed paper.

Peter and the Giant Beer.

Our pizza - half tomato, bacon and onion; half sausage (pepperoni style), ham and onion. Mushrooms aren't really any option.

They have bags of chips and we grabbed a couple for appetizers. Good ol' Nacho Cheese Doritos and Cebolitos - Brazilian Funyuns!

While we were finishing up, a couple of Policia Militar stopped in to pick up dinner. Brazil has a different sort of police system than we have in the U.S. Natividade da Serra has a population of about 2,500 in town and maybe 5,000 in the surrounding area. There are a couple of local cops employed by the city, and a few people who work for the equivalent of the U.S. Forest Service because we are so far out in Nowhere Land, but most of the policing is done by members of the Policia Militar (federal police.). There's really no such thing as county sheriffs or state troopers.

Nina is a lawyer and the Presidente do Conselho Tutelar (similar to a federal Child Protective Services) for the region. Because she sometimes has to deal with difficult family situations, she knows the police who work in the area pretty well. Mathias and Feres stopped to chat for a while as they waited for their food. Mathias and I talked about the Sonics. ... and American football. 

Mathias has been with the P.M. for 7 years. Their regular uniforms include bullet-proof vests that they wear all of the time.

Police car! The photo is dark, but I was too lazy to open Photoshop to fix it.  Maybe tomorrow.

Nina and Feres chat for a bit. Feres and Mathias both live about an hour away from Natividade da Serra. The Policia Militar don't live in the same towns where they police. It's set up that way to help avoid corruption.

Back in November, criminals robbed one of the banks in town -- with machine guns. They also blew up the ATM with a bomb. FOR REAL. Feres spent five years policing in a city of 600,000, but said he had never seen anything like this robbery. He was shot in the shoulder and his partner at the time (not Mathias) was shot in the knee. "It was the longest minute of my life," he said. (OK, it was in Portuguese, but that's the translated version.) The bad guys got away. They had several cars and while there's only one road to get out of town, there are all sorts of tiny dirt side roads and the bank robbers knew the area well.

Both were really great guys and it was cool to hear about their jobs.