Living in Brazil

I was watching TV the other night, Globo, a Brazilian channel, trying to get better about understanding spoken Portuguese and the movie Spanglish came on.  If you don’t know this movie, it’s about an illegal from Mexico trying to make it in southern California with her daughter and her involvement on multiple levels with the rich American family she works for.  It’s a good, complex movie with all sorts of levels, about love and family and identity, and the acting is good, too.

One of the key points about the movie is that the woman doesn’t speak English, only Spanish, at the beginning.  A lot of the movie is about communication between parents and children, men and women, and different cultures.  And problems with communication and learning how to speak to each other.

This movie was dubbed into Portuguese, and the Spanish parts were left untranslated as in the original English version (your experience watching this movie probably varies a lot depending on what langauges you speak).  Anyway, as you probably know Portuguese and Spanish are not so different.  Some things, totally different, some things similar with small differences, and quite a few things identical save perhaps for accent or pronunciation.

There’s a key scene where the mother is furious with the male head of the household and is ranting at him, with her daughter translating for her from Spanish into…Portuguese.  I was struck watching this how ridiculous this movie was dubbed into Portuguese when the  daughter simply repeated almost exactly, word for word, what her mother had said so that the man could understand.  I mean, WTF?  Lots of disbelief you have to suspend here.

Another problem I’ve noticed watching TV, more with subtitled comedies from the United States which I can understand better, is how often they don’t even try to translate a joke.  Some of this is cultural differences, or wordplay that works in English but not Portuguese, but I just got to wonder if the Brazilians understand why some shows are funny at all.

All in all, it is interesting how dominant American TV and movies are in Brazil, and around the world more generally, and how this probably leads to all sorts of things weirder than just missing a few jokes.  I mean, the world has this view into American life, distorted as it is by Hollywood, that Americans do not have of the rest of the world.  Even if America wasn’t dominant economically and militarily, the Hollywood machine would probably still make us look dominant, make people think about America, make people want to move there, and make some people have strong feelings about it (good and bad).

A CPF number is basically the same as a Social Security Number in the United States.  I now have one, and the process was not too involved — for Brazil.

I found a nice online guide for how to do this for foreigners.  It mostly matches my experience, although things were easier than I expected.

If you’re going to work in Brazil, have a bank account, or do any significant financial transactions, you need to get a CPF number.  Be aware that you may be asked for a CPF number when it is not necessary to have one.  A lot of places use them to track customers and just need some official number associated with your name.  For instance, when I was buying some furniture I was able to provide my passport and passport number instead of a CPF.  Some other transactions absolutely do require a CPF.

Anyway, you can go to a bank or post office to apply for a CPF.  The process is a little different for foreigners (we don’t have to prove we’ve satisfied our military obligations for instance, similar to how in the U.S. we have to register for the draft but foreigners in the U.S. don’t).  I went to the bank with a friend, my passport, and a copy of my birth certificate.  There was a processing fee of R$5.50.

I was told to take a document and receipt to the Receita Federal downtown (a big brown building with a nickname meaning the big chocolate, and yes it looked like that).  There wasn’t much waiting.  I gave my documents and passport to a woman and she gave me a CPF number a few minutes later printed on a piece of paper.  In about 30-40 days I should have an official card show up in my mailbox.

Now I need to get a bank account, which is more involved.  I am still working on one thing I need (proof of residency).  This isn’t hard, I think, with something like an electrical bill.  All my bills are in my friends’ names, and while I now have a CPF and can transfer the bills, I am looking at getting a residency card, which might be quicker.  That is through the Federal Police and someone is researching the requirements for me.

Like most things in Brazil, you want one thing, and you have to do two things.  To do those two things, you have to do two more things.  It does end, eventually, I think, when the web of legal requirements and documents is finally assembled.  Allows allow time and be patient.

Used to be R2.10.  Now it is R2.30.  Oops .  Surprised me.  Luckily the buses here make change.

I was talking to a friend about this and he told me that apparently some students went to City Hall to protest the price hike, and the police showed up.  Then there are two stories, one that says the students left when asked and other that says the police beat a lot of the students.  Apparently not a lot of independent evidence to support either side.

I don’t read the local papers or watch the local news (damn my weak Portuguese!) so I don’t even know what was reported in the media.

Moving forward on some other fronts and will have some new “how to” posts coming up.

So a while back I wrote about getting surprised about holidays here and linked to a wiki page.

Well, my girlfriend told me about a holiday on Feb. 2, and I pretty much didn’t see anything listed (only a little obscure note about a local holiday February 2: star’s birthday, and another note somewhere about some Saint’s Day) and didn’t worry about it.  I had a big deadline, a proposal to submit on Monday to the Very Large Array, a radio telescope in New Mexico.  I worked on getting some things together over the weekend, outlining and such, checking into some technical details, but was going to finish off the final formatting and things at the University.

A bit past 11AM I left to walk to the bus stop, and it was odd.

Many stores were closed.  There wasn’t much traffic.  Hardly anyone on the streets.

Uh oh.  I called another friend, a graduate student from the University.  He confirmed the holiday, said he wasn’t going in, and wasn’t sure anyone would be there or that the building would be unlocked (haven’t gotten my own key yet, on the to do list).

Fine.  I met him for lunch, returned to the apartment, and wrote the proposal on my laptop using my second-choice software and submitted right at the deadline.  But it got done.

Turns out I’d missed a department email listing the official University holidays for the year.  Here’s what it has:

Comparing the list to the wiki page I linked to before, there are a number of differences!

I should just expect this now here in Brazil.