How to buy a used car in Brazil

1. Take a taxi to the used car lot guy who looks a lot like Tony Soprano. Work out a deal to buy a car and sell it back shortly before leaving the country. Used car guy doesn't accept credit cards. Wire transfers become increasingly complicated.

2. Go to ATM every day for a week to withdraw the maximum allowed by US bank. Head over to used car guy in a taxi with a suitcase full of the Brazilian equivalent of $5 bills.

3. Buy car. Try to get insurance. Insurance guy gives car the 25 point check up, finds a burnt out air bag indicator light. Won't insure car because light is burnt out. Take car back to used car guy.

4. Used car guy fixes light. Go back to insurance guy. Light burns out again. Back to used car guy.

5. Used car guy feels bad. Fixes car and takes car directly to insurance guy. Take taxi to insurance guy to collect our new ride, a sort of shiny mid 90's green Citroen. Racing green, even, but we're not racing anywhere with this engine. Not a beauty, but hey, if it gets us to the beach, excellent. And it has a cd player!

6. First day with new old car: drive car to Federal Police on insane Sao Paulo highways to register tourist visa in passport. Get to Federal Police, told to come back tomorrow.

7. On the way home, dumb truck driver smacks into side of sort of shiny Citroen and bangs up driver's side mirror. Gives us the Brazilian "thumbs up!" which means "I'm an asshole, but hey, we're still buddies." Pilot our way finally back to our place, park car, take a nap.

8. Spouse takes car out later to attend lecture at the university.

9. 10 PM. Phone rings:

"Well, I'm standing here on the side of the road with Milton. The car's transmission is completely gone. We're waiting for Maria Elisa to help us get a tow truck."

To be continued....

Feminine wiles

Livia (the new Brazilian nanny) turned to me, with a hint of the same incredulity in her voice that I heard a few days ago in the matter of the toys, and asked didn’t little 1-yr old Mabel have any hair accessories?

(This being a discussion in Portuguese, it didn’t go quite so smoothly as that. I, not yet being well-versed in the vocabulary of baby girl hair accessories, wasn’t familiar with some of the lingo, so it took a few go-rounds before all became clear.)

“You know, decorations, bows, accessories for her hair?” My weak-kneed objections--But she doesn’t really have that much hair, tee-hee- and surely she’d yank them out in seconds--were quickly dismissed. Valentina, the 1.5 yr old of her former employer, she said pointedly, had a whole box of them.

Mabel's father, to make matters worse, had dressed her that morning in her slick red stretch t-shirt with the big Ferrari logo on front, and had selected a pair of salmon pink shorts to complete the outfit. His reasoning, he said later, was that he figured Livia being Livia would want to see her in something girlie, so he thought the pink shorts would do the trick. So it came as no surprise, really, that Livia had taken pity on the poor girl before heading out to the playlot and had changed her into a girlie little number--or as frilly as it comes in her drawer--and had wrapped a hair band around the largest swatch of hair she could scrape together on the top of her head. It was sticking straight up, with a little curl at the end.

Livia is doing her best with some pretty rough raw material. We were trying to decide the other day why we stick out like such sore thumbs on the Sao Paulo street, since if there's anywhere in Brazil where we should blend in, it's here. (Granted, the White Sox T's don't help.) There's some German strain in the gene pool around here, so it's not uncommon to see tow-haired kids at the playground, scruffy blond sailor types on the street, and green-eyed women. Add the huge Asian population, and it's a pretty diverse mix.

After my husband observed the other day that, well, Brazilian women are just somehow more feminine, I started to look more carefully as I lumbered around the neighborhood to see what I might yet be missing. Pedicure? check. Tight pants? check. Frilly tank top? check. Hoop earrings? check. But somehow the final package is still not quite, um, feminine. As I hauled a big pot and four bags of potting soil past the doormen in 100 degree heat the other day (herb garden deeluxe), I could have sworn I heard a grunt. Brings me back to the time in Rio when some drunk guy in Copacabana asked me if I was a transvestite. Oh, honey, you must be joking--the trannies are much more feminine. So, good luck to you, Mabel. If your genetic material is true to course, you'll be doing deadlifts with bags of potting soil in no time.

Cross if you dare

In a certain way, Sao Paulo must be a lot like LA. And I don't mean the bikinis. It's a car culture, except that the majority are Citroens about a decade old, and that not everyone has one, so parking is surprisingly easy. And, of course, this being an economy where labor is distressingly cheap, even your drycleaner has a valet. So if you happen to be driving yourself (your driver, I guess, has the day off), you can drive right up to the grocery store, hand the valet your keys, watch him back over a couple of pedestrians as he tears around the corner in it, and walk back out to collect your car while he loads your groceries in the back. Or, if you'd prefer, you can simply request that your groceries be delivered. I can only assume that that's what the dudes in uniforms pushing loaded grocery carts around the neighborhood are doing. Either that, or they're making off with the well-packaged goods at a very slow pace.

This being a car culture, pedestrians rank somewhere below algae on the food scale. Apparently the rules of the road are somewhat different here--it falls to the mergee, not the merger, to WATCH OUT. So you blithely wrench your way into traffic knowing that everyone else will somehow scoot inches out of the way to make room. It must work, since I haven't seen an accident yet. Unfortunately, the same rules don't apply those of us on foot. Crossing the street is really somewhat better than an afternoon cup of coffee--at least it will get your heart rate up a little higher. In our neighborhood, they've created little roundabouts at many intersections, presumably to slow down traffic. In practice, this only makes the driver's intentions even more inscrutable for the pedestrian presumptious enough to attempt a crossing. Will he swerve all the way around, only half the way around, or drive straight over the little bumps demarcating the roundabout, it's anyone's guess.

So we're headed out to buy a used car this afternoon. When you can't beat them, join them.

Social butterfly, and only 1 year old.

It would seem that our 1-year-old has a busier social scene than we do these days.

You probably think I'm kidding.

I'm not.

This being Brazil, we've hired out the afternoons to a "nanny", a lovely young woman named Livia. This being Brazil, she also cooks our lunch, makes our bed, and would wash our laundry if some of us in the household didn't scurry to do it first, being a bit particular about our laundry (I refer you to a recent post on the proper way to wash a pair of blue jeans.)

We have landed in a lovely neighborhood here in Sao Paulo, full of big tall trees, lots of Brazilian yuppies with little babies and nannies to care for them, cafes and such, dry cleaners everywhere. We had thought we wanted to live in the gritty hip neighborhood across town, but, well, it turns out that yuppielandia is just about right. The bread might cost twice as much, but when you have to order it in a foreign language, it's sort of worth it. Just up the street, there's a little neighborhood square with a playground, where nannies and their flock congregate in the afternoons. Nannies gossip, kids throw sand at each other and have a grand old time. Our kid, being the one without any toys, wanders up to various suspicious little tykes and, without hesitation, helps herself to a sandbucket or two and a shovel.

So today, our nanny made plans with a friend, who happens to be the nanny for a friend of a friend, to go to their spacious apartment down the street for some good old fashioned play time. The kid, about the same age as ours, is reputed to have an astonishing toy collection, and ours, not being the shy type, reportedly was beside herself at the sight of so many wonderful playthings. So much so, it seems, that when we all reunited here at home at the end of the day, Livia turned to us and asked, "So, does she have any toys at home, back in the States?" What, a plastic hanger and a cardboard box don't count? She really did seem to be having fun with my suitcase the other day, I swear.

My job for tomorrow, it seems, is to find the sand bucket store and make a purchase. How do you suppose you say sand bucket in Portuguese, anyway?