São Paulo: First Impressions

Technically our first real impressions of Brazil would be our experience of getting our work visa from the Brazilian consulate in Ghana. This was no mean feat and actually a fair introduction to the monster that is Brazilian bureaucracy. We had never heard of the term ‘apostille’ before the Brazilian tax/immigration consultant mentioned it.

This is an internationally recognised process by which your government or authorising authority confirms the validity of your key documents like birth certificates, marriage certificates and even degree certificates. We managed it in the end which meant that we didn’t have to worry about this during our transition summer.

One thing to note about the summer was that we spent a week dog sitting. This wasn’t for a friend but through a website where people need dog sitters while they are away. You get a free place to stay and the pet owner gets free dog sitting. The dog we ended up with was a nice border collie called Flynn and the house was in Ealing, in West London. Flynn was well behaved albeit barky at times but in the main was great fun to be around. They had a small paddling pool which, as it was uncharacteristically hot for London, Flynn liked to get into after a walk. He then had a bespoke doggie towel/dressing gown to dry in! The rest of that summer was spent in Devon doing our usual things and was quite relaxing overall. 

We took an overnight flight from London and arrived in São Paulo on the morning of July 25th which was a Friday. This nicely allowed us time to climatise effectively over a long weekend. The school is based in an outer district of São Paulo called Morumbi and that is one of the neighbourhoods you can choose to live in. However, we wanted to be much more central and were lucky to be able to take over an existing employee’s apartment in a district called Pinheiros (‘Pines’ in English but spoiler alert, there are no pine trees). We were met at the airport by drivers employed by the school and then at our apartment also by school employees who showed us the flat and how things worked.

Our first apartment building had 25 floors and we were on the 16th floor affording great views of the surrounding city. The location was excellent, right in the heart of where we wanted to be and had it been just a little bit bigger we would probably still be there now.

After resting up a little bit and unpacking we then went to a restaurant which turned out was going to be one of our favourite restaurants in São Paulo – astonishing that we should discover it on day one! That takes away credit from Lindsey who, of course, had already done extensive research but still, a real find. It is a fish restaurant set within a fresh food market. There is a huge food market like this with loads of restaurants in the centre of São Paulo but this one was just in our neighbourhood less than a 20 minute walk away. That first time we sat at the bar which meant we could watch the kitchen cooking all the fish. Their standard set menu lunch includes an amazing salad and a choice of fish or prawns from the grill – absolutely delicious.

That first day we also went to two bars that had intrigued us from afar in that they both had a large number of beers on tap. That being said we have never been back to either of them so not quite the home run that our lunch had suggested. Nevertheless we were overwhelmed with the sheer number of restaurants and bars a stone’s throw from our apartment in those first weeks. 

One day we were sitting outside at a bar drinking a Caipirinha. We looked around and counted all the bars/restaurants that we could see and wanted to potentially try – there were six. Then we tried to remember all the restaurants and bars that we liked to go to in Accra – we got to 8 and there were some pretty down at heel places in that list. The contrast between the two cities just couldn’t be greater. 

Despite being quite large and full of people, Pinheiros is surprisingly local and residential. When you go into a bar, despite being a foreigner, people really want to get to know you. We find that staff turnover seems to be low here in general and that not only goes for bars and restaurants but all manner of businesses – the grocery shops, the gas station/garage and really any store you might go into more than once.The speed at which people have learned our names is astonishing especially as to most people, our names are foreign sounding. It makes us feel like locals far more than living in our neighbourhood in London ever did.

One example of this is a permanent (if pop-up) looking wine bar just a few streets over. It is literally a converted garage. They bring a table out and line up a number of different bottles of wine which they will happily tell you about before you choose one. They have fold out chairs and tables that they put out on the opposite sidewalk and they even have a little food you can order. Occasionally, they are joined by a mobile oyster shack and the whole thing happens on a cobblestone street – basically a million miles away from what we thought São Paulo was going to be like. The lady who serves the wine speaks good English (more on that later) and we often pass by her place when we are out and about. Without fail she will greet us regardless of whether we are having a drink there or not. It sometimes makes us feel quite guilty like we are letting down a friend.

As anyone who has looked for an apartment in a city will know, it can be a soul destroying process. Estate agents/realtors in Brazil have exactly the same skills in photography as this industry has world wide so many of the places didn’t exactly live up to their billing. Apartments here favour the living space way above the bedrooms such that many of the bedrooms were comically small, even in some high priced places. I had to bring a measuring tape on every visit just to see if a bed and at least one bedside table would actually fit into the bedroom. Mostly, the balconies of the apartments are built in, meaning that there is a glass wall which can open out in panels creating a verandah out of your living room. It’s nice in theory and looks good in the photos but we had that same option in our place and we rarely opened out all the panes of glass.

Eventually a few places came up in an apartment block one street over. The building was a bit older so they hadn’t gotten into the lego sized bedroom fashion yet. I wanted to visit these places but they seemed to be going like hot cakes. Our agency had arranged a viewing but I was worried that it would go before our viewing came up. I ended up going to the building, pressing the intercom and then painfully trying to explain to the porter what I wanted. This involved reading Portuguese from Google Translate and then holding up the phone to the intercom trying to understand the answer. Eventually, the guy told me to come back later which I did and was given the WhatsApp number of someone who represented one of the apartments. She spoke very little English but what you end up doing is using Google translate and doing everything in text through WhatsApp. I literally don’t know how English speakers managed in places like this, where relatively little English is spoken, before Google translate. It was an essential in our first few months. 

Finally we were able to see the place which was head and shoulders above anything else we had looked at with a proper external balcony, lovely view and good sized bedrooms. Once you put in an offer there is a process they call the ‘analysis’ which is where they inspect the proposed contract. This is a lengthy process and seemed to involve some misunderstandings in our case. Eventually the school came to our rescue and we were able to secure our ideal apartment – a real relief.  Unlike in Ghana where we had to wait until December to receive our shipment, our stuff had already arrived and was waiting in storage, so the day we moved in was also the day we got our shipment. It took a little bit of time before we had our pictures hung on the walls but in almost no time, it really felt like home.

This post is starting to meander so I’ll leave you with our final surprising first impression – the weather! São Paulo is in the southern hemisphere so the winter months are reversed. Our arrival was firmly in the winter but we never really expected it to be cold. Any regular reader of our blog will know that both Yangon and Accra were extremely hot and we couldn’t quite believe that it wouldn’t be much the same – far from it. While the winter cannot be compared to anything in the northern hemisphere it was occasionally actually a bit chilly. I mainly wore jeans and a t-shirt and often a light sweater too! When we went away for a weekend break once we actually made a small fire in the evenings – and sat near it! We brought a light duvet with us when we came and the school provided us with another one – often we used both in the beginning as our apartment was pretty drafty. Lindsey always ran before light in our last two places to avoid the heat of the sun, but here she is quite able to wait for the sun to come up before going for a run. It might seem like a small thing but to us it was a lovely surprise.

So far we are enamoured with São Paulo. It’s not on everyone’s tourist bucket list which I totally understand but it is an extremely livable city. I’ll leave it there for now. Stay tuned for bureaucracy like you’ve never imagined it!