Cake, cheese bread, coffee, cheerful conversation, smiles and lots of fun: Welcome to a mineiro’s home. [mineiro = person born in Minas Gerais]
Don't think twice if a mineiro invites you to spend a few days in their home: pack up your bags and head for Minas Gerais. Mineiros are smiling and welcoming people, and will do everything to make you feel at home, as part of the family. With one of the nicest accents of the country, mineiros are known for using the interjection "Uai" in all their sentences, which according to them, serves to express almost everything: surprise, dismay, fright, impatience, terror or admiration, or to reinforce what has been said before, and what comes later.
Mineiros share a famous saying, which might explain the thousands of bars scattered in numerous corners of Minas Gerais: “já que não tem mar, vamos para o bar" [If there’s no sea, let’s go to a bar]. Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais, is the brazilian city with the largest number of bars per capita, can you believe it? In a cozy atmosphere and between typical snacks, such as the liver with jiló or pastel de angu and green corn, you can ask for a genuinely Brazilian and one of the most popular drinks: cachaça. Minas is a synonymous for quality cachaça, so be sure to ask for this typical drink from Minas Gerais to toast to the trip. Aguardente is the main ingredient of Caipirinhas.
You will notice the mineiro style in everything, like "cutting" the end of words by using a diminutive to offer that pedacim [slang for little piece] of cornmeal cake, with a freshly made cafezim [slang for small coffee]. Or at lunch, when mineiros serve their guests with A LOT of food: at the table, a variety of unique spices and flavors in the chicken with quiabo, the bean puree, sautéed kale, suckling pig roasted in the oven, pumpkin and coconut sweats, and on the famous ambrosia (milk fudge and eggs) that melts in your mouth. In the evening, the smell of cheese bread will take over the room in such a way that you will taste the cheese melting in your mouth, and you’ll be sure, at that moment, that you will come back more often to Minas Gerais.