Historic Sao Paulo

Once out of the Policia Federale we headed to the financial district (the picture is of one of the tallest buildings in the city - Edifice Italiano) which is also the historical center of Sao Paulo and spent about 3-4 hours walking between different tourist attractions. It was a really interesting Brenna-guided tour, and I have posted some pics here.

A few of the general things we have noticed:

- Despite the fact that we are constantly running into communication barriers, most Sau Paulitanos are very friendly and don't get irritated by it. There is a lot of smiling and weird hand gestures but we eventually figure it out and people go out of their way to be helpful. Part of this is probably that Sao Paulo is really NOT a tourist town - we almost never hear languages other than Portuguese being spoken - so I think most of the locals find foreigners interesting rather than irritating.

- The place is remarkably clean. This might be something to do with the areas that we have been frequenting, but there are a lot of trash cans and people seem to use them pretty diligently. You get weird smells coming up out of sewers from time to time, but that is no different to what you experience in a place like Manhattan.

- Exception to the note about the city being clean - graffiti! The stuff is everywhere, and I mean in really crazy places where you just wonder how the heck anyone managed to put it there. Sometimes it is just tags, but there are also a lot of really impressive murals around the place.

- There are quite a lot of homeless people visible on the streets. Definitely more so than in Canada, but actually less than in some parts of the USA that I have visited. During the day while there are lots of people around there is absolutely no problem, but I can understand why people are warned not to roam around alone after dark.

There's no social security system here, so you can imagine some people are pretty desperate. That said - I've been reading that crime rates in Sao Paulo have dropped dramatically over the last 5-10 years. You get the impression that this city is just exploding economically (in a good way) and so of course you would expect crime rates to drop as the wealth starts to get shared around. There is obviously still some wealth stratification to deal with though!

Bureaucracy Brazil Style

One of the outcomes of our trip to FGV on Monday was that we were given a bunch of forms to take to the Policias Federal (PF), in order to register ourselves as foreign nationals studying in Brazil. In all, there were seven items that the police required, including paying a moderately large sum of money to Citibank (purpose for that is still unknown because the form was in Portuguese) and getting photocopies of our entire passports (i.e., all pages!) notarized.

Sounds easy, but the pace of the bureaucrats that we dealt with (see photo of beetle from our later walk in the park), our own lack of proficiency in Portuguese and the time it takes to actually walk between so many different locations, ultimately defeated us on Wednesday. By around 1pm we had all the required forms and were left with the choice of taking a 30 minute cab fare out to the PF and hoping to get everything processed before their 2pm closing time, or doing some relaxing tourist stuff near our apartment for the afternoon. Discretion (and laziness) being the better part of valour, we put off our visit to the police until Thursday.

Wednesday afternoon was thus spent in walking around a local park, then venturing down to get more familiar with the center of the city. I've uploaded a couple of photos here.

So Thursday morning bright and early we finally headed to the PF. The taxi driver had no idea where to go, but after asking directions from a few of his buddies we were off, and he got us to the right place within about 25 minutes.

After making our way to the front of the line at the PF we were suddenly made aware of the existence of something called a 'CEP Code'. This is apparently the local equivalent of a post code, but was not something that we had ever encountered before at either our apartment building or at the university. It turns out that CEP codes do exist, but nobody except the federal government ever really uses them and most people have no idea what their CEP code even is!

So after realising that we were missing a vital piece of information - the CEP codes for both our apartment building and for FGV - the sequence of events went something like this:

- exit line;
- exit PF building;
- look for somebody who speaks English (not easy);
- ask them to explain what a CEP code is;
- realise that you need to call your apartment building and FGV to find out their CEP code;
- try and find a place that sells phone cards in weird industrial area (also not easy);
- find a public phone (ok this is easy, they are everywhere);
- call apartment and FGV and attempt to explain that you need to know their CEP code (to somebody whose command of English is fairly basic);
- re-enter PF building;
- re-enter line (now much longer);

Eventually we got it all figured out, then after submitting the forms and waiting for 45 minutes we were taken into a room to get our fingerprints done, given our foreign national form and we were free!!! It was really good to have that out of the way.

Citibank Saves The Day

One note that I forgot to mention in the previous post - our agent didn't accept credit cards and wasn't willing to wait a week for an international bank transfer to come through (this despite the fact that we had been hassling her for literally months for instructions on how to pay our rent!). Instead, we had to walk up to Citibank and extract the R4,950 (about $C3,300) required to cover bond, rent and agent commission for our entire stay out of an ATM!

All I can say is thank god Citibank are not very good at flagging unusual transactions, because they had no problem giving me around $C2,500 out of my account. We then had to carry this huge wad of cash back to our apartment block along a crazy busy street. Good thing Ave. Paulista (see photo) has banks on every corner, and as a result just about the highest concentration of police and security guards in the city!

First Days in Brazil

We spent most of our first Sunday in Sao Paulo comatose in our apartment, before finally venturing out to find dinner at a local restaurant. One thing we quickly discovered was that the area we are staying in is VERY high end - finding a cheap meal is not easy! But eventually we found a reasonable place on Ave. Paulista, our major local thoroughfare, and had some delicious Brazilian cuisine.

My opinion of Brazilian cuisine so far - I love it. It's not particularly complex - usually just a cut of meat that is salted and then grilled or barbecued to perfection. Add beans, rice and occasionally some vegetables and you're done. If complex spices and sauces are your thing then you might find the food a little bland, but personally I am really happy!

Anyway, Monday came around and despite having a week before classes started we figured we should get registration at FGV (our University) out of the way. We walked the ~1.5km to the school without too many wrong turns and eventually convinced the receptionist at the front of the building to let us in, despite a major language barrier! Having overcome the entrance obstacle, we found that the international office was very well organised and the friendly English-speaking guy there had all of our access cards, course schedules and other forms ready to go. Full marks for making a good first impression!

So with that out of the way, we spent the rest of Monday and Tuesday getting comfortable in the local area. It is an interesting part of Sao Paulo, apparently known for attracting very wealthy residents. Sitting by the pool on the roof of our apartment building (by the way, the blog banner pic is a panorama from said roof) in the evening, we were amazed by the number of helicopters landing on rooftops nearby! We were also very aware of the huge gap between the rich and poor in this country, with some people driving around in Mercedes while others are only able to afford a Fiat.

On the subject of traffic, it is completely nuts. We have learned that traffic signals are basically irrelevant. The only safe time to cross a road is when there are no cars, because most of them completely ignore rules about giving way to pedestrians! We've already seen a couple of traffic accidents, with one pedestrian who had obviously been hit by a car while crossing the road. One interesting thing is that the accidents immediately turn into a big group activity, with lots of passers by stopping to help anyone who is hurt. The picture is of the usual scene during a business day immediately outside our apartment building.

Getting to Sao Paulo

Ola!

For those of you who are sticklers for punctuation, the 'a' in 'Ola' should have an accent on it, but I am still figuring out how to generate latin characters on my laptop so bear with me for now. Also, the 'a' in 'Sao' (as in 'Sao Paulo') should have a different kind of accent on it; needless to say that is way beyond my capabilities so just imagine that it has a little squiggly line above it.

After several false starts, we finally left Kingston on Friday afternoon and had an overnight stay in Toronto to catch up with friends. On Saturday morning Brenna heard from our real-estate agent in Sao Paulo that she had, in fact, finally booked our apartment and would meet us at 'The Advance' flats on Sunday morning. So that was great news, at least in theory, and we were heading to the airport on Saturday evening feeling reasonably confident that we had everything sorted.

It was good that FGV made a point of telling us that we needed visas - there were a couple of people literally turned away in front of us at the boarding gate, because they didn't get their tourist visa. Brutal!

Anyway, the flight was direct from Toronto to Sao Paulo and remarkably uneventful given that it was Air Canada (who I have to admit have been growing on me lately). Just enough time to watch a couple of movies, eat a couple of meals and sleep for a few hours before touching down in Sao Paulo at 10:15am local time.

Immigration was really smooth - no questions asked at all - and our bags were waiting for us as soon as we got through. We walked them through customs with no questions asked, and within 30 minutes of touching down we had completed our entry formalities and were at the point of needing to navigate our way to our apartment building.

Once again the Sao Paulo airport came through for us. The woman at the tourist information desk spoke fluent English, gave us a map and then directed us to a place where you pre-pay your taxi fare. The woman at the taxi booth also spoke fluent English, and helped us learn a few basic words ('Bom Dia' - 'Good Morning') while waiting for our MasterCard to go through, which it eventually did. The taxi driver did not speak any English, but the booth attendant had printed out the address and directions for him, and we had pre-paid so there were not any fare issues. Within 30 more minutes we were pulling into 'The Advance'.

At the apartment we ran into our first slight hitch, which was that our real-estate agent was not there waiting for us and the people at the front desk had no idea who we were. Fortunately Brenna had written down the agent's cell phone number before we left, and after about 20 minutes the people on the desk managed to get through to her. Another 10 minutes and she arrived at the hotel, we signed our contracts, and then moved into the apartment.

All things considered, our travel could not have been much smoother and we were feeling really excited to explore the area around our home for the next two months.