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.