sunday afternoon gas guzzling

weird moment earlier, whilst walking from ipanema to leblon along the high street.

i got to a junction just into leblon where there is a Shell petrol station on one corner of the junction. i've been past here before, and usually there's nothing very special about it. today, though, there were absolutely loads of people standing in groups, holding beers and chatting away. almost as though it was a bbq in someone's garden. all the while, an occasional car would pull in and attempt to cajole people out of the way so they could fill up with fuel.

it's pretty strange. why would people decide that a petrol station forecourt was a top place to socialise on sunday afternoon?

I'd been pondering this for a few minutes, when I remembered that someone told me the other day that cars in brasil are special in that the vast majority of them run not on petrol or diesel, but on pure alcohol. i've just checked this out. it's true, according to this extract from a website dedicated to telling you how to run your car on ethanol, not petroleum

In 1980, Brazil neatly solved both problems at once, along with their problem of really low prices on the world sugar market. So the military government declared that the countrys sugar cane production would go into making alcohol for fuel, and the car manufacturing companies in Brazil will have to make cars that run on alcohol.

The result? Twenty years later, alcohol fuel is much cheaper and much more available than petrol. When you rent a car at the airport, you have a choice between clean and cheap ethanol or a dirty and more expensive petrol fueled car. Ethanol will cost you about $2.50/gallon, while gasoline will cost $4.20/gallon.
Because of the successful and widespread use of alcohol fuel in Brazil, most manufacturers now make cars that are fuel injected, and this is controlled by a computer chip that can be changed out to make it into an FFV (flexible fuel vehicle).

anyway, i think with this knowledge we can solve my little mystery. if the petrol station is also an alcohol station, then sunday afternoon drinking on the forecourt starts to make a lot of sense :)