Tuesday, January 10, 2006

First Impressions

Eventually, we all managed to get comfortable enough on the plane to get to sleep. When we woke up, we looked below for landmarks but we ere flying so high that we really couldn't see anything of interest. As we approached Sao Paulo and began to descend we got a great view of our new city. It truly is a massive place with buildings going in all directions. We've been told that it is between the second and fifth largest city in the world, with some 20,000,000 plus people in greater city area (compare that to Toronto's 4,000,000 in the GTA and you get some idea of the population here.)
Of course, many things could have happened at the airport. We were told that the airport can be a very dangerous place since almost all of the international travellers come through the main airport, there is a lot of theft at the airport. We decided to wait for everyone else to get off the plane so that we could make sure that we weren't leaving anything behind. We also didn't want to hold anyone else up as we knew that we would be slow going through with all of our belongings in tow. Our first stop was at immigration where we handed in the paperwork that we had to fill out on the plane as well as our information from the Consulate in Montreal. Although our agent spoke very little English we got through okay. Our timing was perfect as our bags arrived just as we got to the baggage claim. A uniformed fellow offered to help us with our bags and led us to our third stop--customs. Although we were told that there shouldn't be any real problems since we were coming in as residents with our stuff, there was a very real possibility that our bags would be searched for new items that we might be trying to bring in to sell (especially computers or other electronics.) However, the man at the customs wicket simply waved us through without even asking to look at our passports. We paid no duties, no taxes, nothing--Praise God! At this point we were able to meet our Brazilian hosts from PACA. Two men, Mike Epp (Cary's boss) and Ken Fast (our neighbour) me us at the airport and helped us from that point on. It turned out that the uniformed guy who offered to help us with our bags might have been trying to steal them, but more likely than that he was just trying to make sure that he delivered our bags to their destination so that we would give him a tip. At that point we didn't have any Brazilian money to give to him anyway. (Only Brazilian currency can be used in Brazil, American dollars will get you nothing here.) So we got all of our stuff onto a PACA school bus and headed for our new home.
Along the way, we got our first glimpses of Brazil from the ground. It was a hot, sunny day (American Thanksgiving) and we could see very well through the large bus windows. The first thing that I (Cary) noticed was how different the vehicles looked. There was hardly a vehicle that I recognized, even though most of what I saw were Volkswagens, Fords, and Chevys. There were lots of the old VW Bugs, and the old VW vans. There are lots of pickup trucks here, but even a Ford Ranger looks really big here. The next thing we all noticed was the filth. Brazilians are not litterbugs, but the sanitation here is nowhere near North American standards. More than that, because there are so many vehicles around and there are no pollution controls in place on vehicles, nearly every building is covered in a blackish-gray soot. Any building that wasn't painted looked very bleak, but painted buildings looked okay since the rain washes off the soot. We didn't see much in the way of Christmas decorations. This mall had a very typical Brazilian Christmas tree erected. (By typical we mean artificial.) In fact we noticed that Christmas was not a big deal here at all until you get very close to the actual date.

Then we saw our first favela. Favelas are the shanty towns that house the poorest of the poor. They pop up all over the city with any construction materials people can find. We don't have any pictures of favelas yet, but some day we'll do a whole posting on what favelas look and feel like. Needless to say, this had an impact on us right away. By the time we got to our house, we were feeling a little overwhelmed and nervous. Things were not like what we had pictured in our minds. But then we arrived at our new home and our opinion of Brazil changed dramatically...