As promised I bring you dispatches from the Southern Hemisphere, where rain is but a distant memory and shorts are all the rage. I have been weaning myself off tea for the past three days, and feel slightly peculiar.
For the past week we've been furiously house-hunting while simultaneously trying to get me to go legit with the Man - a bureaucratic farrago culminating in a trip to Police HQ this Friday which I'm sure will be a barrel of laughs. It's a lot more streamlined than in the UK though, and if all goes well then within a week I'll be a straight-up resident of Brazil with all the perks, except the ability to vote, which no one will be doing for years anyway.
We've found a landlady who knows Gaby's parents and will hopefully rent us her flat fairly soon on much more flexible terms than most places, where the minimum tenancy period is 32 months and you actually have to prove who you are up-front, which for obvious reasons isn't that easy at the moment; the only hitch is that seemingly every property here comes unfurnished, so we're going to have to go out and buy everything from the bed up.
In the meantime we've been visiting houses that are for sale, some of which haven't even been built yet and are instead represented by a dummy furnished flat, often deep in the centre of a building site. They're all very shiny and roomy and equipped with spas, en-suite bathrooms and individual BBQ pits, but we need to do some number-crunching to see if we can actually afford one, even on my economy-busting international-PR-man salary.
In between all the mattress-shopping and the wrangling of mobile phone contracts and Gaby looking for work placements and speculating on HSBC's presence in South America, we've managed to have some fun too. We were invited by Gaby's friend to a circus performance on Saturday night, which was awesome and minimal and conducted entirely in pidgin Italian, followed by my first "temake" - a Japanese concoction of minced salmon wrapped in seaweed, which is apparently the Brazilian equivalent of a drunken, post-club kebab.
Then on Sunday we went to Gaby's grandma's house, where I was initiated into the rite of "feijoada" - essentially meat and beans with a side of greens, rice and Guarana which apparently (and intriguingly) once almost killed Peter Frampton in the '70s. Then went on to another BBQ somewhere else for good measure. I haven't unleashed my Pizza à la Fred on them yet, but it's surely only a matter of time and finding the right yeast.
In short I'm being well fed and watered, and very much taken with the Brazilian way of life so far, even if it's a bit more hectic and filled with paperwork than usual. Took in some sightseeing yesterday at the Sao Paulo Cathedral (largest in the country, fact fans); have been blooded back into Ridaut's Saturday morning football team, albeit in goal and out of harm's way for the most part (a propos of nothing, the Portuguese for "butter fingers" translates as "mãos de alface"/"lettuce hands", which I rather like); and have caught up with the latest 9pm soap opera, which the entire population apparently thinks is utter rubbish, almost to the point of not watching it every night.
Coming up next is a slew of "Festas Juninhas" - as far as I can tell, some kind of June-based party involving Morris dancing and silly hat - and the Brazilian Valentine's Day, which I've been told in no uncertain terms applies to me too. I will speak to you tomorrow, and in the meantime have made another wildly erratic mixtape for your enjoyment/bafflement: https://play.spotify.com/user/freddypowys/playlist/0AJYQND2PLpui8bWC30L5W
Até logo, Botafogo.
Love,
Fred
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