Carnaval is over...here's us, trying unsuccessfully to use the timer on our camera and using terrible positioning under the lights. We have a hard time remembering to take photographs--anyone else in this same boat? I need suggestions on how to amp up our photographic proof of a life together! I'm wearing my birthday shirt here (thanks, Nan!) which I bought over the sales at the beginning of the month and intended on saving until the big day...but it was too Carnavalesque. I couldn't resist! And now that Carnaval is over, the year begins. Hello, 2012. I am ready for you.

And now, a little link love for my readers, from things that I encountered over our little staycation:

Sex in the News:
The Opinionator at the NYTimes on the election that is all about sex. Some really provocative comments here, lotsa stupid, but some gems worth looking into. Notably for me, these quotes:

1) "When Rick Santorum talks about this stuff in the way he does, it’s theology, not sociology. And believe me, there are very few Americans who are strongly theological, even the ones who attend services every week." Dear God, I hope that's not true. But if it even appears to be true, it says volumes about the state of actual faith praxis in the United States. Which is scary in its own way.

2) The backwardness of the sexual debates. As Gail points out, the anti-abortion camp was making headway. Changing the topic in the public arena to whether female birth control should even be LEGAL (not to mention the insurance lockout for female contraception options), while blithely ignoring the fact that non-essential sexual health options for men are routinely covered by insurance and no one bats an eye...it's not just archaic. It's absurd. It's also an old, OLD topic. See here and here for stuff ranging back a decade.

3) "The rise of unwed mothers" sounds like a 1950's pulp horror title. Besides coming to some weird, biased conclusions that show the authors' social and class preconceptions, the talking heads here don't even mention what is probably a MAIN cause, the dearth of marriageable men, until the last couple of paragraphs: "what do we do to make it so that more men are worth marrying?" Can we really DO anything about the fact that prolonged adolescence has become a national/international pastime? I know a few "unwed mothers" and contemplated adoption when I was still single...being a mother but not married isn't synonymous with poverty, poor child raising, promiscuity and being a "drain on society." "Unwed mother" is a title I think we need to scratch from our vocabulary, as it's a horribly stigmatized phrase...and really, when have you ever heard the term "unwed father?"

On a Lenten note:
here's a great reflection on the differences between the Catholic and Orthodox positions on Mary. It seems I turn the corner and everywhere I'm encountering Orthodox thought and theology...it resonates within me and I move closer and closer to that side of the faith spectrum...

On Ash Wednesday, I made myself a set of prayer beads, following no particular tradition, but just as a way to not fall asleep when I go to pray. Closing my eyes takes me straight to the land of Nod, so...I use this to stay focused. It's made to represent a wide spectrum of people and places and times in my life as it includes tiger-eyes from blogger and real-life-friend Ali, the San Damiano cross I was given when I started missionary work with WMF, and even some beads I inherited from my great-grandmother. It's just long enough to hold in my hand, and with 25 beads, satisfies my inner OCD need for things to be in manageable numerical clumps. Usually, I do threes, but five is a nice odd number too...in any case, I think I'll be using these for both planned and impromptu prayers. My favorite memorized prayers by far are from the Orthodox tradition, the Trisagion prayers. A more complete prayer book can be found online here.



They're resting on discarded practice dovetails that hubby is doing. I don't know what, exactly, I'm getting for my birthday, but I do think it involves these time-intensive, precise little critters. Whatever it is, it's going to be gorgeous. My husband is SO MUCH MORE attentive to detail than I am, which is a good quality when making things by hand. See this?

That's the changing tray for our future kiddo...he made entirely with hand tools. Planed, sanded, even did the router work with chisels! Amazing, right?

And last, but not least, RT.com
has been added to Al Jazeera English as one of my places to go for international news coverage that's being ignored, glossed over or spun in only one direction from the US media. Also, what's NOT to love about their tag line? "Question More." Amen!

My husband and I have a love/hate relationship with the transportation professionals in this area. He can never get taxi drivers who carry even R$5 in change; we've lost count of the number of times that the local taxi stand has given him a free or discounted ride because they were unprepared to do business with people who don't walk around with a wallet full of R$2 bills. They also have a nasty habit of parking at the taxi stand and then disappearing, or arguing with the other guys about who should take the fare...because they're not really in the mood to work. It's fascinating when you're not in a hurry. I'm not sure how they make any money at all. On the other hand, seeing a line of taxis as you are rapidly approaching being late for work and knowing that there's not a soul there to drive them because they're all having a beer or a coffee at the bar down the street is rather disheartening. I usually take buses, though when I'm lazy or late I do succumb to the appeal of an air-conditioned taxi.

The other day, impatient for my bus to arrive, I jumped on a different bus which I thought was going where I wanted to go. Of course, it only went part of the way, and by the time I realized my mistake, the bus driver wouldn't let me out...and ten minutes later when we'd arrived at the next bus stop (hello, traffic jam!) , I was too far away from where I wanted to go to walk and get there in time. So I hailed a taxi and discovered that my horrendous mental mapping skills are still better than apparently three out of four taxi or professional drivers. (At least that day!)

The first gentleman who picked me up opened the door and greeted me by introducing himself by his full name. Very Victorian and chivalrous. I told him where I wanted to go and he immediately began driving in circles.

"Why are you going this way?" I asked. "I need to go to the canal road."
"Oh…well, we have to go this way anyhow." Since he's turned down a one way street that's inconveniently angled to move in the opposite direction of where I want to go,
I highly doubt this.

"Take the next left. Turn back. You're heading the WRONG WAY. It's this street, do you know it? Not the canal street at this end, I could walk there...it's the one between Ipanema and Leblon!"

He muttered and stuttered and finally did what I asked him to. It doesn't seem like this guy is trying to take me for a ride on a running taxi meter. No, he's just CLUELESS as to where he is. The Zona Sul is not hard to navigate, so this baffled me.

I finally arrived at my destination, had a great time at cooking club (more on that in a later post) and was offered a ride home by one of the ladies who has a personal driver. It took no less than 3 phone calls, 20 minutes of saying goodbyes and 10 minutes waiting by the side of the road before he managed to find the major road we are on. My brain whirs. Are we in a time warp? Am I speaking Klingon? There are only three conceivable ways one can arrive in Leblon via Copacabana...and all of them intersect with the road we are on! Yet somehow, the driver is lost. Argh!

We do manage to make it to Barra, and other than actually getting the driver to find us, the lift was pleasant and without incident. I'm super grateful that I didn't have to sit on a bumpy, sweaty bus for an hour! But with a doctor's appointment later in the afternoon, this time at a medical center in a major mall down the way, I just couldn't bring myself to drag my pregnant self to the bus stop in the sweltering heat. So I flagged a taxi. As my luck goes, the man doesn't know where the mall is. At this point, I am tempted to question my own sanity. Am I hearing him correctly? Should I get out of the cab?

"Barra Shopping. It's the big mall on Avenida das Americas? You can't miss it."
"Never heard of it."
WHAAT? Maybe my Portuguese is broken. Even, deep breathing. Relax.

"Just get on this road. Go straight. I'll tell you when to turn." I knew I should have taken a bus!

The last taxi of the day picked me up outside the mall. I gave him my address and he knew exactly where he was going. Glory! Then we had a long and heated conversation about Brazilian politics, corruption and Rio's crumbling infrastructure. As we neared my place, he said "You should put yourself on the ballot. Brazil needs new blood."
Flattering...but…"Well, I can't really. I'm not a Brazilian citizen."
"You're not?"
Ohh. Flattery. I get out with a grin and breathe a sigh of relief. After a day of starts, stops, misdirection and confusion, it was nice to know that I could, in fact, communicate intelligently and coherently in Portuguese. And not only that, but I can do a fairly decent job of back-seat navigation!

Mr. Bugigangas needs to get his Brazilian driver's license. Since we're now officially Brazilian residents, his foreign license really isn't adequate if we wanted to rent a car here. Also, it really is the strangest license I've ever seen and I'm constantly amazed that the car rental companies haven't blinked an eye when he's presented it in the past few years. He has a Texas license. As a foreigner, the license clearly states the expiration date for his visa as well as a separate expiration date for his driver's license, but without specifying whether the currently expired visa invalidates the actual license. It's weird. Anyhow, yesterday, we decided to pop on over to the DETRAN website and check out the requirements.

It has been a long time since I laughed so hard I snorted.

First, there is the simulator for the written test, which I got a 70% on, not bad for a first time and also because I guesstimated a few of the answers because I wasn't familiar with the vocabulary. Those questions I did understand were often humorous, as the options were between what OUGHT to happen on the road and what Carioca drivers actually DO. I wonder how many people think those are trick questions?

Brazil also requires a medical exam and a psychological exam before they'll issue you a license. Just for fun, we looked at the info sheet for both of those exams. That's when the giggling started. This webpage reads like a primer on how take micromanagement to the next bureaucratic level.

For example:

The doctor's office must be no less than 9m2 and have a sink and light fixtures. (Are they worried people will be practicing medicine in caves?) There should be a chair for the patient as well as a chair AND a desk for the doctor, who needs to own a stethoscope, tongue depressors and a tape measure...among a few other essential items. Doctor's shouldn't treat more than 6 patients an hour...and yet there's an extensive list of things they're supposed to test for. It hardly seems possible that even an assembly-line doc could run through that list with any amount of thoroughness in 10 minutes. Moving on to the instructions for medical "professionals," we discover that not all doctors know to leave their tap shoes at home...the psychological and medical testers are advised to:

Use clothing that's appropriate for the testing facility and shoes that do not make too much noise (which might interfere with a candidate's concentration), provide well-sharpened pencils no less than 12 cm long, and, just in case it wasn't clear what the job description was, remember that "the conclusion is the most important part and, as the name indicates, should conclude something without a shade of doubt, so that, as it is a medical diagnosis, we have absolute certainty of the results of the exam."

Well, I am SO glad that's been settled. Conclusions should in fact, conclude. That led us to make our own conclusions, namely, that we're not sure that being assured our testing pencil is 12cm long gives us any confidence hat crazies are being kept off the road when they're being subjected to a psychological test that can be failed and retaken at least once!

When we got pregnant, I realized how little practical information is available on the internet for expat mothers. With the exception of a few really great Brazilian-based bloggers who detailed their pregnancies for the world, there's just this big blank space in the ether. So I decided to keep track of our decisions and whatnot to help out other families who might be in our situation.

Pregnancy, like all major life events, is a chance to be totally BOMBARDED by advertisers. Everyone has something to sell you once a child is growing in your womb. And it can be hard to separate the necessary from the "nice to have" and the essential from the purely fun. What's even worse is when you're an expat with limited suitcase space, no access to affordable infant things, and one trip a year to your home country. Everyone in Rio says that taking a pregnancy vacation in the United States will pay for itself, as the amount you save buying everything overseas will more than pay for the cost of the ticket. Crazy, but true. Baby things are hella expensive in Rio. We are talking R$2000 for a crib made of particle board, R$250 for a Bumbo seat…and some things aren't even really available here yet. Prenatal vitamins aren't sold in the drugstores (I think you have to have them mixed at a special pharmacy), cloth diapering isn't locally popular, and the options are limited, so anything you want/need has to be brought from abroad and maternity clothing is only just starting to appear in the stores (and like everything else, costs obscene amounts of money. As if that weren't enough, being in another culture means that the whole pregnancy experience is different. Expectations are different. For example, Caesarean sections are the norm in Brazil, so finding a doctor who is amenable to natural birth is a big deal. Brazilians often treat pregnancy like a disease; people don't want me to WALK outside, for goodness sake, or carry my own groceries, or exercise. Women are treated like queens during this time: special seats are provided on the buses; I get to go through priority lines at the supermarket, bank and post office; and it's assumed that you'll need all sorts of specialized care: nutritionists, massage therapists, birth consultants who will help you learn how to give your baby a bath (?!) and more. Phew. It all makes my head spin.

Over the next few months, I'll be posting at semi-regular intervals, detailing the random little things about pregnancy in another culture that I wished I'd had access to at the beginning. Stay tuned...

Brazilians must love blue eyes. I'm always getting comments on mine, but more often than not, I'm at a loss as to whether the comment is meant as a compliment, as an expression of disgust, or something else.

Instead of hissing at a stranger on the street, or leaning close as you walk by to leer, or excitedly come up to share with me the surprising fact that my eyes are the same color they have always been...men of Rio, perhaps you could follow the lead of the charming elderly gentleman in the cheese store today who tapped me on the arm and said, "Excuse me, but may I compliment you?"

May I compliment you? I think I melted right in the middle of ordering my Minas cheese.

Well. When you ask so nicely, what choice do I have but to say yes? (This method has the added benefit of not being creepy or rude.) Now, you can say, as he did, "You have lovely eyes."

And you will get a thank you instead of the withering look your mother used to give you when you left your dirty underwear on the bathroom floor when company came to visit. See? Isn't that nicer?

I've really not had luck with my transportation today. Bus drivers that won't let me off the bus, traffic snarls, taxi drivers that don't know where they're going and won't take directions...but I'm getting more Brazilian, I guess, because I no longer bite my nails when I'm a half-hour late for an appointment.

I'm glad that I did make that appointment, though, as I'm currently stuffed beyond belief with wonderful food, courtesy of a cooking group we've just started with a few other expats. Today, British food has been solidly rescued from an unfair stereotype as bland and boring, as our cooking lesson not only included a hair dryer, but also marinating maraschino cherries in Worcestershire sauce for some divinely bacon-wrapped nibbles. Not boring. I was given my first taste of Yorkshire pudding and we simply devoured a lovely, lovely pork roast (that took some wrangling at the supermarket to purchase with skin on)...

Now I'm holed up at home, smelling like bacon and trying to work up the energy to head out again for my doctor's appointment. It's been a busy week, full of meetings, writer's critique groups, etc. Tomorrow begins our unofficial staycation for Carnaval, which I'm really excited about. It seems that there are two groups of people who stay in the city for Carnaval. The first group doesn't leave their homes for the duration, avoiding crowds, pee-soaked streets and the miserable traffic. The second group doesn't make it home at all, as they're too busy staying awake and partying for days...you can guess which group we're going to be a part of, can't you?

Besides having some uninterrupted time for writing, a little beach time and middle-of-the-day naps planned for this looooong weekend, I have a big crafts project to finish over Carnaval--a papier maché elephant head to hang in my office. It's been on my to-do list for quite some time, but I've only recently gotten up the gumption to
attempt it. I'll be posting pictures and a how-to once it's finished. At the moment, I only have the frame done and will need to rip up a lot of old newspapers and buy copious amounts of glue in order to start the papier maché process. (Flour glue won't work in this humidity and with the number of bugs we have!)

If you don't hear from me before Ash Wednesday, have a great, safe, fun Carnaval. Samba a little. Don't forget to sleep, and eat real food (if you're going to the blocos). Paz!

The state of Rio's military police went on strike last night at 11:30 or so. Promising to put just 30% of their troops on the streets, this is guaranteed to cause chaos in the city and severely hurt the economic boom that is Carnaval. While foreign news outlets are reporting that Carnaval is 2 weeks away, don't be misled by their literal interpretation of "Carnaval." The parade is 2 weeks away. The official blocos and street parties started LAST weekend. This weekend was set up to be even more intense...and I've heard that a major street party (Bola Preta) has already been cancelled.

Read a news article in Portuguese here.

The police have legitimate complaints: their salary IS abysmally low for the dangers they face. However, the poor public image and general lack of respect for the force is directly tied, I'm sure, to the rampant corruption in their ranks. My taxi driver vehemently asserted last night: "This is blackmail!"

Agreed.

These are Brazilians. It's Brazil! This is pre-Carnaval...there's a saying in Rio, at least, that nothing happens until after Carnaval.

"Want to go out for a girl's night?"
"Sure...but after Carnaval."

"I need to make a doctor's appointment."
"Ah...only after Carnaval."

"My favorite restaurant is closed...and they're not going to open until after Carnaval!"

Demanding a raise and expecting an answer during the Carnaval season is ludicrous. Just absurd. And so the only logical explanation is that the police never intended to negotiate. They intended to blackmail. "Give us what we want or you'll be royally screwed..."

I'm guessing that this may be the death blow for the World Cup. Let's hope Dilma and the other leaders manage this tumultuous situation in a wise way, because if this strike spreads to all the states, I can only see one outcome, and it ain't pretty.

Oh, Brazil. I love you...but why do you frustrate your own progress?