Ilhabela – it’s Portuguese for beautiful island…

Easter was a great excuse for another mini adventure to….

you guessed it.. the beach!

Somewhat strangely for a country that loves public holidays, Brasil has just only one day off for Easter, but we aren’t exactly complaining, it feel like there is a public holiday every couple of weeks at the moment!!

With only one day off work we headed up the coast to Ilhabela, and island just off the coast with probably the most famous set of beaches in the state.

By chance I got a haircut on the morning that we drove up and my barber told me the three things that the island was famous for – stunning beaches, beautiful women and mosquito’s!

But the fourth thing that the island is famous for is the traffic jams over long weekends with people heading there from both Rio and Sao Paulo. As you can see from the map below, its only 200 odd kms to Ilha Bela, with one short ferry ride across to the island. But the consensus among the staff and customers at the barber shop was that it was going to take us five to seven hours to get there.

In the end it only ended up taking four hours, so we werent complaining!!!

The wait for the short fifteen minute ferry ride can be up to an hour – or over a long weekend even longer, but we did learn a great tip from a friend, that was to book ahead on a specific ferry and prepay, then as long as you arrive around the time of your scheduled ferry (we were about an hour early on the way there, and an hour late on the way back) you can drive right past the queue (which must have been at least three km long on Sunday afternoon) and straight onto the next ferry – thank you very much!!!

The island is basically one giant nature reserve (90 percent of the island is national park) with just one road running from north to south along the western side of the island, its along this road that all of the houses, hotels and restaurants are.

There is also one 4×4 track that goes over the island to the beaches on the eastern side.

All around the island are an amazing 41 beaches with great snorkeling and diving and whole host of ship wrecks to be explored, behind the beaches are massive expanses of lush jungle, not the famous rain forest of the amazon, but remnants of the once equally important Atlantic Rainforest.

The map below shows the two beaches that we visited:

It also shows how close the island is the the mainland and the port of Sao Sebastiao, which unfortunately is a major Petrobras port, so the side of island facing the mainland isnt as nice as the wilder eastern side.

There is only one town on the island, which is really cute and still has a bit of a colonial feel.

We went to Ilha Bela with two german friends, one of whom is lucky?!? enough to need an armoured VW Tourag as his company car, as you can see its a beautiful and somewhat sinister machine:

But as you can also see in this shot, the thickness of the armour plating in the windows and the body add a massive amount of weight to the car, in fact it takes two people to close the boot!

So we werent about to tackle the 4×4 track over to the east of the island in it!!

But we did take it to the beach on the north of the island Jabaquara which is right at the end of the road, which is beautiful:

But dont start thinking this is some isloated hideaway, as you can see here, its quite popular with the boaties and has a couple of excellent beachside restaurants as well as a couple of little snack shacks:

We were told that the best beach on the island was over on the east side, called Castelhanos, so we hired a little speedboat to get around the island which took about an hour and a half. But as you can see the trip around was just stunning:

But the beach at Castelhanos may be now my favourite brasilian beach, though still a little crowded, having beautiful warm water with proper waves and a couple of beachside eateries serving awesome caiparinhas, fried fresh squid and fish make for a perfect way to spend the day at the beach….

Another rough weekend in our brasilian adventure!

And yes, my barber was right, the beaches were amazing, the women were beautiful (as usual in brasil) and the mosquitos were nasty little beggars, whatever variety they are on the island they were evil little creatures, but the problem was easily solved by sleeping in late and hitting the bars early (thus avoiding dawn and dusk when they are most active)!!!

Jungle, Jesus, Beaches, Bikinis & Favelas – a weekend in Rio

Hey folks,
The first weekend in April supplied us with three visitors, Sam has just arrived from Melbourne to work in sunny Sao Paulo, Katherine has come over for a holiday from grey London, and Peter one of Caths workmates was in town for the weekend, so as none of them had been to Rio, we decided to go for the weekend.
Now for those of you who are still learning their Brasilian geography, Rio de Janeiro is only 450km from Sao Paulo.

Both Rio and Sao Paulo are serviced by two airports, both of which do domestic flights. The closest airport to our place is Congonhas and in Rio the closest airport to the famous beaches is Santos Dumont. This route is so popular that the number of flights between these two airports make it the 2nd busiest air route in the world with 894 flights per week (or an average of five flights an hour between them – if the airports were open 24 hours – which they aren’t)! So the actual number of flights per hour is even higher. Also add into the mix that both the other airports in Sao Paulo and Rio also have direct flights between the two cities, the total number of flights between the cities must be almost beyond belief!
For those of you who are now wondering what the busiest air route in the world is…. its Madrid – Barcelona (and Sydney – Melbourne is the fourth busiest):

Worlds Busiest Air Routes

But even though there are so many flights, if you don’t book early you can still end up paying an arm and a leg for the 45 minute flight, for example when we looked for last weekend it was an average of R$800.00 return (or 250.00GBP), so given the costs we decided to hire a car and make a road trip of it. A people mover, petrol and road tolls end up costing us just R$240.00 per person!!
Despite what you may read on tripadvisor, lonely planet etc the road from Sao Paulo to Rio is actually great, it’s mostly a toll road, double lane all the way with frequent services and some really pretty scenery. There are only two real problems with the drive – the start and the end!
Leaving after everyone finished work on a Friday night we hit the road at 7pm – and it took us 2hours just to get to the Guarulhos airport on the edge of Sao Paulo!!!
After a quick stop for some motorway services food and Sam working hard to keep Greg awake with some scintillating conversation, we arrived in Rio at about 1am. The drive across Rio and on to Copacabana is a bit of an adventure, it seems to cross some slightly dodgy parts of town – which I am sure would look a lot better in daylight, but can be be pretty scary at 1am in the morning!
Finding accommodation in Rio can be a bit of a lottery, with so many people visiting the beautiful city, there is plenty of accommodation to suit any budget, but this trip we found some great accommodation at Edificio Jucati – a great little hotel, with apartment style rooms for not much more than a room in a backpackers.
Now for our three guests it was their first visit to Rio, so as you can imagine the priorities were as follows:
Beaches – tick!

Football – Tick!

The Christ bloke up on the hill – tick!

And bikini clad beauties – tick tick tick tick!!!

There is no doubt at all that Rio de Janeiro is one of the most beautiful bay side cities in the world, the mix of beautiful sand beaches, stunning jungle clad mountains and the ever present jesus fella up on the hill make it a magic city to visit.

But as well as all that beauty, the city also has an almost equally famous dark side, the favelas or slums of Rio, unlike Sao Paulo where most of the poorer areas are on the edge of the city, in Rio the favelas and rich parts of town live side by side, with the wealthy areas generally on the few flats parts of the city, and the favelas perched precipitously on the surrounding mountains.
Ana and Piero visited Rio a while ago and recommended we do a favela tour while we were in town, and after initially being hesitant to go and look at poor people, we decided on this trip that we would do it.
For those of you who aren’t up on their Brazilian favelas, they are suburbs/cities around Brasil where people (mainly migrants from the north of the country) live. And in a country with 180,000,000 people – 32,000,000 of whom live below the poverty line and many more who are living on the minimum wage of about 150GBP per month, there are plenty of poor people around who need somewhere cheap to live which is close to their employment.
Now I must state that I am by no means an expert on Brasilian poverty or favelas, but from what we have seen on our adventures, they range from the cardboard and wood shacks, to brick and stone three or even four story structures, some of them like Rocinha (the one we visited) are large and vibrant communities with between 60,000 and 150,000 residents.

Anyone who has seen City of God (which isn’t really based in a favela, but in a replacement for a favelas) or Elite Troupe will probably have some understanding of what urban poverty looks like, but by doing a tour with a company like Be A Local who fund a children’s day care centre in Rocinha and a health centre as well, you can get into right into a favela and get a tiny picture of what it’s really like to be poor and Brasilian.

Our tour was absolutely fascinating, we started with a moto taxi ride up from the base of the mountain right through and up to the top of the favela, and we then walked back down to the bottom. All up the trip was about three hours – including a visit to an art gallery, the child care centre (closed on the weekend) and a bakery.
Here are some snaps I took while on the tour:

The Rocinha favela

Beside a wealthier part of town.

Kind of administered by the city council, kind of self administered.

Typical housing

A big house – complete with room to ride your bike!

Electricity – provided by the state electricity company, but the wiring is a strictly do it yourself affair

Plumbing – fresh water is supplied for two hours at a time, unfortunately as you can see, the water tap is right over the sewer

Urban living, without any urban planning – narrow paths, crazy steps, but in reality a fully functioning community, with bars, stores, hair dressers, churches, you name it.

Local entertainment – these kids gave us a demonstration of samba drumming by some local kids

Local enterprise – cheap beer – no pesky sales taxes or licensing restrictions here

Bakery treats – say no more!

It was a really fascinating, educational and humbling experience, I suppose the main thing that we got out of it is that people living in the favela are just people like us, spending Saturday afternoon watching tv, chatting on the front step, surfing the internet, shopping, getting a haircut, sitting in a pub watching Liverpool play while drinking a beer, all the stuff we do, but in a much smaller space, but in a town with limited access to health and education and with little no access to the police or protection from the drug gangs that effectively control their towns.
When we got back to Sao Paulo, many of our Brasilian friends expressed shock, horror and even disgust that we had ´wasted´ our time in Rio by visiting a favela. Looking at it from their point of view I can definitely see what they are saying, there is no way I would think to recommend tourists to New Zealand visit some of the poorer suburbs of our big(ish) cities, but maybe it would be interesting if they did, we certainly learnt a lot more about life in Brasil from our brief time in Rocinha.
Our guide for the trip filled us with many interesting insights into life in the favelas, one of the most interesting facts he gave us was regarding the work of the many NGOs in the favelas of Rio. Apparently 80% of the volunteers working in Rio are from outside Brasil, charities he has worked with have had real trouble attracting Brasilians to help out in the favelas, and his reasoning for this was somewhat cold, confronting and shocking. As you are aware, the gap between rich and poor in Brasil is one of the largest in the world, and the lifestyle that this allows the rich and the middle classes to have is one that appears pretty luxurious to most of us outsiders, having a large group of people with very low wages means that it is relatively cheap to have staff in your house, someone to park your car, walk your dog, look after your kids, pick up after you and generally make your life easier, so our guide suggested that most rich Brasilians aren’t interested in ´fixing´ the favelas because if all of these peoples earned a decent wage, wealthier Brasilians wouldn’t be able to afford to have the great lifestyles which they currently enjoy.
I can’t really comment if this belief is widely held, we have met many Brasilians who are actively working to make help poorer Brasilians lives better and to give them a better chance at life, but we have also been shocked on more than one occasion when Brasilians explain that people live in favelas because they are simply lazy and that the best solution to the favela problem is an airforce bombing raid.
Having only lived in Brasil for just over a year, we really don’t know enough about these massively complex issues to judge any of these people on their beliefs, I suppose you just have to make up your own mind – and a favela tour like the be a local tour gives you lot more information from the inside rather than the outside to help make up your mind.

Carnival 2009, we escape the dancing and head off for some fresh air in Patagonia.

So last week was carnaval week here in sunny Brasil, for those who have been reading our blog for a year (thanks for sticking with us)!!! you will remember that last year we went to Rio and did the “carnaval thing”, for those who missed it, you can read our blog on it here, it was great fun – everyone should do it – at least once:

Greg and Cath hit Carnaval 2008

As a highly civilised country, Brasil (and most of latin America) gives three days off work so that everyone can fully enjoy the carnaval parties that are taking place all over the continent. But in a sign of our increasing brasilianness (and yes that is a word), we like many Brasilians chose to escape Brasil for the week and head to Argentina – for those of you who think that Argentina is also in Latin America,  you would be right, except for when it comes to carnaval, apparently the argies consider themselves too European to celebrate carnval, so while the rest of LatAm is dancing, drinking and wearing g-strings and feathers in their hair, the Argentians are in a ignoring their partying neighbours and going to work like good Europeans!!
This of course means that its a great time to visit Argentina to get away from it all – which is exactly what we did. We flew to Bariloche in the north of Patagonia, Argentina.
Here is Bariloche on a map, and our place (its four hours flying time to give you an idea of the distance:

We arrived in the middle of the night (cheap flights that seemed a good idea at the time), so our first night in Bariloche was a bit of mystery, we were staying about 20km outside Bariloche, at a lovely little place called Patagonia Vista, so when we drew back the curtains at dawn, we were blown away by this view:

Like many of the buildings in Bariloche Patagonia Vista is designed in a kind of a swiss chalet meets Latin American style:

Unlike our earlier encounter with interpretation of swiss chalets in Monte Verde last year, the buildings in Bariloche are really well done, not just a copy of a swiss chalet, but taking the best bits of “European” design and adding some local flavour.
For anyone who has been to the south east of the New Zealand (around Queenstown), you can pretty much picture what Bariloche looks like, its a picturesque tourist town on the edge of a beautiful lake, with majestic mountains on every side and the great outdoors within easy grasp.
Like Queenstown, Barlicohe is essentially a tourist town, the main street is a never ending line of chocolate shops, fondue restaurants, tour operators, and outdoor clothing shops, but the magic doesn’t really happen in the city, it happens in the hills and lakes all around it.
Bariloche is just the start of Patagonia, right on the edge of Chile, it’s surrounded by the Andes on every side and has enough lakes, mountains, rivers and valleys to keep anyone busy for the rest of their life. The region is full of places for outdoor activities including fishing, rafting, kayaking, mountain biking, skiing, climbing and just about anything else that can be done outdoors. Which is exactly why we choose it for a week escape from Sao Paulo.
Just about anywhere you head to from Bariloche, the scenery is just stunning:

This picture is a view of lakes and Llao Llao hotel – apparently the most famous hotel in Argentina, Cath spotted instantly that it was also exactly like the resort in Dirty Dancing, so she spent an afternoon walking around the hotel carrying watermelons and looking for Patrick Swayze while I took more photos:

Bariloche is also full of lots of wandering dogs, just about anywhere you go there are some dogs wandering around, this one we spotted while out on a walk near where we were staying:

He was completely mental and would suddenly take off on a superfast run through chasing himself and generally having a great time – I don’t know what type of dog he is, but the tiger strips made him quite a dashing fellow:

While out on the walk where I took this picture Cath and I were talking about how much like New Zealand it felt, the area around Bariloche is a little alternative, very relaxed and very very beautiful, its probably the most New Zealandish  looking place I have ever seen.  But when we got back to the car park at the end of the walk, we met three backpackers who we had passed earlier on the walk, they had been jumped and robbed while on the same track we were on and the police were scouring the area trying to find the two teenagers who did it. This horrible crime really shocked us out of our revere and reminded us that things are very different over here, it’s not so dangerous that you shouldn’t come and see it, but you need to keep your wits about you at all times…..
The next day we went for a big tramp up one of the nearby mountains, starting at the La Catederal ski field (apparently the best ski field in Lat Am) we went on up and across the hills to ´Refugio Frey´. A Refugio is basically a mountain hut, but being Argentina it has full time staff and offers hot meals and snacks, unfortunately as I thought it was 10km return trek, we left a bit late in the day, we worked out after a couple of hours that it had to be 20km return trek, so we hurried on hoping to get to the refugio before lunch finished….. which of course we didn’t, we arrived just in time to watch some other trampers tucking into a hot lunch and made do with just salami and cheese sandwhiches on mouldy bread – I wouldn’t normally eat moldy bread, but due to me thinking it was just a 10km walk, we hadn’t packed any food, and that was all that was on offer!
But apart from a dodgy lunch, the small bit of the Andes we saw were just stunning, here are some photos we took on our walk:

One of the bridges on the track!

Another awesome handbuilt bridge

Climbers scaling one of the stunning peaks

Refugio Frey – a long way to walk for mouldy salami sandwhiches!

Us sitting in one of the ´tentsites´ to keep out of the wind!

The view from the refugio

Use relaxing in one of the campsites, out of the breeze and enjoying the clean air and sunshine!
On our last day we took a drive to see the black glacier (Perito Moreno) on Mt Tronador. The glacier and snow covered mountain are 40km into a national park, the road to the base of the glacier is to say the least a bit rough. narrow and windy, in fact it’s so rough, narrow and windy that it runs one way (inwards) from 10am-2pm, then the other way (outwards) from 2pm to 6pm. Presumably this is to make the road a bit safer and lessen the chance of you getting hit by some crazy tourist coming round the bend sideways. But of course as the Paris Dakar rally had been through here just a month ago, Greg took this as his inspiration to see how quickly he could cover the 40km in their super rental/rally chevy corsa, Cath was remarkably silent for this bit of the trip, but if we were to do it again I would at least spend enough on the rental car to ensure that it had a ´jesus handle´ for the passenger to hold on with as the car powerslides around the corners!
Here are some pictures we took around Mt Tronador, it definitely one of the most beautiful places we have ever seen, amazing snow capped mountains, glaciers, waterfalls, woodpeckers, eagles and stunning aqua blue lakes and rivers  – the highlight of the trip for sure.

Mt Tronador.

The end of the black glacier

Translated ´only fools beyond this point´

I am guessing it was a hawk – but its just a guess!

One of the many aqua lakes full of glacial run off water

Cold and clear – and i mean really cold!

Thats it for now, back to work…

Adventures in Brazilian bureaucracy

I got sent this blog today, it may not mean much to some of you, but to anyone who has dealt with or may have to deal with the brasilian system, its a very entertaining read (and yes i do recognise that every country has some degree of excessive beureaucracy, but brasil seems to have a lot)!!

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/brazil/090302/adventures-brazilian-bureaucracy

One year in, we are still here and still loving it!

Hello Hello,

Long time no chat!

We have now been in Brasil for over a year, many people predicted the initial six months would keep going and going and it has.

So it now looks like we will be here for another year or two – which in our world is practically forever, so we are settling into our Brasilian lifestyle even more and making ourselves more at home here in sunny Sao Paulo.

Of course because we are now going to be here for longer, all of you who have been talking about coming over to visit us can now go ahead and book your tickets!!!

I know I have been a bit slack on the blog front for a while now, work and other not so exciting things have kept us a bit quiet for the last few months, plus we have also been traveling a lot, trips to Australia, England and Spain have kept us on the move and having fun catching up with family and friends all over the world.

Work for both of us is good, as usual busy, but good and with summer finally in full swing over here we really have nothing to complain about.

Last night we were watching the travel and living channel (gregs favourite channel after Speed), and we happened to see TV chef and travel show host Anthony Bourdain presenting a show from Sao Paulo. His encounter with Sao Paulo and his view of the city very closely mirrors our own thoughts on the city, so i thought i would post the show here for anyone who wants to see it.

Thanks to youtube, the full show is available to watch online (but its broken into five bite size pieces)  the show is about forty minutes all up,  so get yourself a comfy chair and a cool drink and settle in and follow Mr Bourdain as he falls in love with the city we also love:

Of course for anyone who wants to download the whole show, you can download it here:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3780431/Anthony.Bourdain.No.Reservations.S04E01-04%5Bcabra%5D

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Watch this space as we will back soon with another post on our latest adventure to Patagonia!

The book is finally published!

I am happy to announce that my book

Discover SAP ERP HCM

The first ever introductory guide to SAP HR is now published and available to purchase from SAP Press here:

http://www.sap-press.com/product.cfm?ac … duct=H2989

Though not the novel that lots of people where hoping for, its a high level introduction to all of the modules that make up the SAP Human Captial Management software including:
* E Recruitment
* Talent Management
* Learning Management
* Global Employee Management
* Personnel Administration
* Organizational Management
* Time and Attendance
* HCM Processes and Forms
And all the other parts that make up the HCM Solution.

Its not a config guide (apparently there is no market for a book on config?!?), but it does explain what all of the various parts of the system are supposed to do, the key terms and concepts that explain howdifferent modules work  and are integrated and provides case studies of companies that implemented the various modules and their experiences.

The book is perfect for people just starting out on SAP HCM implementation who would like to understand the potential of the system and also for experienced users and consultants who would like to expand their horizons and learn a little more about the other areas of HCM.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of my family and friends around the globe for their support and encouragement which was invaluable in getting the book finished!

Thanks a lot folks!

Ohh yeah and happy new year and merry christmas from Cath and I, 2009 is looking to be even more interesting that 2008 so look out for lots of upcoming adventures!

renting a house in sao paulo, our experience

After four months of solid searching we finally found our dream house here in sunny Sao Paulo. From looking at our blog stats, searches, emails and comments it appears that lots of people seem interested in information on the house rental process here in Sao Paulo, so this blog will cover what we encountered, learned and discovered during our search for a rental house.

Please don’t think that we are house hunting experts, or that our experience was in anyway “normal”, I don’t know what is normal here for house hunting, I can only write about our experience, and I hope that it helps someone.

Types of houses:

We knew we wanted to live near Parque Ibirapuera (the biggest park close to the centre of Sao Paulo), so we only looked in this area of the city, but even in our relatively small area we saw some a whole range of places, from amazing condominiums, cute secure streets and lots of nice houses out on regular streets.

Condominiums are secure and gated housing developments, they are the most secure (and most expensive) type of house that we saw, but most of them were well out of our budget (and hard to find vacant too), which was sad as some were really modern and funky.

Secure streets have a barrier at the entrance and exit of the street and a guard looking after the street, there are some nice secure streets around the edge of the park, and a couple that actually back onto the park.

Houses on regular streets can still have a security guard service; groups of houses chip in to pay the wages for a twenty four hours security service (which is what we have near our place).

Real Estate Agents

They are much the same as they are back in NZ or England, and that’s all I need to say!

We used all of the agencies near the park to maximise our chances of finding a place. In the end we found our house with VNC:

http://www.vnc.com.br/hm/

We also used Coehlo Da Fonseca:

http://www.coelhodafonseca.com.br/

And Anglo American:

http://www.angloaa.com/

All three had some people who could speak at least some English, which was a great help to us with our beginners Portuguese.

Another website that friends have used is:

http://www.zap.com.br/

The three agents would regularly email or phone as new houses became available, and we could see them online usually before deciding to view them.

Because where we wanted to live was an area of high demand, houses came and went really quickly, so we were lucky that Greg had a pretty flexible schedule so was able to visit houses as soon as the agent got the keys. The agents showed us houses around the range that we requested, but would also try and get us to view houses that were way out of our budget, which was both annoying and fascinating at the same time. The range of houses around our area goes from R4,000 to over R25,000 per month, and some of the houses at the top of the range are worth a look, just to see how the other half live!

The agents would pick us up from our place, or if it was easier we would meet them at the property or at their office. We never saw more than three houses in a day and we could never work out if this was deliberate or just coincidence.

The renting process

Once we found a house that we liked, we put in a written offer to the landlord via the agent, it seemed that the landlord can only be presented one offer at a time, and we narrowly missed one nice house as another offer got put in just 10 minutes before our offer did.

Once the landlord agrees to the offer, a contract is drawn up; this is where the process became a lot slower and more convoluted than the process in the UK or Nz/Oz.

There appeared to be no standard lease document, and our lease was 23 pages long and needed to be prepared by a lawyer – as if renting isn’t stressful enough on its own!

You don’t pay a bond, instead someone acts as a Fiador and guarantees your rental, this could be your company, or a person who lives in the state of Sao Paulo, and owns their own property, I don’t know if you could get a lease signed without this guarantee though.

The first place we applied for went fine until the landlord realised we were gringos, when he put the rent up by 25%, but the other landlords we encountered where pretty good and the agents were as shocked as we were by the landlords behaviour, so I don’t think this is normal behaviour!

The standard lease appears to be 36 months, but you can add a break clause in with a few weeks’ notice which we did, so the length of the lease didn’t really worry us, if the lease was broken early we would have to pay the lawyers fees – I am not sure what that would be though!

The real estate agent gets one months’ rent – but this paid to them by the landlord and you also need to pay the landlords insurer one month’s rent per year which is effectively landlords insurance.

A couple of friends of ours had leases that stated they needed to completely repaint the property when they ended the lease, this isn’t massively expensive, but it is another cost you may want to consider adding into your costs.

Renovations

It appears quite common here to negotiate with the landlord to spend some months of the rent money renovating the house, it’s a really great idea and lots of houses we saw had the option to spend up to four months’ rent on renovations, of course, the more you could spend on renovations, the shabbier the house was to start with. We negotiated to repaint the inside of our house, install a new kitchen and bathroom and generally tidy up the place up to the cost of three months rent. So the first three months rent we have paid to the contractors to do the renovations rather than the landlord.

What’s in the house?

This was probably one of the biggest areas of difference to the way we were renting back home, the things that are included in the house can vary massively from house to house, some we saw were totally bare – I mean totally bare, you would have to buy your own light fittings, switches, curtain rails, hot water systems etc. Others were more normally empty; you just needed to buy all your white goods (including fridge, oven, washing machine etc). Luckily we found a house in the latter category of empty, so we just had to buy all our white goods and furniture.

As with most things in Brasil, prices are probably higher than we expected (and most other expats too it appears) expected them to be, you can see the prices of all the white goods you need at this company website:

http://www.fastshop.com.br/

From our comparisons and talking to work mates these guys had pretty good prices, and a two day delivery guarantee.

Brasilian houses

The Brasilian houses that we saw had some peculiarities that we had not seen before and might be worth mentioning.

The most obvious difference was the maids’ apartment. At the back of all of the houses that we saw there was a small apartment with a bedroom and bathroom for the maid to use, these were generally pretty small and dark, but could I imagine be used as a spare bedroom if you like us don’t have a live in maid.

Quite a few of the older houses we saw didn’t have hot water in the kitchen; others had small electric hot water systems over the sink supplying hot water. Along similar lines was the electric shower, our house has a couple of these, they use electrical current to heat coldwater right in the shower head, once you get used to electric cables and running water being so close together they are pretty good.

Most of houses we saw also had fire places, its hot most of the year in Sao Paulo, but as the houses are built to catch a breeze rather than hold in hot air, when the weather does get cold, the house can get quite cold, we have a big fireplace in the lounge that fixes that problem there, but there is no heating in the other rooms. It’s not that cold here, so it’s not really a problem, but for people used to turning on the central heating as soon as it got a bit cold in London, we have found our first winter in Sao Paulo a bit of shock to the system!

My favourite bit of Brasilian house design is definitely the hammock hangers, our house has three sets of internal hammock hanging points, I am really looking forward to sleeping in the hallway on a hot summer night, with the breeze blowing through from the hallway door!

Given the grim fascination with safety and security and Sao Paulo, it’s probably also worth mentioning that our house is suitably well secured, we have a big tall fence around the house, topped with an electric fence, we have a motion detecting alarm system, and the core part of the house has all steel frame doors and windows with bars on them and panic buttons to call our security firm if anyone manages the get through all that. With that amount of security we sleep very well at night!

Bills

As well as paying the rent, we also pay for water, electricity, telephone and IPTU (council tax). I don’t know how the IPTU is calculated but for our house it costs us about 10% of our rent each month.

Another bill that we are quite happy to pay is for the security guard who watches over some of the houses on the street, given the fear of security in Sao Paulo, it’s reassuring to have him around the house in the evening, and as he is shared between several houses, the cost is minimal.

That’s about all I can think of our house renting experience at the moment, I hope it helps someone else who is in our situation. If I have made any mistakes or omissions, then please let me know!

Cheers,

Greg

Finally, we get into the new house!

Hey folks,

Yep we know its been a while since we updated the blog – sorry – but we have been busy kids!

Greg was finishing his book (it’s off to the publisher now) and Cath was busy at work (as usual) and amidst all this we have been trying to find and sort out our new house.

As with lots of things in Brasil, the processes for renting somewhere to live is subtly different to the way we have done it in the past in London and Oz and Nz, and importantly a somewhat longer process. Greg will do a follow up post with some lessons we have learned going through the process of renting a home in Sao Paulo soon as lots of people have been visiting our blog and asking for information on our experience.

We choose to rent a house over an apartment because coming from Oz and Nz we are not really apartment people, even though we were living in an apartment for the last eight months, and have previously spent 12 months in one in London, we enjoy having a real outdoor area, and most importantly not having people above, below and beside us, so even though the security risks are somewhat higher (apparently) we decided that a house was the right home for us while we are in Sao Paulo.

So last Friday we finally said good-bye to our forty-eight square metre studio (which included the balcony and ten boxes of stuff shipped over from London last month) and said hello to our three hundred square metre house. The house was built in 1977 (what an awesome year, lots of quality produced in that year) and I don’t think anything has been renovated since.

When we finally arranged a time to hand over the keys we were in for a bit of a surprise, as well as the keys to the front gate and the front door, we were told that the rest of the keys for the house were in the box in the kitchen – we didn’t really realise what we were in for here though - the box contained over 180 keys “for the house” none with any labels, so our first challenge was trying to match these keys to the forty odd lockable doors, windows, cupboards and drawers in the house! Here is Greg half way through the great key sort:

The “keys to the house”

So the house is actually divided into two separate houses, in the main house, we have three bedrooms, four bathrooms, kitchen, conservatory and two dining rooms… you get the picture. It is huge.

Then there is a separate house at the back, its double storey and on the top floor it has an art studio with amazing views to the city and to the park. Downstairs is where the maid would live, it also has a laundry room, a small poolside party room and a bathroom for the pool, taking the grand total of bathrooms to seven.

Oh yeah and it also has a pool and a second larger “sala de fiesta” which translates to the party room!

So here is a quick tour of the new place, starting at the street and working towards the back:

The front gates (and the car)

The Sala de fiesta (just waiting for the pool and ping pong tables)

The lounge

The conservatory (and Gregs soon to be cactus garden)

The dining room

The kitchen (with new cooker and fridge)

The “yellow” bathroom, we also have similarly “lovely” grey, brown, chocolate and white bathrooms too!

The second bedroom leading to the pool

The second house

The artist’s studio (now gregs office)

So as I mentioned rental agreements are a bit different here and our new house is really tired inside, the kitchen, bathrooms and paint doesn’t look it has been touched since the place was built, so we negotiated three months rent free so that we could spend the rent money renovating the kitchen, bathroom, and re-painting everywhere.

There are lots of things that are different between a Brasilian house (well our Brasilian house at least) and the houses that we have lived in before, the electric showers is an obvious thing, instead of having hot and cold water in the shower, there is just cold water, and an electric shower head which heats up the water before it comes out the nozzle, a great idea once you get used to mixing electricity and water! But Gregs favourite thing is definitely the numerous hammock hooks around the property (inside and outside the house), there are a couple set into the wall near the back door of our place (where there is a nice breeze), they are a great idea, the fold into the wall when not required and are definitely something that could definitely catch on:

Hammock Hooks

So, the house is definitely a lot bigger than what we were planning to get, but after four months of looking for a house we were quite keen to move somewhere/anywhere!!! As well as an amazing house where we live is in walking distance to loads of great restaurants, the biggest park in Sao Paulo, and is considered to be the safest neighbourhood in town, and the best thing is that the rent for this house is not much more than we were paying for a small 2 bed terrace house in Chiswick, London.

But of course the first thing that everyone wants to know about when we mention we are living in a house and not an apartment is the question of security, so for those who are interested, the house is surrounded by three metre high walls, with an electric fence on top, a motion sensing alarm system, panic buttons in most of the rooms, a secure inner locked up area (where you can “double lock” at night) and a guard outside twenty four hours a day that guards our house and the ten houses around us. So I think we will be fine!

Its pretty funny, though this level of security may seem extremely high to some of reading outside Brasil, it already feels completely normal and we feel more secure in house that we ever have before in a house!

So the painters start tomorrow, so hopefully in a month of two our house should be fixed up nice, just in time for summer and a pool side bbq party or two!

Why don’t you boys go outside and fly a kite or something?

Well after just over six months in our tiny little flat, we are finally moving somewhere a bit more permanent. We are moving next week into a real house – no more apartment living for us (we say yet again)!!!

But living on the 18^th floor definitely has it advantages if you like to watch the world go by, at the moment its school holidays in Sao Paulo, so some kids in a building near us went to fly their kite.

Here is their kite:

And here are the kids:

The best thing is they are thirteen stories up, so their kite is really really really high (kids and kite highlighted):

Here they are another day, this time with an afternoon flight departing from Congonhas airport:

As you can see in that picture, they sky is quite grey on the horizon, aparently because its July, one of the driest months of the year so there is no rain to wash the pollution away.

Talking of departing flights, here is one of neighbours coming home from work (or maybe a hard days shopping, it s hard to tell from here:

Another great thing is the evening views; here is a time exposure shot I got of the evening traffic near our place (including the lights from a passing plane in the top right hand corner)…

We are really going to miss the view, but we sure aint going to miss the twenty four hour traffic noise!!

Euro 2008 in Caracas with Piero and Ana, this isn’t Spain we are in is it?

In life sometimes things are a bit surreal, sometimes they are just totally surreal, our weekend in Caracas with Piero and Ana definitely was one of the more surreal.

The gang enjoying the game

We were in Caracas Venezuela as Cath had to work there for a couple of days; Greg got a cheap ticket and joined her, writing in the hotel room while she worked in the office.

This was our second trip to Caracas; in the newly renamed “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” you would think things have to be going pretty well in a country for the government to have time to rename the country, but as of January this year the country was renamed to reflect the importance of Simon Bolivar( the first bloke to attempt to unify South America) in the country’s history.

As we noted on our first arrival to Caracas, it’s a pretty shocking city to arrive in, as soon as you step through the arrival gates into the public part of the airport you are heckled by blokes wanting to change money, offer cheap hotels, car hire – you name it. It’s the only airport we have visited outside Zimbabwe where you get the same level of touting.

The drive into town is up a large range of hills, on the second part of the drive the hills are covered in ramshackle buildings, the amount of slums in Caracas has (according to locals and friends who visit their regularly) been steadily increasing since Chavez came to power.

There is amazing amounts of homelessness and poverty visible in Caracas, much more than any other South American city we have visited (though we haven’t visited that many), but pictures definitely stuck in our heads of people making houses on the banks of the river that runs through the city, building houses underneath the motorway fly over’s and in any other patch of land that is free. You see homeless people in all South American cities – but not in the numbers we saw in Caracas.

During our times in Caracas we didn’t hear a single good thing about the President, most people are quick to point out how much they dislike him, and how he only wins elections because there is compulsory voting, and so many of the country’s poor people vote for him the hope that he will make things better. The international press certainly does him little favours, his reputation as a loud mouthed slightly crazy leader is almost universal; he is probably the most famous South American politician at the moment – and usually for all the wrong reasons.

But what is actually happening in Venezuela at the moment?

Are things getting better under Chavez, or are they getting worse?

It’s really hard to tell, but the fact is Chavez has made more money than ever thanks to high oil prices, but he also faces a massive challenge, though always a wealthy country Venezuela never had much in the way of wealth distribution, and from my quick look on the internet this morning it appears that the number of people living in poverty in Venezuela has been steadily dropping.

Even the CIA world fact book shows that the percent of the population living below the poverty line in Venezuela has dropped from 67 percent to 37 percent in 2008 which anyone would have to admit are pretty staggering statistics (if they are in fact true)!!

But enough about politics, what about hanging out with Piero and Ana and watching football i hear you ask?!!?

So Pesty and Spana were just finishing up another adventure around South America and luckily our paths crossed in Caracas, they were about to head over to Barcelona where they are setting up home for a while (remember 2008 is officially the year of “moving somewhere Latin speaking”)!!!

So we headed out to watch the final of Euro 2008, we headed to a part of town that was in easy walking distance of the hotel but of course as this is Caracas, its apparently not safe to walk anywhere so we got a taxi).

The taxis in Caracas are pretty amazing, as a dedicated car nut, Greg loves it, it appears that anyone who has a car can stick a taxi sticker on their windscreen and heh presto they are a taxi driver, this fact combined with the super low petrol prices (around five cents US per litre) means that a lot of the taxis are massive old American sedans from the 1970s.

Here is just one of the beauties i snapped from our hotel window:

Caracas Taxis – your choice a tiny battered Daewoo or an ‘merican muscle car?

So we drove around the suburb of La Candelaria trying to find a good pub to watch the match in, we eventually found a place called “Wassup! Bar and Fun Place, since 2002”

Wassup!!?!?

So of course we knew instantly this was our kind of bar, we love fun, and have done since long before 2002! Hanging with Piero and Ana is great as they both speak pretty good Spanish, but the Venezuelan version of Spanish is pretty difficult to follow, so we were all confused when the bar tender said he couldn’t sell usthree beers and a Smirnoff ice, but he could see us either six, fifteen or twenty six beers and a Smirnoff ice… totally confused we decided to go with just fifteen beers (to start at least) and then the mystery was solved as the barman dragged out a bucket filled with beers and ice and handed us a bottle opener. Pure genius, he doesn’t have to waste time serving us, and we didn’t have to wait around for him (which was lucky):

Waiting, waiting, waiting for a drink!!

I just wish we had ordered twenty six beers, then you get it served in an Esky/chilly bin. Of course for our readers who are used to being served in English or Aussie or Kiwi pubs – remember this is South America, you never, ever, go up to the bar yourself – anywhere that serves drinks always serves to your table – something we are getting quite accustomed to now!

So we settled down with our fifteen ice cold beers and one Smirnoff ice for Ana. Let me just say that Venezuela has without a doubt the worst beer of any country we have visited. We were stuck with no choice in the bar we drunk at – there was only Brahma Light – kind of like XXXX gold, a tasteless mid strength horrible beer – served ice cold which is good as it stops you noticing the lack of taste.

We settled down with our beers to enjoy the game, we were amazed to find that the whole place was 100 percent supporting Spain, it appears that Venezuelans still look back fondly on their colonial heritage, there were some German supporters (including us) but we were in a tiny minority.

Everyone had dressed up in their best red and Spanish gear, and unfortunately for us, the game went with the Spanish – though it was all very well mannered… This lady at the bar particularly caught our eye, she had a butt that would make Beyonce proud and man she loved to shake it and her boyfriend loved to grab it!!!

Beyonces twin sister shakes her thing!

After the game, the streets filled with 1,000s of honking flag waving Spanish supporters, this unofficial victory parade went on well into the night:

Just part of the never ending Spanish victory parade

So it appears that no matter the state of the economy, at least these folks really know how to party!