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If you walk the streets in Brazil for long enough, surely you will get hungry. And eventually you might get so hungry that it will occur to you that you should eat vast quantities, in what in Argentina is known as a tenedor libre (lit: free fork) and what we call in the United States, an “all you can eat buffet.” But in Brazil there are two kinds of all-you-can-eat type places. In one, you get up and serve yourself buffet (say: bif-A), and in the other, the waitstaff circulate with giant platters of nibbles, usually in the form of unknown cuts of meat, or pizza, depending on what kind of restaurant it is. The latter foodfest is called a rodízio (say: ho DJIZ iu), which means, literally rotation.

My Portuguese comprehension is fairly excellent, but I sometimes get tripped up for a second when a word I know is used in a way I haven’t heard before. I could figure out that my friend was talking about when she said that on Fridays she’d take the metro, rather than drive, because of the rodízio, I quickly surmised that this word is also used for the rotating restriction on driving to control traffic and pollution in major cities in Latin America. But for a moment I imagined a Friday of endless waiters ambling about with oversized palettes of (in my case) pizza. And you know? I’m thinking that pizza delivered around the city would make people much happier than rotating traffic restrictions.