The school where I take private Portuguese classes now has a nice website up:
http://www.englishoffice.com.br/
It has versions in Portuguese and English. The vast majority of their business is teaching English, but where you have language teachers who speak both English and Portuguese, English lessons are also often available.
So, I told my friend Leo I’d write a list of recommended science fiction and fantasy books that he has for sale online from his used bookstore USA-Brazil Books. This will focus on things that are a bit less well known in Brazil, authors other than Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, etc. Still, many somewhat well known authors, some much less so, and all excellent books.
We’ll start the list with all the editions of Garder Doziois edited Year’s Best Science Fiction. This has been the premier annual collection of the best in short science fiction for decades. Every edition is about 1000 pages long and almost every story is a gem. If you like short stories (up to and including novellas) these are can’t miss. I’ll include notes with the other entries.
Holders of long-term visas living in Brazil need to register with the Federal Police within 30 days of entry. Worst case scenario is probably getting hit with a R900 fine leaving the country if you don’t do it, and that’s enough threat to make me jump through some hoops. I imagine it can be worse if you get in trouble over something else, too.
Anyway, the official websites about this, at least the ones I could find, pretty much suck.
One of the best unofficial ones is here. It helped me get all my things straight. They also have a link to how to find where to go in your city.
Still, it took me three days. First I realized I needed copies made of all the pages in my passport. I also needed a couple more passport style photos. I also needed to print some documents — two documents to pay the fees for the registration and card fees. That was a trip to Centro with three stops.
One trip to the Federal Police building on Ipiringa to find out that they stop taking registrations at 2pm. This information is not on their telephone line or on their website. Typical government B.S.
Finally, one trip with all the right documents (basically all the stuff from the visa application, plus passport with visa, and the above, plus money). Arrived at 11AM. Waited for an hour and a half, then had to go pay after seeing someone, and then another wait. Finally I got fingerprinted with the gooey black ink on the official application form and was done by 1pm. I now have a temporary registration card that I carry with my passport and entry form.
I really should get certified copies of my passport and visa and stop being risky carrying these with me. There is a market for U.S. passports and it’s a pain to lose them, I am told.
Anyway, one more government task done.
Coming soon…I got a grant from the government to support the astronomy grad program, so I am going to need to get a bank account. To get that I need a “CPF” number, like a social security number. I will document that process.
Now, I have a slingbox and can watch my US TV, at least when it doesn’t interfere with the people renting my house. Sometimes the time zone works in my favor, sometimes it doesn’t. Also the DVR there is having problems temporarily, so I have to look for other options when I want to do things like watch NBA Basketball.
I’ve used NBA League Pass Broadband to try to do this. I say “try” because the first time I did it, everything worked ok except the server or internet connection couldn’t keep up and I barely got to watch anything. I just tried again and things look a lot better, but it has crashed once and took a long time to restart.
I think I can give it a tentive recommendation, especially if you have a good system with a good connection. It works internationally, and you can get a day pass to all the games for $5, and for more money get longer time periods.
Anyway, another option for international travelers who want to watch the NBA while outside the U.S.
I have a furnished apartment here in Porto Alegre, but it didn’t come with any office chairs to go with the nice desks, and the sofa sleeper it did come with just plain sucks.
So, I went shopping. There’s one of the big avenues here, Ipiringa, that has about 20-30 furniture stores (”Moveis”) all in a row along both sides. I took my Brazilian girlfriend for language backup and started in one store and vowed to keep going until I found what I wanted.
I need to work on the Portuguese and tried to engage all the salespeople who were generally attentive and helpful. Unfortunately I was getting a lot of “I don’t understand” in response to some of my questions. I have an accent and sometimes I can’t string together my limited vocabularly very fast into the phrases I want, but I usually manage to communicate better.
The problem came when I asked about chairs for an office. The world chair in Portuguses is “cadeira.” I have problems with that “r” that is a hard “r” rather than the one pronounced like an “h.” I can’t roll an r to save my life, at least without drinking, and I usually just fake it. Well, I was faking it badly that day, and it was coming out sounding like “cadeia.”
“Cadeia” means “prison.”
I was there with my girlfriend asking if they had any prisons for my office.
I guess this is natural in the language acquisition process and will probably happen again with other words in more embarrassing situations.
Anyway, after a dozen stores I ended up with a fold-out “sofa-cama” (sofa bed) for $R650 (delivered) from Lewis Moveis, and a nice office chair for $R330 (an extra fee on top of that for delivery) from La Torre Moveis. There were small sofa beds for as much as $R1000 more, but I didn’t like them much more than the one I got. I have a small living room, and the sofa fits it well and matches the colors. I’m happy with it.
Now I just need to figure out where I can buy a prison, like the one they had in the “Alcatraz Suite” at the motel we stayed at over New Year’s Eve…
New Year’s Eve in Porto Alegre was the emptiest I’d ever seen the place. Hardly any people on the streets, hardly any traffic. I am told most people leave the city for the beach during the holidays, and I believe it. It was such a contrast to what happens in Rio on New Year’s, where millions hit the beaches and every restaurant has specials for the evening and reserved areas to watch the fireworks.
Well, I didn’t want to stay in and I didn’t know a lot of options about places to go. Something I had been wanting to do with my girlfriend, a local Brasiliera, was to visit a motel, and this seemed like as good a time as any.
Motels are not the same thing in Brazil that they are in the United States. There, they are places with simple rooms and beds where a tired driver can get a quick night’s sleep in the middle of a long trip. Here, they are an escape from homelife, often from houses filled with family, for a sexual get away with the spouse. Or an escape from prying eyes for a sexual get away with a mistress.
Motels in Brazil are places to rent by the hour for essentially one purpose.
Now, because they are common and Brazilians don’t have the same aversion to sex that Americans seem to have, these are not generally sleazy places (although I guess some could be and probably are). They are designed for access by car and the rooms have private garages so that no one can easily see who is coming or going.
Curious to see some of these places? Check out this guide with photos and prices, by region. The site is safe for work, but some links may not be.
I can recommend Motel Atenas in Porto Alegre. Pictures and prices on the website. This isn’t one of the cheaper places. They have a lot of theme rooms, with special decorations and features, which is pretty interesting to me. Also there is full room service, both for food/drink and for adult items. Basics include round beds with mirrors on the ceilings, TVs, and hot tubs. You can get a room for all night for 12 hours at one rate, or rent in three-hour blocks for shorter stays. And let’s just say a good time was had by all.
Going back the next morning a bit after 8am, the city was again dead, dead, dead. The morning after a big holiday is not, I think, very busy in Brazil.
I’m not talking about prison here, although I’ll touch on prison later this week.
I’m talking about getting locked up at work, literally.
My first day back in after the holidays was Monday, January 5th. Not many Brazilians came to work that day, and things in the Institute of Physics at UFRGS were quiet. (It occurs to me I probably haven’t outlined a lot of details of my professional life here, and I’ll try to rectify that later this week, too.)
Now, crime is an issue everywhere in Brazil, even on University campuses. UFRGS is actually close to a prison, too, and apparently in the past there have been escapes and the police have searched buildings room to room. Fun. Doors and windows have bars, and even the nicer bathrooms have locked doors requiring keys.
Security goes around at about 8pm and locks the buildings.
Now, in the United States it’s always possible to get out of a building. Safety ensures that there are emergency exits that can be pushed open.
Brazil is different.
The building doors require keys. I had a key, but I neglected to make a copy of it when I had it, and I returned it to my colleague when I went back to the States in November. About 8:15pm I tried to go home, but the doors were closed.
A quick check of my part of the building revealed that I was the only one there. Uh oh.
It’s a little embarrassing, but I know very little of how things work at the University. I’m here to do astronomy, and I focus on that. Dealing with Portuguese, buses, and other issues is plenty. So I didn’t know what to do, or who to call, or where to look up to call, assuming I can manage with my limited Portuguese. My office there has a telephone, but I didn’t even know how to get an outside line.
Also, to top things off, my cell phone pretty much doesn’t work in the building. The signal is too weak.
So I sent email to my colleage and another friend and waited a few minutes. Then I took my cell phone and walked around in search of enough bars to call out. I found a corner and reached my friend. He said he’d try to get help and call me back. While I was waiting for him to call back, the electricity went out.
It was one of those days, you know?
Finally he calls back and says he can’t reach anyone he knows on campus. He asks me to look for a message about after-hours security. I finally find it, taped to the inside of the glass window of the door, requiring me to remove it to read as it’s intended for people OUTSIDE wanting access. It’s dark, but I have a flashlight on my keychain, thank god. The paper has three numbers to call. My friend tells me he’ll call and get help.
I wait again in the darkness. It’s about 9pm now.
He gets back to me. No one is answering any of the numbers. Of course!
Worst case scenario is that I’ll just stay locked up until morning, without access to food, water, or a bathroom. Or electricity.
My friend agrees to drive out to campus (20-25 minutes by car from his place). He finally shows up about 9:45pm, and it turns out that none of his keys will work on my section of the building either! He goes off and searches for a campus policeman to open the door. A bit after 10pm he manages to find one.
I’m free!
The whole experience was a bit surreal. Just by not having a key and not watching the clock closely, I became a prisoner. Life in Brazil. There were a lot of little gaps in my knowledge that the experience revealed, and that I was really at the mercy of that lack of understanding and circumstance.
One bonus was that with the lights out, the sky was brilliant. It was one of my best and clearest looks at the southern sky here since my arrival in Porto Alegre. As an astronomer, I’ll comment on the southern sky at some point. My favorite part is that the constellation Orion looks upside down to me, and that’s pretty cool.
As I was dawdling with my head tilted back to stargaze, my friend told me to hurry up because it wasn’t safe there so late in the dark. I responded that it was perfectly safe. I’d just spent two hours there looking for anyone outside to help me, without seeing pretty much anyone there. Brazilians are justly afraid of crime and take appropriate measures, but danger is always overstated in our minds. I’ve done some dumb things in Rio, being alone late at night in the wrong parts of town, without problem. It’s stupid to tempt fate, but reassuring that the world isn’t quite as dangerous as it seems on TV and in our nightmares.
And really, it was this fear of danger and crime that got me locked up for two hours unnecessarily. Our fear can make us prisoners. And some mistakes/ignorance on my own part, to be fair, helped as well.
Anyway, only in Brazil…
There have been problems with my server this week, and I have refrained from blogging here. That should be changing soon. First, a quick post following up on my ipod problems here.
There is one authorized Apple dealer in Porto Alegre.
Their place doesn’t even look like a store, rather an apartment with an armed guard outside. The real deal, however, and professional.
Here’s the scoop. The Apple warranty is good everywhere you can get to an Apple dealer. My Ipod Shuffle doesn’t shuffle, and it should. They are happy to help.
But…they didn’t have any in stock and needed to order from Sao Paulo. Three weeks to replace the old Ipod. They let me keep it in the meantime, and it does maintain its other functions. They will call when the replacement is in.
Thanks, Ken, for suggesting how easy this might be. And thank you, Apple.
Now, my old classic Ipod is having problems with its selection wheel, and I think I am going to be adopting my new classic sooner rather than later. The old one lasted three years, which is good enough for a electronics these days.
I’ve fallen off with the posting recently, which I apologize for. It’s my intention to post here regularly as much for myself as for anyone out there reading. This is where I want to record my observations of life here before I forget about the different things and everything here looks normal to me. The first times doing and seeing interesting things should be appreciated.
I’ve been pretty busy this last week, and several of the experiences have been uniquely Brazilian. I’ll be writing soon about the process of registering as a foreigner with the Federal Police, shopping for sofas and prisons (sort of), getting locked in building after hours, and going to a motel, among other things.
I’ve caught a small cold and expect to stay in for the weekend, and I also have some fiction writing to catch up on.
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.