Getting Settled
Saturday, 6. January 2007, 12:11:09
Blog for the week ending January 2, 2007
CONTACT INFORMATION for Kevin and Bob
New Phone Number! Call us at 0 11 55 62 3314-9318
This time of year we are SIX hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.
Send e.mail to kevinbob7@msn.com
Note: Since our move, we’ve been without reliable internet service, so this week’s Tuesday blog is a few days overdue.
The Salvadoran Bakery in Seattle wrote to us, and so can you. I have seen our address written out about six different ways. The one that the gatekeeper likes is:
Kevin e Bob
Rua Ferroviário Braulino dos Reis
Qd. 16, L 3-E, Ap. 604-E
Vila Industrial,
Anápolis, GO 75115-050
BRAZIL
The address that the Salvadoran Bakery used got here just fine. I prefer the street name "Rua 5-A", but I'm told the mail carriers sometimes have trouble finding the building, since Rua 5-A doesn't have an entrance to the building.
WEDNESDAY, December 27, 2006
Today Heidi gave us a ride to her mom’s place so I could send out the Tuesday BLOG, and so Bob could do laundry.
Our ulterior motive was to have another one of Shirlee's home-cooked meals.
The woodworker wanted me to come by his shop so we could finalize our order for the ivory-wood bed. The woodworker is able to offer reasonable rates because he cuts down on overhead by eliminating unnecessary expenses such as wastebaskets for his office.
Heidi let me drive her car, but she came along to make sure I had back-up support in Portuguese.
Brian was in town today.
He came by and replaced our evil front-door lock.
Bianca and Lexy make appearances in our lives from time to time.
THURSDAY, December 28, 2006
Bob and I went back to Shirlee’s today, where there is food, laundry facilities, and internet. Heidi FINALLY got some recognition for her birthday.
Her mom baked her a great one-layer carrot cake.
The plan for the day was to go on a shopping spree downtown to get new appliances.
Heidi got us downtown, where our favorite store, Novo Mundo, had huge signs up saying something like, “GO AWAY. Come back tomorrow for the big sale.”
Just our luck. I went across the street to see our accountant.
Good news. We’ll have our all-important CNPJ number soon.
After so much exertion, we needed an açaí break.
OK, so Novo Mundo couldn’t help us, but we found a foam shop that sold us a mattress CHEAP. I came home to wait for the foam to be delivered, while Heidi and Bob went out and got pamonha for our dinner.
Let’s see… Blue rubber band? This must be the sweet kind of pamonha.
Our money-changer in Paraguay sent me a multi-lingual agenda: English, Guarani, and Spanish.
I can't make it through a day without taking pictures of Lexy.
....I enjoy the view from our new home. I can see...
Palm trees in the rain,
The distant hills,
and the new building that will take away a slice of our view.
FRIDAY, December 29, 2006
It was a beautiful day for Heidi’s muffler to fall off. It was still hanging by a thread when she delivered Bob and me to Shirlee’s place.
We swapped cars with Shirlee, and headed for Novo Mundo and their big year-end sale. Matt came along,too.
....I got to drive the little white VW Gol. My shoes are about twice as wide as the pedals on the car, so I had to step on two pedals at once. I eventually got used to the roar the engine made when I hit the breaks and got the accelerator as an added bonus.
We spent about four hours shopping for “Eletro Domesticos”. For every 50 reais (about 22 dollars) we spent, we got a coupon to fill out and enter in a sweepstakes. We got 174 coupons at the end of the day. The deadline is tomorrow. Although we ordered a dishwasher, a washer-dryer, a fridge, a microwave, a DVD player-recorder, and two 29-inch TVs, I think we were most excited that we got to bring home a toaster. Our salesperson missed his lunch entirely (but likely got a very nice commission), and we arrived at Shirlee’s before 4 pm for a late-late-late lunch. (Glória and Adenaur were there, with a potential buyer for the house.)
Matt's Brazilian passport arrived today, stamped with an immigrant visa allowing him to enter the US and apply for US citizenship.
Rainy season means interesting clouds.
I got home in time to tutor Juan… for the first time at our new location. While Juan and I worked on English, Bob filled out nearly all of the sweepstakes tickets… Which not only asked for our LONG address, but also my CPF number, the number of the receipt, the RG number (Brazilian ID… which I don’t yet have), and the question, “Which store sells more home appliances that anyone else in Central-West Brazil?”
We’d better win.
Have you ever wondered how to build an apartment building? I'm learning how just by looking out my window.
This builder is using two wheelbarrows and a pulley to get all the concrete in place.
SATURDAY, December 30, 2006
This morning, unexpectedly, the Novo Mundo truck appeared, with everything except the fridge and washer-dryer.
Bob and I walked downtown to turn in our 174 sweepstakes tickets.
Along the way we saw a horse hauling away purple flowers,
and we discovered a road that had washed out during the flooding...
The scenery here can at times suggest that Brazil is truly a land of contrasts.
Along the washed-out road we found the
LAUNDRY OF THE WEEK
Once we got downtown to Novo Mundo, we had our sales associate, Rodrigo, put our contest entries in the hopper.
We went from store to store looking for the perfect stove, which Novo Mundo didn’t have in stock.
We returned to Novo Mundo to buy Heidi a chicken dish set, when the manager and our sales associate rushed up to us, wondering how they could convince us to buy our stove there. They found a six-burner, two-oven gas stove at the new mall in Goiânia, and they gave us a good price, so we bought it. Then, we found ourselves with 32 more contest tickets to fill out. We still had three hours before the store closed. So, we went to the açaí place around the corner. This is the second açaí place we know of in town run by emigrants from Taiwan. “Emily” told us that she is a vegetarian, and she’d like to open a vegetarian restaurant in Anápolis… but there aren’t that many vegetarians in town. We’ll do all we can to encourage them to open a vegetarian restaurant. Once again, while I chatted, Bob was left with the job of filling out contest tickets. We’d better win something… I hope it’s nothing useless, like a boat. We turned in the additional contest tickets, and walked to Heidi’s house on Rua Dona Doca (which we call “Donald Duck Street”).
I wanted to take a picture of the inside of her house. I looked around for a neat and orderly part of the house, and am proud to show you how clean her ceiling is.
She gave us a ride to the tattoo studio, where Marcelo had just got paid,
and where
Lexy was waiting to borrow my hat.
Then on to the video place, and the grocery store near our home.
Hey kids, did Santa not bring you what you asked for? Maybe he encountered some unexpected problems in Brazil.
Before his accident, Santa brought us a notebook made of elephant poo paper.
Using a wheelbarrow to carry concrete to the fourth floor can be time consuming. The work crew next door worked from about 6:30 a.m. until 11:00 pm.
SUNDAY, December 31, 2006
Bait and switch? We asked Brian to come to Anápolis this morning to pick us up and take us to Goiânia…
But was it all a trick to have him come and hook up our new appliances? He listened to our wish list, and did what he could to figure out our appliance dilemmas. Even the microwave was hard for me to figure out, since it had all those grounding wires sticking out the back. Does your microwave look like this?
Eventually we left for Goiânia.
Brian took us to the aviation school near the airport where he teaches in the evenings.
....I asked for a trip down memory lane, so he took us downtown. While most neighborhoods have filled up with high-rise condos, downtown hasn’t changed in 20 years. Then, back to Brian’s comfort zone, the Flamboyant “Shopping” and the Carrefour store. The Carrefour store sells "Baby Beer".
The Christmas displays were still up at the Flamboyant mall, and this year’s theme seemed to be “Christmas Fertilizer”. Or, more broadly, Santa’s Christmas Tree Farm… for which Santa needed bags and bags of ADUBO.
We also found the Pot Man here.
With no tradition of Gingerbread Men, you make do with what you have.
The other highlight of the trip to the mall, besides the visit to the Lebanese restaurant in the “Plaza of Alimentation”, was the new “sanitário masculino”. Propriety didn’t allow me to take photos in the restroom (and the mall guard had already told me not to take pictures of the "Deck Parking"). But I will describe the salient feature of the men's room. The shelf over the urinals was right at chin height. The shelves stood out from the wall so far as to render the porcelain fixtures nearly useless. Was it designed by really short space aliens or by women architects who wanted revenge against the male of the species? It’s just one more item to add to the list of design flaws that we encounter in Brazil.
We marveled at other sights, too… such as the Bobstore,
which didn’t appear to have any Bob-friendly items at all.
We looked for king size sheets at a bedding store, and were shown sheets for something like $600 DOLLARS. We lucked out at one of the department stores. We found king-size sheets for about 90 dollars per set. It’s still more than I wanted t pay, but Brian explained that only the ultra-rich in Brazil have king-size beds.
I looked for a vantage point from which to take a picture of the Goiânia skyline,
but it’s like trying to take a picture of all of LA at once. It’s best done from a satellite or a really high airplane.
On the way back to Anápolis, Brian stopped in Terezópolis to show us his new house.
We saw César The Dog, and his friend the death-defying kitten, which through natural selection had developed perfect camouflage to blend in with the door mat.
I didn’t wipe my feet on the cat. From the front yard you could imagine that you were on the edge of some jungle, but that’s just the way things are in downtown Terezópolis.
The ride back to Anápolis is scenic.
We got home in time for last-minute preparations for our first-ever party in our new home. Without a fridge or a stove we were limited in our food-preparation options. I prepared some fruit. Shirlee and Matt arrived with zucchini bread, and Heidi brought everything else… Rice and lentils, and a variety of other foods.
Heidi even brought a barbecue for bananas... and other things.
From our rooftop deck we were able to watch fireworks around the city.
It reminded me of watching the Fourth-of-July fireworks from our deck in West Seattle, only here in Brazil the weather is the same as it is in heaven… a constant 74 degrees with a cool breeze. And, I’m guessing our New Year’s Eve was about 40 degrees warmer than it was in Seattle. It was a perfect evening.
Lexy enjoyed the fireworks, too, but the concussive BOOMS were not so popular.
MONDAY, January 1, 2007
This is the first time I’ve been in Brazil in January. I lived here from early February to late December in 1987, and I narrowly missed New Year’s Day when I was here seven years ago. So far, January is turning out to be gray and rainy… With pleasant temperatures, so we still leave the windows open.
Brazilian culture permits “noise” that wouldn’t be permitted in most US communities. This morning around 8:00 a.m., a sound truck came by, blaring information about the schedule of church services for the Foursquare Gospel Church across town. I don’t think it was so much an effort to recruit new members as it was an attempt to mete out God’s judgment on revelers who drank too much last night and woke up with a hangover. The soy milk I drank yesterday left me able to roll over and go back to sleep.
Bob got up early to put sticky notes on the kitchen walls. He has the whole kitchen planned out.
....It was a cloudy, rainy day. The yellow birds that visit the roof of our building seemed comfortable enough.
....It was cool enough in the evening that I wore a sweater as I was working in our open-air upstairs “loft”. Sweater temperatures are a rare event in Anápolis. This indicates that the temperature may have plummeted to 70 degrees. It was another quiet day at home. I didn’t leave home even once... But I did go out on the deck to take pictures of our neighbors' laundry.
Bob and I watched two videos on our new DVD and TV.
TUESDAY, January 2, 2007
The most interesting creatures come to visit us. Mosquitos are too lazy to fly up to the seventh floor, but ants do make the trip, as did this unidentified visitor.
My life doesn’t have enough drama in it, so today I went in search of a complicated real estate transaction. I’ve had my eye on a lot for sale near our home.
It’s a big lot, in the nicest part of our derelict neighborhood.
It would make a great home for Gringolândia, our English tutoring center.
Aelson, our realtor, came by today to take me to meet the owner of the lot. It turns out that the lot is full of real-estate drama. According to the owner, his good-for-nothing so-and-so brother-in-law illegally put a lien on the place, and now the owner can only pay off the lien by selling the lot, but he can’t sell the lot until the lien is gone. There’s also a house straddling the property line, but that will be easy to fix. He’ll just tear down the half of the house on “my” side of the line. Best of all, the lot is home to a community of chickens.
Our friends, Ricardo and Eliana, came by today. In addition to being friends, they are also painters. They agreed to paint the interior of our home.
Bob and Heidi spent the day shopping for a can opener… Not the flat kind that works like a machete, but the kind you can buy for three bucks in the States. It turns out it’s a rare commodity here. No one seems to have one.
It's taking a bit of work, but little by little we're settling in to our new home and our new life.
CONTACT INFORMATION for Kevin and Bob
New Phone Number! Call us at 0 11 55 62 3314-9318
This time of year we are SIX hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.
Send e.mail to kevinbob7@msn.com
Note: Since our move, we’ve been without reliable internet service, so this week’s Tuesday blog is a few days overdue.
The Salvadoran Bakery in Seattle wrote to us, and so can you. I have seen our address written out about six different ways. The one that the gatekeeper likes is:
Kevin e Bob
Rua Ferroviário Braulino dos Reis
Qd. 16, L 3-E, Ap. 604-E
Vila Industrial,
Anápolis, GO 75115-050
BRAZIL
The address that the Salvadoran Bakery used got here just fine. I prefer the street name "Rua 5-A", but I'm told the mail carriers sometimes have trouble finding the building, since Rua 5-A doesn't have an entrance to the building.
WEDNESDAY, December 27, 2006
Today Heidi gave us a ride to her mom’s place so I could send out the Tuesday BLOG, and so Bob could do laundry.
Our ulterior motive was to have another one of Shirlee's home-cooked meals.
The woodworker wanted me to come by his shop so we could finalize our order for the ivory-wood bed. The woodworker is able to offer reasonable rates because he cuts down on overhead by eliminating unnecessary expenses such as wastebaskets for his office.
Heidi let me drive her car, but she came along to make sure I had back-up support in Portuguese.
Brian was in town today.
He came by and replaced our evil front-door lock.
Bianca and Lexy make appearances in our lives from time to time.
THURSDAY, December 28, 2006
Bob and I went back to Shirlee’s today, where there is food, laundry facilities, and internet. Heidi FINALLY got some recognition for her birthday.
Her mom baked her a great one-layer carrot cake.
The plan for the day was to go on a shopping spree downtown to get new appliances.
Heidi got us downtown, where our favorite store, Novo Mundo, had huge signs up saying something like, “GO AWAY. Come back tomorrow for the big sale.”
Just our luck. I went across the street to see our accountant.
Good news. We’ll have our all-important CNPJ number soon.
After so much exertion, we needed an açaí break.
OK, so Novo Mundo couldn’t help us, but we found a foam shop that sold us a mattress CHEAP. I came home to wait for the foam to be delivered, while Heidi and Bob went out and got pamonha for our dinner.
Let’s see… Blue rubber band? This must be the sweet kind of pamonha.
Our money-changer in Paraguay sent me a multi-lingual agenda: English, Guarani, and Spanish.
I can't make it through a day without taking pictures of Lexy.
....I enjoy the view from our new home. I can see...
Palm trees in the rain,
The distant hills,
and the new building that will take away a slice of our view.
FRIDAY, December 29, 2006
It was a beautiful day for Heidi’s muffler to fall off. It was still hanging by a thread when she delivered Bob and me to Shirlee’s place.
We swapped cars with Shirlee, and headed for Novo Mundo and their big year-end sale. Matt came along,too.
....I got to drive the little white VW Gol. My shoes are about twice as wide as the pedals on the car, so I had to step on two pedals at once. I eventually got used to the roar the engine made when I hit the breaks and got the accelerator as an added bonus.
We spent about four hours shopping for “Eletro Domesticos”. For every 50 reais (about 22 dollars) we spent, we got a coupon to fill out and enter in a sweepstakes. We got 174 coupons at the end of the day. The deadline is tomorrow. Although we ordered a dishwasher, a washer-dryer, a fridge, a microwave, a DVD player-recorder, and two 29-inch TVs, I think we were most excited that we got to bring home a toaster. Our salesperson missed his lunch entirely (but likely got a very nice commission), and we arrived at Shirlee’s before 4 pm for a late-late-late lunch. (Glória and Adenaur were there, with a potential buyer for the house.)
Matt's Brazilian passport arrived today, stamped with an immigrant visa allowing him to enter the US and apply for US citizenship.
Rainy season means interesting clouds.
I got home in time to tutor Juan… for the first time at our new location. While Juan and I worked on English, Bob filled out nearly all of the sweepstakes tickets… Which not only asked for our LONG address, but also my CPF number, the number of the receipt, the RG number (Brazilian ID… which I don’t yet have), and the question, “Which store sells more home appliances that anyone else in Central-West Brazil?”
We’d better win.
Have you ever wondered how to build an apartment building? I'm learning how just by looking out my window.
This builder is using two wheelbarrows and a pulley to get all the concrete in place.
SATURDAY, December 30, 2006
This morning, unexpectedly, the Novo Mundo truck appeared, with everything except the fridge and washer-dryer.
Bob and I walked downtown to turn in our 174 sweepstakes tickets.
Along the way we saw a horse hauling away purple flowers,
and we discovered a road that had washed out during the flooding...
The scenery here can at times suggest that Brazil is truly a land of contrasts.
Along the washed-out road we found the
LAUNDRY OF THE WEEK
Once we got downtown to Novo Mundo, we had our sales associate, Rodrigo, put our contest entries in the hopper.
We went from store to store looking for the perfect stove, which Novo Mundo didn’t have in stock.
We returned to Novo Mundo to buy Heidi a chicken dish set, when the manager and our sales associate rushed up to us, wondering how they could convince us to buy our stove there. They found a six-burner, two-oven gas stove at the new mall in Goiânia, and they gave us a good price, so we bought it. Then, we found ourselves with 32 more contest tickets to fill out. We still had three hours before the store closed. So, we went to the açaí place around the corner. This is the second açaí place we know of in town run by emigrants from Taiwan. “Emily” told us that she is a vegetarian, and she’d like to open a vegetarian restaurant in Anápolis… but there aren’t that many vegetarians in town. We’ll do all we can to encourage them to open a vegetarian restaurant. Once again, while I chatted, Bob was left with the job of filling out contest tickets. We’d better win something… I hope it’s nothing useless, like a boat. We turned in the additional contest tickets, and walked to Heidi’s house on Rua Dona Doca (which we call “Donald Duck Street”).
I wanted to take a picture of the inside of her house. I looked around for a neat and orderly part of the house, and am proud to show you how clean her ceiling is.
She gave us a ride to the tattoo studio, where Marcelo had just got paid,
and where
Lexy was waiting to borrow my hat.
Then on to the video place, and the grocery store near our home.
Hey kids, did Santa not bring you what you asked for? Maybe he encountered some unexpected problems in Brazil.
Before his accident, Santa brought us a notebook made of elephant poo paper.
Using a wheelbarrow to carry concrete to the fourth floor can be time consuming. The work crew next door worked from about 6:30 a.m. until 11:00 pm.
SUNDAY, December 31, 2006
Bait and switch? We asked Brian to come to Anápolis this morning to pick us up and take us to Goiânia…
But was it all a trick to have him come and hook up our new appliances? He listened to our wish list, and did what he could to figure out our appliance dilemmas. Even the microwave was hard for me to figure out, since it had all those grounding wires sticking out the back. Does your microwave look like this?
Eventually we left for Goiânia.
Brian took us to the aviation school near the airport where he teaches in the evenings.
....I asked for a trip down memory lane, so he took us downtown. While most neighborhoods have filled up with high-rise condos, downtown hasn’t changed in 20 years. Then, back to Brian’s comfort zone, the Flamboyant “Shopping” and the Carrefour store. The Carrefour store sells "Baby Beer".
The Christmas displays were still up at the Flamboyant mall, and this year’s theme seemed to be “Christmas Fertilizer”. Or, more broadly, Santa’s Christmas Tree Farm… for which Santa needed bags and bags of ADUBO.
We also found the Pot Man here.
With no tradition of Gingerbread Men, you make do with what you have.The other highlight of the trip to the mall, besides the visit to the Lebanese restaurant in the “Plaza of Alimentation”, was the new “sanitário masculino”. Propriety didn’t allow me to take photos in the restroom (and the mall guard had already told me not to take pictures of the "Deck Parking"). But I will describe the salient feature of the men's room. The shelf over the urinals was right at chin height. The shelves stood out from the wall so far as to render the porcelain fixtures nearly useless. Was it designed by really short space aliens or by women architects who wanted revenge against the male of the species? It’s just one more item to add to the list of design flaws that we encounter in Brazil.
We marveled at other sights, too… such as the Bobstore,
which didn’t appear to have any Bob-friendly items at all.
We looked for king size sheets at a bedding store, and were shown sheets for something like $600 DOLLARS. We lucked out at one of the department stores. We found king-size sheets for about 90 dollars per set. It’s still more than I wanted t pay, but Brian explained that only the ultra-rich in Brazil have king-size beds.
I looked for a vantage point from which to take a picture of the Goiânia skyline,
but it’s like trying to take a picture of all of LA at once. It’s best done from a satellite or a really high airplane.
On the way back to Anápolis, Brian stopped in Terezópolis to show us his new house.
We saw César The Dog, and his friend the death-defying kitten, which through natural selection had developed perfect camouflage to blend in with the door mat.
I didn’t wipe my feet on the cat. From the front yard you could imagine that you were on the edge of some jungle, but that’s just the way things are in downtown Terezópolis.
The ride back to Anápolis is scenic.
We got home in time for last-minute preparations for our first-ever party in our new home. Without a fridge or a stove we were limited in our food-preparation options. I prepared some fruit. Shirlee and Matt arrived with zucchini bread, and Heidi brought everything else… Rice and lentils, and a variety of other foods.
Heidi even brought a barbecue for bananas... and other things.
From our rooftop deck we were able to watch fireworks around the city.
It reminded me of watching the Fourth-of-July fireworks from our deck in West Seattle, only here in Brazil the weather is the same as it is in heaven… a constant 74 degrees with a cool breeze. And, I’m guessing our New Year’s Eve was about 40 degrees warmer than it was in Seattle. It was a perfect evening.
Lexy enjoyed the fireworks, too, but the concussive BOOMS were not so popular.
MONDAY, January 1, 2007
This is the first time I’ve been in Brazil in January. I lived here from early February to late December in 1987, and I narrowly missed New Year’s Day when I was here seven years ago. So far, January is turning out to be gray and rainy… With pleasant temperatures, so we still leave the windows open.
Brazilian culture permits “noise” that wouldn’t be permitted in most US communities. This morning around 8:00 a.m., a sound truck came by, blaring information about the schedule of church services for the Foursquare Gospel Church across town. I don’t think it was so much an effort to recruit new members as it was an attempt to mete out God’s judgment on revelers who drank too much last night and woke up with a hangover. The soy milk I drank yesterday left me able to roll over and go back to sleep.
Bob got up early to put sticky notes on the kitchen walls. He has the whole kitchen planned out.
....It was a cloudy, rainy day. The yellow birds that visit the roof of our building seemed comfortable enough.
....It was cool enough in the evening that I wore a sweater as I was working in our open-air upstairs “loft”. Sweater temperatures are a rare event in Anápolis. This indicates that the temperature may have plummeted to 70 degrees. It was another quiet day at home. I didn’t leave home even once... But I did go out on the deck to take pictures of our neighbors' laundry.
Bob and I watched two videos on our new DVD and TV.
TUESDAY, January 2, 2007
The most interesting creatures come to visit us. Mosquitos are too lazy to fly up to the seventh floor, but ants do make the trip, as did this unidentified visitor.
My life doesn’t have enough drama in it, so today I went in search of a complicated real estate transaction. I’ve had my eye on a lot for sale near our home.
It’s a big lot, in the nicest part of our derelict neighborhood.
It would make a great home for Gringolândia, our English tutoring center.
Aelson, our realtor, came by today to take me to meet the owner of the lot. It turns out that the lot is full of real-estate drama. According to the owner, his good-for-nothing so-and-so brother-in-law illegally put a lien on the place, and now the owner can only pay off the lien by selling the lot, but he can’t sell the lot until the lien is gone. There’s also a house straddling the property line, but that will be easy to fix. He’ll just tear down the half of the house on “my” side of the line. Best of all, the lot is home to a community of chickens.
Our friends, Ricardo and Eliana, came by today. In addition to being friends, they are also painters. They agreed to paint the interior of our home.
Bob and Heidi spent the day shopping for a can opener… Not the flat kind that works like a machete, but the kind you can buy for three bucks in the States. It turns out it’s a rare commodity here. No one seems to have one.
It's taking a bit of work, but little by little we're settling in to our new home and our new life.
WIDGETIZE
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