The Bureaucracy that is Brazil...

July 1st
Today was the first day back in São Paulo and back to school after our weekend at the beach and unfortunately it was still chilly and rainy here. Today our Portuguese class was interesting, we discussed and article about a man who worked for 8 years as a street sweeper to write his dissertation and we worked on more grammar since we have our first test this week...blah.. Lunch was a bit hard to find today since there was a general strike in support of the protests and several of the lunch bars in the cafeteria were closed (they all have individual owners). After lunch we had our culture class which this week is centered on immigration and Brazilian identity from the early 20th century on. For me, it is an absolutely fascinating topic because race and immigration are so different than in the US than in Brazil but they both have similar backgrounds with regards to slavery and waves of immigration. Also the ideas of whiteness and blackness (not white and black status but the qualities they engender in the cultural imagination) are very different here. For example, the famous Brazilian soccer player, Pele, in an interview made a comment that he “remembered when he was black” which made perfect sense here in Brazil but was incomprehensible in the US. While the 19th century the US adopted the “one drop rule” that race mixing lead to degeneration, Brazil, already a nation with a history of race mixing, the adopted the opposite approach stating that immigration and mixing with Europeans would help improve or ‘whiten’ the general population and make them stronger.
After our fascinating class we got to experience the bureaucracy that is Brazil first-hand as we are moving forward in the process of registering with the Federal Police. The PUC staff had already made copies of our passports and consulate documentation in order to make our appointments with the federal police, which are actually set for two days before the end of our program… PUC was also able to get the ball rolling on our money order process to pay for the registration. Apparently there are particular places that are allowed to sell the paper to print the money order request which we then take to a bank, pay them, and then they stamp the exact same piece of paper that we gave them, return it to us and then we take that to the federal police at our appointment. However, today we all went as a group to get certified copies made by the Brazilian version of a notary of our passports, including every page that has been used, which for some people became rather expensive (about $23). I found this particularly ironic in my case because the only thing in my passport is the Brazilian visa that they gave me a month ago, but I still had to get an authorized copy of it… Afterwards several of us went to get new ID pictures made in the Brazilian sizes as we were misinformed about the type and size of image that we needed to bring with us. On July 24th we will take all of these components (plus our original passports and consulate visa forms) and a book to the federal police office and wait to hand it in. In about three months we should receive a card granting us permission to be in the country.
After we escaped the black hole of bureaucracy Allision and I went by Rua Agusta on our way home in search of good soup to banish the chill. We decided that whatever we need Agusta will provide, yesterday it was an open sports bar, today it was cheap umbrellas and good soup from an American-style healthy quick meal place (like a Panera). Finding food in Brazil in restaurants that is not fried, cheesy or wrapped in bread is very difficult. When people eat in their homes they the food is fairly healthy, but the restaurant food is almost all unhealthy. It can also be very confusing to order food in Brazil because there is no real uniform system. Generally you eat first and pay after (even at food stands in the market, it’s kind of on the honor system where you just go up and tell them what you had). However, sometimes you pay first and take a ticket. There are also two kinds of ticket food places, one where you have to walk down about 10 feet to give it to another person behind the same counter who will make your order, and the kind where you hold onto the ticket and give it to the person when they call your number. Sometimes is pretty clear, and usually the type of ticket where you have to walk it down the line to the person a few feet away from the register who make the food but are unable to communicate with the register person for an unknown reason, are typically not common, yet twice in the past two days I have managed to get this type of ticket and failed to recognized it so I just stand there for 10 minutes before I catch on to what everyone else is doing…On the way back to the apartment we also stumbled upon a really neat cooperative store in which people rend out little cubbies to sell small things, like Etsy but with a physical location. In the store there were lots of interesting little knick-knacks and fun arty-s things. São Paulo is always an interesting city!