A whole month’s gone by already – can you believe it?! The weeks seem to have flown by since my last blog entry, but the days haven’t been as hectic as our first week. Basically, we’ve spent the past 3 weeks waiting to see if we’re able to buy a car for Onezio (and for me and David to use till we leave in August). Cars are incredibly expensive here (for instance, a new Fiat 500 costs R$60,000, around £20,000!!), so unless you’re very rich, no one’s able to pay the full amount upfront. So what happens is, you find a car you’re interested in buying, usually at an ‘oficina’ (a garage selling second-hand cars, of which there are hundreds here in Goiânia). You then get the car dealer to fill out several forms for you, which are sent off to a bank to apply for a loan. If all goes well, you then end up paying a monthly ‘prestação’ (installment) over the course of 3, 4 or even 5 years – which seems like forever to pay for a car (and you end up paying almost double the initial price due to the high interest rates here), but it’s the only feasible way, considering a normal monthly salary is around R$1,500 – R$2,000 (between £500 and £700).
However, we’re in a Latin country, so as you would expect everything takes double or triple as long as it would anywhere else in the world. Hence why we’ve been trying to buy a car for the past three weeks and have still not had much success. As they say here, people and things here are very ‘enrolado’ (loosely translated as ‘tied up with something’, but basically meaning incredibly long-winded). For instance, someone tells you they’ll pop by your house to pick you up in 15 minutes, but they don’t show up till 2 hours later. Or someone promises to give you a lift home at 5 pm, but you don’t end up leaving till 8 o’clock. Or you arrange to have dinner with a group of friends at 8.30 pm, but you end up meeting up at 10.30pm (however, since everyone is ‘enrolado’ here, everyone seems to know that 8.30 pm actually means 10.30 pm… So the system seems to work, as annoying as it may be for an outsider). So we seem to do a lot of hanging around here, waiting for things to happen, and I’m having to learn to be very patient… It doesn’t help that we don’t have our own car yet, so we’re having to rely on other people to give us lifts. The reason we would like to have a car here is because it’s practically impossible to rely on the bus system. Goiânia is a big city, especially since it’s very spread out, so to catch a bus into the town centre takes about 1 hour from where we live, and if we wanted to go visit David Filho by bus (who lives on the other side of Goiânia) we’d need to allow at least 2 hours – just to get there. Plus the bus that takes us from the bus terminal in the centre to Vila João Vaz, where we live, only runs once an hour, so you could end up waiting almost an hour at the terminal just waiting for the bus to arrive. It’s not like London, where you can easily hop on the tube or a number of buses to take you to where you need to go. I don’t know why the bus system isn’t very reliable here. The problem is that it makes most people rely on cars to get about, meaning the city’s very polluted – especially since a lot of vehicles are very old and let out huge puffs of black smoke whenever they accelerate. Not only that, but the traffic is horrendous too. People overtake left right and centre, two-lane roads become 3 or 4 lanes if the roads are wide enough to fit that number of cars, no one indicates which way they’re turning, people often drive through red lights (which at night-time is actually permitted since assaults often happen at traffic lights, but which people continue to do during the day too), and no one respects anyone on the roads. It’s quite scary!
Not only would a car be useful to get around whilst we’re in Goiânia, but we’d be able to go on road trips (for instance, to Caldas Novas, some natural hot springs south of Goiânia, or up north to David’s parents’ farm). It would just be so much more practical, especially in a city where public transport isn’t very reliable. So two weeks ago we went to a ‘feirão’ (a large fair) selling second-hand cars, and we happened to find a guy selling the car Onezio wants, except the guy wasn’t interested in selling it – he simply wanted to transfer the car to another owner to no longer have to pay the monthly installments, since he’d recently bought a much newer car and had an even higher ‘prestação’ to pay for that one. So Onezio and David made arrangements with the seller, and the following day sent off the necessary forms to the bank. The seller then had to wait to receive a form from the bank to fill in to change over the payment details (so Onezio could take over the monthly payments), which we were told would take a few days. So we waited. And waited. And waited. We’re still waiting, 3 weeks later. The bank still hasn’t emailed the car seller the form he needs to transfer the car over to us. So banks are even more ‘enrolados’ than anyone else (especially considering an email only takes a few minutes to send). So we’ve pretty much given up on him and we’ve tried several other cars, but each process seems to take as long as the previous one. Hopefully we’ll get there eventually…
Although we seem to have spent a lot of time waiting around for things to happen, we’ve still managed to enjoy ourselves. I went on a day trip to Brasília with Cinthya (Denes’s girlfriend) to help her sort out her car documents (she bought the car in Brasília so the car’s MOT documents have to be sorted out there), and got a brief introduction to the city. Although our visit was quite short (the journey there and back alone took up over 5 hours of our day), I got a nice feel of the city. It’s much cleaner and more organized than Goiânia is. The city’s only 50 years old (compared to Goiânia’s 77 years – both quite young cities either way), and the city resembles an airplane when seen from above. Different sections of the city are even named after an airplane’s parts – Asa Norte (‘north wing’), Asa Sul (‘south wing’), Plano Piloto (‘pilot’s cabin’)… I didn’t get to see the cathedral, because it’s closed at the moment since they’re renovating it. We had a really nice meal that day, at a restaurant serving food typical of the northeast of Brazil. We’ve also been out for some nice meals with some of David’s friends (including a group of friends who all grew up playing computer games together and who all ended up working in IT – I like to call them his geeky friends). We’ve hung out with David’s cousins at Harley’s ‘Lan House’ (internet café) a number of times. We took David Filho out to a local shopping centre and spent the morning having fun with him there, and we had him to stay one night, which was quite exhausting but good fun since he’s so cute! We’ve been to a number of birthday parties, including Leandro’s (David’s cousin’s son) and Du’s (Cinthya’s son), and to a number of ‘feiras’ (fairs/markets). We went out one night with one of David’s ‘geeky’ friends, Matheus, with his girlfriend and a few of his mates to a bar where a Brazilian rock band played covers of Led Zeppelin – interesting to say the least!
I didn’t feel very well during our second week here – I first had some funny stomach bug (probably due to the change in climate and food) and then found out I had Cystitis, which wasn’t very pleasant, so had to take it easy for a few days. I also managed to break part of my tooth whilst eating a goiaba, a delicious fruit that has small rock-hard pips inside, which you can swallow but you’re not supposed to bite down on. I wasn’t thinking and bit down hard on one of the pips, which ended chipping one of my teeth. Luckily it didn’t hurt, and it just took a visit to David’s parents’ dentist to get a filling and have it fixed. However, I’ve been feeling better since then, and although the heat still makes me feel very sleepy, I’ve realised that having a nap after lunch really helps!
So whilst waiting for this car business to sort itself out, we’ve been taking it easy, getting to know Goiânia, and getting used the different pace of life in Brazil (even David’s found it strange being back here again, since it’d been so long since he’d been away). Check out more of my photos of the past few weeks. More to follow soon!
PS. Great news! As I was just updating this blog entry, I got a call from David (who’s out with Onezio) to say that the bank has just called to say that they have approved our ‘case’ and will give us a loan to buy a car! Woohoo!! More updates to follow…
