The rituals that survived four continents

I make cafezinho every morning in São Paulo. Six grams of beans. Hot water. A small porcelain cup. That's the whole ritual.

I expected more. My grandparents were born in four different countries - Syria, Lebanon, Latvia, the Netherlands - and at some point I assumed that being descended from a four-continent diaspora would leave me with a house full of inherited recipes, prayers, gestures, and rules about who drinks first. It hasn't. What I actually inherited is the felt sense that culture is something you carry across borders, not something you receive in a single piece. That's a slipperier inheritance than I wanted.

So I had to assemble.

What I actually do

The cafezinho is one. I learned to drink coffee like that here, in Brazil, after I moved back to São Paulo in January 2025. Before that I'd lived in Switzerland since I was 7 - rural Bern, near Thun - and Swiss coffee is a different ritual. Slower. With cake, often. I miss it sometimes. But the cafezinho is what marks 7am for me now.

Then there's the music. When I'm with family in Brazil, I play guitar. Other people sing. Nobody hires a DJ for a churrasco. You eat for hours, somebody pulls out an instrument, and the afternoon goes wherever the chord changes take it.

I have a pressure cooker for feijão. I take care of plants in our house in São Paulo, which my Brazilian friends find amusing, because the morning routine of watering plants is something I picked up from my parents' vegetable garden in Bern, not from anywhere tropical. It's a Swiss inheritance dressed in tropical leaves.

I started using perfume after the move. Not because I decided to. Because in Brazil people take fragrance seriously and you absorb it. And I still dress the way I dressed in Switzerland: neutral colors, calm, closer to silent luxury than to tropical print. That part I haven't undone.

On Sundays I walk after lunch. That's pure Bern. The walk after lunch is one of the few things that survived the move intact.

Why the small ones matter more

Here's what I've been thinking about. The rituals that didn't survive - the elaborate inheritance from four continents I'd expected - those weren't real to begin with. My grandparents didn't sit me down and teach me Aramaic morning prayers or Latvian midsummer practices. The diaspora skipped two generations and arrived at me as names on a family tree, not as a practice.

What did survive is small. Cafezinho. A guitar at a churrasco. A pressure cooker. Sunday walks. Plants. Dressing quietly. Wearing perfume like a Brazilian and walking like someone from Bern. None of these are dramatic. They don't make a documentary. But they're mine in a way the inheritance I expected wasn't, because I chose them, or they chose me, after the actual move.

That's the logic of how we're building Tropinest. Not by claiming to inherit rituals we don't have. By curating the small ones that anchor a day, from the cultures we actually know, and offering them as starting points rather than as folklore.

What's coming

We're sourcing from Brazilian artisans for the first launch - personal care and home decor - and the products will come with the ritual context they sit inside. Not "this is a Brazilian thing." More like: this is the kind of thing you do at 7am, or after lunch on a Sunday, or when you're trying to slow your house down.

If a ritual matters, it survives a move. The four-continent ones in my family didn't. The small ones did. That's what we're building from.