Living in Brazil

The holidays have disrupted my plans to resume more regularly blogging, but I plan to get back there next week. Feliz Ano Novo!

I wanted to strongly recommend one of the books I brought with me:

I’ve finally started to read it now after living in Brazil for months. I should have checked it out sooner! A lot of my blog entries are pretty good matches to paragraphs in this book and I could have learned some of these things the easy way. A lot of the comments and advice in this book are things that I would be likely to tell a visiting friend. Congratulations, Volker Poelzl, I think you did a really good job.

I’ll probably find things to nitpick as I read it in more detail, but so far it’s really great.

Not so distant past, a blog for foreigners living in Porto Alegre: My Porto Alegre.

I was googling information about visiting the local zoo and a helpful post from this blog popped up.

This list is from a Brit, particularly timed for the holiday season:

1. “Happy Holidays.”

Translation: “Merry Christmas but I realise you might be Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Bahai, something even more exotic, agnostic or Godless and I don’t want to offend you.”

2. “Have a Nice Day.”

Translation: “I would like you to have a pleasant time today” or “I hate you” - or anything in between.

3. “You’re welcome.”

Translation: Meaningless Pavlovian response to thank you.

4. “Do the math.”

Translation: “Work it out yourself, stupid.”

5. “Let’s visit with each other.”

Translation: “We should spend time together.”

6. “How are you today?”

Translation: “We mean nothing to each other, but let’s pretend.”

7. “Good luck with that.”Translation: “You have no chance at all.”

8. “Oh my gosh!”

Translation: “I fear you may feel that taking the Lord’s name in vain is blasphemous.”

9. “Can I use your bathroom?”

Translation: “I would like to use your lavatory.”

10. “Not so much.”

Translation: “That’s completely wrong.” Used on me in classic fashion by a Clinton aide back in February.

I think this is a pretty interesting list that says as much about Brits as it does Americans.  I wonder what sort of things the Brazilians think about Gringos, Americans in particular?  I know I’ve seen a lot of ugly American tourists in Rio and a few in Porto Alegre.  Usually it’s rude comments about women when they think no one around speaks English.  The Brazilians ogle, the Americans comment.  The other thing is a rare lack of an attempt with Portuguese — I had a taxi driver here in Porto Alegre tell me he picked up Americans from the airport all the time, and they all had addresses on paper for him and spoke nary a lick of Portuguese.  That was me once, but no more.

Other candidates?

Passing this on based on advice I got from friends when I moved down here.  Screens on windows don’t seem tremendously common here, and there are a lot of reasons to open the windows.  Most apartments don’t seem to have central air, so window air conditioners are common (what I have), and just opening a couple of windows to provide a breeze is welcome.  Also it’s nice to crack a window open in the bathroom when showering, or in the kitchen when cooking.

All of these things makes it inevitable that insects like mosquitos get in.

As far south as Porto Alegre, which is a warm and humid place many months of the year, mosquitoes are a minor annoyance.  There doesn’t seem to be Denge fever here like there was in Rio last year, or other mosquito-borne diseases like malaria in the north of Brazil (travelers are required to get shots if going to the Amazon, for example).  Still, who likes mosquito bites?

My friends strongly recommended “Raid Protector,” which is a liquid-based repellent used with an electrical plug to provide heat.  These work for 45 days without refill, and repell mosquitoes.  I don’t recall how much they cost, but it wasn’t excessive.  I only had minor issues with mosquitoes before, so I don’t know if they’re as great as my friends claimed, but they are easy and convenient, and I haven’t seen any mosquitoes this week.

This originally got misplaces as a “page” rather than a “post” as I originally intended.  I may make a set of FAQ pages about various issues for the sidebar, but for now I’m inserting this in as a post, even though you may have seen it already.

If you didn’t know it, DVDs have codes for different regions.  The world is split up into several regions as far as DVDs and DVD players are concerned.  It’s ridiculous and evil in my opinion.

Basically, if you travel between the regions, you’re screwed.  You’re expected to have multiple DVDs and multiple players, as you can’t use the same stuff everywhere you go.

Personally, I like having Brazilian DVDs to practice my Portuguese.  Officially, my laptop only lets me switch between regions a handful of times.

There are DVD players that have codes to unlock all the regions.  If you’re interested in this, do some googling first.  I successfully unlocked a portable DVD player, but it was a cheap system and the remote control system required to run the menus didn’t last.

Do as I say, not as I do, one of my more absent-minded professors used to say.  A lot.

I’m saying it now, too.

I should have learned already given my experience with my first slingbox, not trying to set it up until the last second, and then not being able to return it when I got back three months later to realize it was broken.

TEST YOUR ELECTRONICS BEFORE YOU TAKE THEM ABROAD.

This is no guarantee something won’t break later, but if it is broken in the first place it is much more difficult to get it fixed or replaced when you’re abroad.

Which brings me to one of my new purchases.  My old Ipod shuffle was starting to have trouble holding a charge.  This happens with a lot of portable electronics over time, and although this was only a year since I’d bought it, I did get a lot of use out of the thing.  Not too expensive either ($50) and new ones are now available with 2 GB for under $70.  They’re fantastic for use while working out, small enough to clip on and leave everything hands free while wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

The new one works, except for its “shuffle” feature that randomizes songs.  Annoying, because I’m lazy about synching and reloading my shuffle and don’t like memorizing musical sequences.  I begin to anticipate the next song automatically and it is distracting.  Anyway, too expensive here in Brazil to just up and replace it and too difficult to exchange now.  Would have been easy back in the States.

Oh well.  Another lesson, and not that expensive of a lesson in the grand scheme of things.

My parents are getting me a kindle for Christmas, which I’ve asked them to bring down to me in March.  I’m going to ask them to test it as soon as it comes in.

OK, I was pretty annoyed when I discovered that all the shows that advertise “go online to watch this show for free” are not available outside the U.S.  Hulu.com, I’m looking at you.  Some of the Sarah Palin Saturday Night Live sketches were not so easy to track down for me, although I did eventually find them.

I don’t do bit torrent or subscribe to an illegal download sites.

Software and TV/movie privacy is a way of life for Brazilians, however.  I have Brazilian friends who would happily pay full-price for DVDs and video games in the U.S., but not in Brazil.  Why not?  Well, beyond the cultural issue, sometimes the shows and games are not available at all in Brazil, or only at prices much higher than you’d pay in the U.S., so I can’t fault them too much on those points.  Even when you buy some things abroad, the companies have regional codes that can prevent them from working on players sold in other countries, which I think is a crock of shit.  But I digress…

A grad student of mine pointed out a website called Surf the Channel.  It is a clearinghouse for links to all sorts of movies, TV shows, and more that are available online.  There was a movie I was looking for down here to buy, but I couldn’t find it.  I was eventually able to watch it via a link from Surf the Channel.  I don’t know how legal all the links are, and I do know that some have limits (e.g., 72 minutes per day of free video, much more for a monthly subscription).

But if you’re sitting in a foreign country annoyed that you’re falling behind watching a show like Heroes, well, there are ways to keep up.

This is an edited version of a post from my main blog.  The key point to add is that I have used this technology now down here in Brazil and it has worked pretty well.  Onward…

Electronics are really expensive in Brazil due to large import taxes, so I’ve been buying a lot of those (portable harddrive, little mini-laptop, new ipod, etc.).  Also there are some electronics we have now in the 21st century that make the world a smaller place.  One of them is the sling box.

Basically, this is a little box that connects to your TV and puts it on the internet.  It also has an infrared output that mimics a TV remote  control, letting you control the TV over the internet.  Change channels, buy things on demand.  Everything is normal, and comes over the internet to you as you travel.

We’re not talking streaming video either.  Not exactly.  You can access the slingbox via slingbox software or their internet site.  Their video uses your computer’s hard drive to write a buffer and keep playback steady.  They also have an adaptive smoothing algorithm, apparently, that keeps the video flowing at the expensive of resolution.  These two things make watching the slingbox video more like watching TV and less like watching internet video on a slow connection.

OK, some drawbacks.  The first slingbox I bought over the summer was a dud.  The networking part didn’t work.  I didn’t try to set it up until the day before I left the country back in August, and as a result I spent three months without American TV when I should have had it available.  When I returned last month, it took me a while to figure out the problem, get a new slingbox, and get it set-up.  I had to consult customer service a number of times (happily, easy and free to reach).  I also had to buy a real router.  I had been using a cable modem, a switch box, and a wireless access point, but this set-up didn’t work for some technical reasons.

Anyway, I finally got everything working and am pretty impressed with the final result.  I can be half-way around the world and watch my TV back in Laramie.

Now I just have to be strong enough to watch what I really want to watch and not let myself wallow in American TV while I’m trying to be productive and learn Portuguese and Brazilian culture.

Oh, and one more thing that I didn’t appreciate before I left the U.S.  I thought that all these shows that advertise they can be watched for free on the internet, like Heroes, can’t be outside the U.S.  You might be able to track them down somewhere like Surf the Channel, but the official sites like Hulu.com block the foreign IP addresses.

I expect to resume more-or-less daily blogging here now that I’m back.  It’s been tough, however, as I’m a natural night owl and that, combined with the five hours of jet lag, has made my schedule a very late one and I haven’t been getting very much done in the few days I’ve been here.

They say you need about a day per hour of time difference to adjust, which means five hours in my case, but I think you throw that out the window when you take your second day and stay up ridiculously late and then overcompensate with a 10+ hour sleep that makes the time difference even worse.

I’ve lived through it before, and I will again.  But I am happy that it is summer here and the sun is up late, because otherwise there was a day or two here I would not have seen it.

My wireless router also died my second-day back, making the computer thing tricky.  I had to go buy a new one, finally, which I did.  Let me note a few things about shopping at the malls here.

Christmas (Natal) is coming up, and the malls were crowded.  They also seemed open a little later than I thought they were.  Could be summer or the holiday, or normal — I haven’t pushed closing time too often.

I suspect this is true in the United States, too, but I am particular aware of it here as I’m shopping less on the internet and more at malls.  Prices vary a lot.  One store had the wireless router for $R299, and another for $R199.  Same mall.  I’ve seen this a lot, particular with electronics and video games where prices can vary by $50 or $100 easily, and the only difference is which store you walked into first.  So, shop around a lot before buying if you can afford the time.  In the States, I like to have an idea of the best internet price, and that’s easy to do with various shopping sites.  Here there are probably similar sites, but I don’t know too many yet.

I did some Christmas shopping back in the U.S. because despite changes in the conversion rate, many electronics are still half the price there that they are here.  I bought a little mini-laptop there for $400 that I saw in the mall yesterday here for $R1600 — about $700.  I had no problems at customs (I’ve never been stopped actually), but I understand that you need to pay a 50% tax on items over $500, so a $400 computer is really perfect.

Anyway, look for more stuff here.  I’m going to be blogging soon about prices at the grocery store, furniture shopping, the car rental experience, and more.

I am back in Brazil finally.  Freaked about a few things at the last second, but no problems in the end.  I was concerned about not making the Brazil flight because they didn’t initially assign me a seat and it turned out the flight was oversold.  That was a blessing in disguise.  I got my first complimentary first-class upgrade for international travel and really enjoyed the meals, wine, and laid-back seat on the long overnight flight.  Being a frequent flyer and having some status (silver medallion with Delta, with 200k miles on my account) paid off.  I’ve actually been getting domestic upgrades about half the time recently with them.

Anyway, it feels natural being back.  Not so much culture shock on the return here, and even though I slacked off on the Portuguese it has been returning fast.

Now I just have to fight the jet lag!