Brazil Dispatch 5

November 29, 2006

It felt very good to get back to Natal, even if it was just back to our hotel. We sure don't miss all the packing and unpacking every few days. Even so, we got kicked out of our wonderful hotel Sunday because we had such a good long-term rate, and they had filled it with an arriving Norwegian group paying full price. The lovely, generous manager called up her friend down the block and negotiated almost as good a deal at another hotel, but we find that the internet here only allows for one of us to be connected at a time.

Fidel, the owner of the house we're buying, only just returned from his (successful) surgery in Argentina. He is having his furniture shipped out next Tuesday, December 5th, so we will move in then, even though the paper work won't be completed till mid-December. We have begun looking at mattresses!

After some frustrating shopping for household goods here, we realized that the expense to buy everything plus the expense to store all of our stuff in New York doesn't add up. We have decided to ship most of our things here. (Unfortunately, we sold all the beds.) We will stop over in New York late January or early February when Newt has a business trip to California and I visit my Mother in Tulsa. Whirlwind shopping for needed items will precede getting our things packed off. I am working on estimates for this now, and I imagine that container shipment will be a whole story! Our furniture will probably arrive by mid-March, so we will have both a house and chairs more than six months after arriving here!

We were finally successful in getting a bank account in Brazil on the fifth try. The magic solution: we bought health insurance, and that company was willing to use our hotel address on the registration, and the bank was willing to accept the health insurance registration as proof of our address. As an aside, we discovered that we didn't actually have health insurance after all, because our certificate of marriage says "Sandra Jean Needham," and my passport, Brazilian CPF (like a social security #), and resident alien registration all say "Sandra Needham." The bank opened our account based on a form that is now moot with an address that is now incorrect (our secret!). The insurance agent returned to our hotel and started the whole process over again, now using my full name. I can just imagine myself lying in a ditch awaiting medical attention and being denied it because my driver's license, passport and Brazilian documents don't say "Jean."

We also thought we had car insurance, but discovered upon our return from Europe that installments could not be paid on a foreign credit card. Now we're trying to pay in full on our credit card, but have no word yet if that has kicked in. We are trying to drive very carefully in the meantime!

After two weeks waiting to receive his CPF card being forwarded from our hotel in Fortaleza, Newton was told that it was still in the backpack of the guy who had been dispatched to take mail to the P.O. Now that another week has passed, he heard today that it will go out tomorrow! When Newt's new dentist sent him to another location for x-rays, it was only after a series of photographs, x-rays, two different space-age contraptions rotating about the head, and mention of the upcoming mold to be taken of his teeth that he asked the question, "For a root canal?" The place specializes in orthodontia and the receptionist hadn't read the dentist's instructions!

To transfer money from our New York bank to be converted into reais requires a form that is typed and signed by Newton authorizing money to be wired to a specific bank account. We sent a stack of signed forms to our bank in Pomona, NY via "Sedex," the FedEx of Brazil (part of the post office system here). Because Pomona, NY must already be listed in the Brazilian system online in order to fill out the mailing form and it was not (as no one as yet had ever sent a Sedex to Pomona from Brazil), and because hand writing or typing the Sedex form is out of the question, the woman waiting on us had to call Brasilia to have Pomona, NY added to the system while we waited. As soon as it showed up on her screen, she could complete the form! It took 39 minutes and $38 to mail this envelope. That was Friday, this is Wednesday, and tracking still shows it in São Paulo.

To counter the frustrations of both the bureaucracy and the relaxed pace here - perfect partners - and for our own 'third world relaxed pace training' we rely on a visit to the beach for whole grilled fish, beer, the aqua ocean and great people-watching. It always works! I am convinced after people-watching here and on all those trains, subways and sidewalks on our trip that you can find a counterpart to most everyone you know in any given country. I found the perfect Japanese version of my Aunt Ruth, for example, on the train in Tokyo, and the Brazilian version of our friend Joe Cerruto sold us our car!

One more week in a hotel...

Love,
Sandy

Montpellier/Paris Dispatch

November 23, 2006

Just a footnote regarding the one night Newton and his partners and I stayed at the Radisson Hotel by Stansted Airport in London. In the 4-story atrium in the center of the hotel stood a large square glass column with an interior column lit with colored lights, looking like the giant insides of a computer. We did not know that this was a tall, 4-sided wine rack until we realized that the blond in a leotard on a bungee cord inside the glass was retrieving bottles as she moved acrobatically up and down, sometimes upside down, on her cord. Cirque du Soleil meets happy hour! Watch:


We caught the last of our budget flights to Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast of France. This airline, Ryan Air, actually charged us to check our bags! I must say, all these economical little flights we took were on time except for the one that had mechanical problems, in which case we were rolling away from the terminal in a different plane one hour later. Some lessons for the big carriers, or unusually good luck?

I passed a lovely Sunday morning street market in the center of a boulevard as I was whisked to our Montpellier hotel by the boyfriend of the partner-company's owner (this was just a one-day meeting on a Sunday). I found my way back to the market on foot, enjoying the feel of the sleepy neighborhood on a Sunday morning. The market provided me with a circle of fresh goat cheese for breakfast, which I ate while listening to a young woman with a sax and two young men with guitars playing snappy Django Rheinhardt gypsy-jazz. Several children shared my enthusiasm for the group, and gladly placed my euro-change in the hat. I was fascinated to watch a very aggressive salesman feeding bites of persimmon to a gathering entourage of women. The faded orange color suggested to me the bitter, furry taste before that red stage which renders persimmons my favorite fruit in Brazil, hence a pinched up face among the curious.

I joined the business group for a true Sunday afternoon French lunch at a lovely, typical restaurant by the shore. It lasted four hours, and one could learn the art, observing the natives there, of eating as an end, not a means. The cast of characters at lunch was really something, and only more exaggerated later at dinner when we were missing the seemingly well-adjusted young engineers that had joined us for lunch. There was the snobby Brit who wouldn’t speak to most of us; his French Vietnamese boyfriend who exhausted everyone except the adoring Brit with his pursed-lip impersonation of himself. The smart German bachelor engineer arrived in his red Corvette with his Russian girlfriend in tow (who does not speak French or English). We all tried not to stare at the clearly anorexic, E.T.-looking face (mostly only eyes left), the emaciated shoulders and arms on this woman, who was exhibitionistic about eating mostly lettuce both meals. I don't even want to ponder the ambiguities this suggests about the Corvette. The foie gras still managed to stand out!

We all walked and walked through the glorious old center of the city before and after dinner, then said our good-bys. Newton and I were catching the TGV (bullet train) to Paris the next morning.

After an afternoon of wandering around the left bank of Paris, we met our dear Manhattan friends, Dick and Nancy Taylor, and their big fluffy white Samoyed, Troisieme, at the apartment they are swapping in Saint Germain. This is another of many stints in the neighborhood, where they also lived for eight years. We had a fairy tale dinner at an exquisite art nouveau restaurant. Troisieme was casually welcomed there! Dick and Nancy are the actual travelers of the globe, and I mean the desert, African tribes, and freezing tents in Ladakh, from which Nancy had just returned. The evening was way too short, and we were flying 'home' to Brazil the next day, so we look forward to a continuation of all those trains of thought!

Our 11th and 12th flights of this trip took us to Lisbon, then Natal. Whew.

Love,
Sandy

Athens Dispatch

November 21, 2006

When it's November and the weather is 73 degrees and sunny in Athens (and it was freezing there the prior weekend), you feel like you're really getting away with something: seeing Athens at its best with fewer tourists, perhaps? Our approaching airplane offered gorgeous views already, but no Acropolis on our side of the plane. Our hotel room was pretty high up in one of the few tall buildings in the city, but our view did not include the Acropolis. I caught a subway, changed trains, and emerged from the station, my heart stopping: there it was! I last saw the Acropolis at age 17, when one could wander around the Parthenon and catch views of the building that revealed its unfathomable grace - feeling light and rooted all at once. But the side I could see from the station was not the Parthenon side. I started up, loving the low, white sprawl of Athens below, embraced by the three hills and the sea.

I felt some disappointment upon arriving at the Parthenon because they are restoring it and have one side and one end covered with scaffolding. I am also convinced that the ancients knew more about beauty than we know today (as a young native physicist later agreed). I suspect that those miraculous columns, after the patching and re-stacking, may not breathe again as they did in the 5th century BC. Most of the fragile statues, bas reliefs and caryatids have been replaced by copies, while the remaining originals are on display in the museum next to the Parthenon. Inside, I walked among the early kore and kouros figures with their sweet smiles; among the robust, writhing later Hellenistic figures, but my heart stopped once more when I beheld the classical torsos from the Parthenon frieze. The mathematical perfection of nature is all there in the subtle torque of diaphanous drapery over breathing marble flesh, in proportions that define timelessness. It was almost too much beauty to contain.

I considered the day a perfect gem, and did not try to surpass it with sightseeing the next day. Instead, Newt got me all situated at the hotel lobby computer to do some dispatch writing. He said he would hook up with his pre-paid internet card that evening when he came back and e-mail the dispatch. I spent 1 hour and 45 minutes writing, and then tried to log off so that the file was not just sitting there available to the next person. Because I know so little about these things, I requested help for this. A young whippersnapper came over and said it was not possible to save anything on these computers, as the sign says, and immediately pushed the button to turn the computer off. He was not being mean; he just didn't understand my confusion. I could have hooked up quickly with Newton's special password and e-mailed the work with his help, but he thought I wanted to remove it and happened to be a bit hasty. I wanted to cry, because every word was lost. I went up to our room and spent the next hour trying to recall as much as possible in longhand. Then I went to a beautiful plaza for an outdoor lunch, even though the day was greyer and chillier than the previous one.

Athens has a beautiful subway system, complete with translation in Roman letters, as a part of the improvements made for the 2004 Olympics. I tried in vain to come up with the pronunciations by applying my limited acquaintance with the Greek alphabet, but later learned that there are several combinations that can make one sound. Verbally, I stuck to the "kalispero" - 'good evening' - that I had learned at 17.

We had the double pleasure of two nights out with the natives - a group of young, sharp, adorable Greek geeks who comprise a great partner company. The first night was a rowdier, more casual place with many plates of everything Greek and delicious wine. The second night we went to a restaurant on top of one of the other two hills in Athens, to which you must take a cable car. One would expect such a place to be hopelessly touristy, which means there is no obligation to have great food, but this place, with its glass-surrounded views of the Acropolis and the city, was entertaining some government ministers and other wealthy locals besides our techy group. The meal was elegant and sumptuous, the company ideal.

The next day Newton, his two partners and I were off for one night at a Stansted Airport hotel in London for another cheap flight connection to Montpellier, France the next day.

Love,
Sandy