Life in Brazil So Far: Carnaval, Bureaucracy & Settling In.

Oi! This is my first blog post from Brazil this time around. So, I'm back in Brazil and I'm here for longer than the last time, when I was studying abroad. This time I'll be here from mid-February to sometime in January 2011. I am here on a research grant and will probably do one (or many more) posts on my research project in the future, once it gets going.

This post is going to serve as an update/summary of what life in Brazil has been like so far, and in the future I'll write posts more often about little tidbits of life here, since you'll all be caught up on my life so far.

After a lovely, jaunt to New York to see some friends and then a fabulous trip to Israel (Hi birthright friends reading this!), I went home for less than 2 weeks to prepare for my journey to Brazil!

So, I have been in Brazil for about three+ weeks now. The first week and a half was great!! I was with my parents and we celebrated carnaval going to the sambodromo for two nights (9 hours each time) which was a blast and a crazy once in a life time experience!! The parades, costumes, themes, music, and stamina of the Samba schools were truly incredible. Some of themes were fun, creative and cohesive whereas some of the others were random and kind of bizarre with odd costumes and floats. There were also tons of street parades/parties or "blocos" which often took place outside of our hotel.

There were a variety of samba schools that included black painted faces/bodies. ohhh brazil!


A little carnaval nap! But it gave my Dad a second wind!

This was by far one of the most bizarre floats...it was about technology and the future. And apparently that means robots delivering babies..















One of the many judging booths.

The sambódromo before the parades started.

One of the street parades outside of our hotel.

After carnival was over, I moved into my apartment and spent my last few days with my parents getting settled and enjoying my neighborhood, Ipanema.

So, the living situation!! I live in an awesome place with great people!! I live on the main commercial street in Ipanema, in a 4 bedroom 3 bathroom apartment. My 3 other roommates are Brazilian girls, one studies medicine, one is an actress and doing a second degree in administration and one is doing her post grad in physiotherapy. They're all from different places in Brazil and are all really nice and fun girls. I think they all speak varying levels of English, but we all speak Portuguese to each other which is good. Aside from my excellent apartment and location, we have a 24 hour doorman and gate which is nice and safe. Also, RIGHT next to my apartment is a Zona Sul supermarket, and right past that is a 24 hour juice place which is great because you can always get juice, salgados, açai, pizza, sandwiches and more there, for a very reasonable price. I also live 2 blocks from the beach and live almost directly on a plaza where there is a farmers market every week, and the "Feira Hippie" which is a arts and crafts market that happens every Sunday. ALSO, a huge thing is there is now a metro stop in this plaza which opened in January which completely opens up the metro for me and means that I dont have to take a bus to the metro in Copacabana, which is what I used to have to do. So, the new metro is awesome and a public transpo wonder!

So that's my living situation and location, which I super love!

Another thing that has taken up A LOT of my time since I moved here, but which I am now done with, is the inevitable and slightly (VERY) agonizing Brazilian Bureaucracy. Capital letters, because it's an institution. So, any foreigners on a non tourist visa have to register with the Policia Federal. Fine, that's reasonable, they want to know who's in the country for more than just tourist purposes, and that's completely legitimate. But, ASIDE from the extensive amount of documentation (and money) I needed in order to apply for my research Visa in the States, once I received the visa from the US Embassy, I needed even MORE documentation (and money) at the Policia Federal (which of course you have to trek all the way out to the airport to do, because a local office would be much too easy). So, once I went to the bank to pay more fees, got 12 smaller than passport sized photos taken of me on a white background without me smiling (of which I only needed 2, but they only sell them in packs of 12 (so if anyone wants a 3x4 picture of me looking mean, let me know)) and had to pay MORE money to get every page in passport with a Brazilian reference notarized, I was ready to go register at the Policia Federal. So, based on the advice of a fellow research buddy down here, I was told you had to get to the Policia federal by 7am if you wanted to ensure you would be seen that day. So I took a cab all the way out to the international airport and arrived before 7 am and got my "#" for the line. The first number for the day would be 611 and my # was 653...glorious. Of course you need to get the number at 7 am, but they dont actually start calling people until 8:30. Long story short, my number was called at 4:30pm, and once I actually got called, my paper work was luckily completely in order and it took literally less than 5 minutes (which makes me wonder why I had waited over 9.5 hours there...why did everyone else's not take 5 minutes or less?). The two plus sides to my crazy inefficient day at the Policia Federal? 1) nothing was wrong with my paperwork so I didnt have to go back again (which happens to some people and 2) I met a really nice french girl in Rio on an internship, and we've already hung out a few times. And she speaks Portuguese with a French accent, which blows my mind.

So, that's all for Bureaucracy right? Haha, no... So, apart from registering with the PF (WHICH I AM DONE WITH!) while it is not mandatory, something very very useful and almost completely necessary to have in Brazil is a CPF. I dont know what it stands for, but it's some kind of number which lets you buy certain things like 1) a cell phone and 2) a super market discount card, among other things. Rumor on the Brazilian street is that it will technically allow the government to track what people are buying, especially big purchases, but I don't know if that's actually true or not. So there are 2 steps to getting a CPF (obviously). So the first thing you have to do is go to the bank (or post office), and register there and have someone enter your passport info and Brazilian address into a computer (which can only be done from 10-2pm, which someone forgot to tell me the first time I went, so when I got there at 3pm the 2nd time, I was shocked that the "System" is only open until 2pm which makes sense...right?..not (besides that banking hours are short in Brazil anyways) so the third time I went was around noon). The registration process was fairly quick, but of course, paying when I registered would be too efficient, so I then had to go in a separate line where I waited over an hour to pay a R$5.50 fee, which literally is $3. So that was painful, because I still forget to bring a book with me everywhere because I keep forgetting I wait in line oh so much here. So, of course after an hour, my number was called and I paid and it took 2.3 minutes. Great. But, that didnt give me a CPF..that was just the registration/fee. I had to wait a day and then go to the Brazilian version of the IRS, which is luckily in my neighborhood. So, I went there, and miracles beyond miracles, I get my "#" to wait in line, and it's called before I even sit down! So I go into the office, and get my CPF and I am in and out of the Brazilian IRS in less than 5 minutes. It was GLORIOUS. and now I have a super market discount card!! and am done with Brazilian government Bureaucracy for the near future. I'm sure I will be soon confronted with other forms of bureaucracy in the coming weeks as I start my research, but, being registered with the federal police and having a CPF (& a super market discount card!) is wonderful.

On a less complainy note (though my previous complaints were 100% justified and can be confirmed by other foreigners in Brazil), I will write about my fun weekend in São Paulo that took place last weekend. Last weekend was the official start of the grant term, so all the grantees met up in Sao Paulo for an orientation. It was very informational and we got lots of good info about life in Brazil. But the best part of the orientation was definitely meeting everyone and hearing about their different projects and stories. Some of the most fascinating were about the animals and environment in Brazil. For example my roommate at the orientation was studying seahorses and conservation and another girl was looking at how the introduction of african bees in the amazon effects native tree species. Also, a lot of people in Salvador were doing public health topics. But in Rio, the majority of projects were history, culture or social science based. On a separate note, São Paulo overwhelms me. More so then New York. It's massive and I don't quite get the city yet. From my two brief stays in the city, I feel like one needs a "purpose" in SP, like a reason to be there, be it research, visiting someone or a job. Whereas someone can go to Rio for a free day or weekend or week and just hangout on the beach and drink juice, life/activities in SP don't seem as obvious to me. As our tour guide in SP said, Rio and Salvador are obvious cities, São Paulo is not.

Life in Rio the past few weeks has been more of a settling period. I'm settled now and have met and hung out with a few fellow gringos, but other than my roommates, at this point I haven't met that many Brazilians..but I think that will change over time. There were a couple of good beach days a few weeks ago, but since then the rain and clouds here have been incredibly overbearing. Yesterday the power went out in Ipanema, and today while it was beautiful in the day, by the evening the rain was torrential, Copacabana and other neighborhoods flooded, the power went out in the trains and some of the metros were shut down...so, definitely not beach weather. But hopefully that will change soon.

This week and in the coming weeks I plan to start meeting people related to my research and getting my research jump started which ranges anywhere from buying a bunch of books I need to deciding which archives I'm going to use, how to get access to them and what I'm looking for in them.

Now that I have done my massive "Welcome to my Life in Brazil" post, I plan on posting much more frequently about stories and random occurrences in daily life. Most future posts definitely wont be so novel-like and will be much more like short crônicas. (heh..heh, reference to my research here...nerd alert!)

I hope you are all doing fabulously wherever you are!! Keep me updated on your lives as well!

It's impossible to stay annoyed at Brazil's little character flaws like bureaucracy when you see a sunrise like this over Ipanema beach.

Abraços,

Hannah