We didn’t spend the weekend at the land this week, instead of me going to the land on Friday to meet Beth, she cycled back from there to Canela to meet me and we caught the bus to Porto Alegre. We’ve been wanting to go there for a while, because being a large city there’s a lot more specialised items we can find there that aren’t available in Canela or Gramado. Beth wanted to get some special rice and some Granola at a good price, and I needed to find a place that sells electronic components so I can start experimenting with some earth energy devices.
The first shop we went to was Severo Roth which is conveniently located only a few minutes away from the bus terminal, it’s a huge place packed with people and has every possible thing you’d need from germanium diodes to microwave oven motor replacements – and you can order over the net too. The prices were pretty steep though, but it’s still a very useful resource to know about. My favourite place we found though was a little shop called Gebeli which is situated just around the corner from Beth’s friend’s apartment where we were staying, it has all the commonly needed components at very reasonable prices and was a much calmer environment with nice helpful staff – you can also order over the net from them too 🙂
We’ve also been looking for a battery suitable for using with our solar panel (which I need to construct from 36 individual solar cells I bought in Curitiba) and charge controller so we have power for our net connection and LED light bulbs, but we’ve had a lot of trouble finding anything for a practical price. Then when we were going to a cafe to meet one of Beth’s friends we saw a small battery shop on the other side of the road, so we decided to pop in and ask if they had anything, or if not, if they knew of anywhere we could go. Well it turned out that the place was actually very large inside and had a huge range of batteries including the exact kind we were looking for at a good price 🙂 and better still it turns out that the owner travels to Canela each weekend and said he can drop it off at the Pensão for us! This was really good luck because it weights over 27Kg and batteries require a special expensive courier service to transport. We got a 115Ah Freedom DF2000 battery for R$440.
We’ve had a bit of time to look around the city when going to meet various different old friends of Beth’s. We paid a visit to her favourite Indian restaurant which was very nice. They have no menu there, everyone has the same meal that they’ve prepared for the day, which means there’s no difficult decisions to make and you can’t eat too much!
