So, I’m currently on a bus hurtling down the MH-356 highway from Belo Horizonte toward Sao Joao del Rei in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.  I’ve barely been in the country two days, and it’s been an interesting trip thus far.

Long flights are never terribly newsworthy.  I cashed in some miles to upgrade to business class on the way down.  For the record, it’s a complete waste on a flight as short as Austin to Dallas, but it came with the upgrade on the much longer flight to Sao Paulo.  The flight to SP was the usual clusterfuck—departure time came and went, and we sat at the gate waiting for passengers coming from late connecting flights because, as the captain in his Texan drawl explained, “This is the last flight down to San Paulo tonight and we don’t want ‘em to have to wait.”  Tudo bem, as they say.  Pushed back from the gate 40 minutes late and taxied out to the end of the runway just in time for a squall line to hit and the captain to decide that it was too risky to take off.  Our 7:45 pm departure finally got off the ground at 9:30.

Natalie had warned me about the airport in Sao Paulo.  I’ve definitely been in nicer airports, but I’ve been in worse.  My big rant is the following: once you leave the customs area with your luggage and enter the airport terminal proper, it’s astonishingly unclear where you’re supposed to go from there if you’re connecting to a domestic flight.  I wandered around for a couple of minutes until I saw a big sign that read “CONEXIAOS DOMESTICOS/DOMESTIC CONNECTIONS.”  Aha! I thought, and trundled my luggage over there, only to find that the entire counter was taken up by agents working for GOL, one of the Brazilian domestic airlines – just not the one I was connecting to.  And, of course, there was no one to ask.  I wandered around a little more before I finally found someone who was wearing a badge for TAM — “my” airline, so to speak, who directed me to the other terminal.

Bah.

Anyway, I got to Belo Horizonte in one piece, and gratefully handed over the box of easel sized post-it notes to Natalie before heading off to my hotel to check in, where I discovered that I somehow had a two bedroom/two bath apartment with kitchen.  Not bad!

Belo Horizonte is, in many ways, similar to Ankara, Turkey – people from Brazil don’t seem to think very highly of it, but it’s a perfectly pleasant city nestled in the mountains (OK, the fact that every walk I took in town managed to be uphill in both directions did get a little old), easy to get around, the people are friendly, and it’s pretty safe.  I’m not complaining.  Also, since it’s winter down here in the southern hemisphere, the warmest it got was 80 degrees yesterday while Natalie and I were trekking all over creation.  And we did trek all over creation.

So I had it in my mind that I would do what I’ve done in every other country I’ve traveled to in recent years – when I arrived in Brazil, I wanted to get a SIM card for my international phone that I carry everywhere.  Since tonight in Tiradentes is the only time I’ll be staying in the same place as the rest of the group – and, frankly, I don’t even know if where I’m staying in Rio has a phone at all – I thought it would be a good idea.

Well, here’s the thing.  Brazil is a bit different.  I tried to do this at the airport in Sao Paulo, but I was told that I’d have to go to an office of the cell phone company, one of their stores, to take care of it because as a foreigner, I lack a CPF (the Brazilian equivalent of a social security number).  So, after our visit to Grupo Corpo yesterday, Natalie and I set off for the TIM store at the shopping mall about four blocks from her hotel.  The woman at the store took my passport, put me in the system, gave me a SIM card, and sent us on our merry way.

Well, I thought, that was easy.

The problem is that the SIM card doesn’t actually have any credits on it to make calls –Natalie needed to buy recharge minutes, so we went to a kiosk where I was the only one who could be a recharge because Natalie’s phone has a Sao Paulo area code (mine is Belo Horizonte).  So, as i’m waiting for Natalie to discover that none of the ATMs at the Banco do Brasil will take an international card, I dial in the number to recharge my phone.

Natalie comes out of the bank.

“Um,” I said, “I’’m going to need you to listen to this message – it sounds like it’s asking for my CPF.”
She listed to the message.  “Yup, it’s asking for your CPF.”
”I don’t have one.”
”Nope.”

After a couple of minutes of dithering, we went back the store (uphill in both directions) where the helpful woman from before listened to the message and announced that, yes, indeed, the phone wanted me to input my CPF.

We all stared at each other.

“He doesn’t have a CPF,” Natalie said.  “He’s a foreigner.”
”Yeah, I can’t help you,” she said.  “You’re going to have to go the big TIM store.”  She gave us directions (uphill both ways) and off we went.  The directions were wrong.  We realized this about 10 blocks away.  We stopped at a gas station, got water, asked for directions, and headed back past the post office, the huge HSBC bank, the massive Banco Santander, and the municipal building before finally arriving at the TIM store which was exactly where the woman would have said it was had she said to make all left turns instead of all right turns.  It was also about 5 minutes away from where we started, but it took  us nearly an hour to get there.

At one point I just started giggling because it was reminiscent of Egypt – in fact, the only major difference was that we were never offered tea at any of the stores (I’m still on the fence about whether this is good or bad because the tea is strong enough to turn your teeth brown and sweet enough to rot them out of your head).  At the big TIM store they did get it working, and we parted ways for an hour before meeting back up for dinner with members of Grupo Corpo.

The Portuguese thing is either more or less bewildering than I thought it would be – it really depends on who I’m talking to and how fast they’re talking.  But I won’t lie—when the Cuban guy from Grupo Corpo showed up with his Spanish speaking wife, I was so excited to actually be able to communicate with someone properly that I probably came off as insane.  Fortunately, since I am insane, this wasn’t too much of a problem.

Anyway, the road is really bumpy now so I’m going to turn off the laptop and concentrate on not getting sick for a while!

My friend Natalie is just going to laugh at me for writing this, but here goes.

As readers and viewers of my photos know, I’m not a particularly untraveled person.  However, I’m setting off in a new direction this summer to Brazil, and it is time for me to start considering making preparations to go through the process of acquiring a Brazilian visa.

This is new to me.  The most problematic visa I’ve ever needed was one for Saudi Arabia, but it was, in many ways, also the easiest to get: someone in the country has to sponsor you for a visa, fill out all the paperwork, and all I had to do was send off my passport to the people organizing the trip on this end and hope that she didn’t lose it.  Next time I saw my passport, there, on page 20, was my entry visa to the Kingdom.  The Indian visa was the same way because I was with a group and it was all handled for me.

For countries like Turkey and Egypt, you’re not getting an entry visa so much as paying an entry tax.  You go up to a window at the airport when you land, hand over your money, and they put a sticker in your passport.  In fact, until just a couple of years ago, the Egyptian visa consisted of two stamps — not stamps in your passport, postage-sized stamps that, it’s entirely possible, could have been affixed to an envelope and used to mail something somewhere.  At this point I have so many Egyptian stamps in my passport that it could probably be mailed just by dropping it in any mailbox in the country (if I ever actually found a public mailbox in Egypt).  Sure, you can get one at the consulate in Houston, but why?  It’s actually more expensive and takes far longer.

This Brazilian thing is a whole new creature to me.  The Web site of the Consulate General of Brazil in Houston is ridiculously complicated — and they’re pretty clear that the reason for the hoopla is that it’s just as complicated for Brazilians to apply for visas to the United States (apparently Americans are both photographed and fingerprinted on arrival in Brazil for the same reason).

The visa form–once you click through 17 links–is on a server in Brasilia, and can only be filled out electronically.  I’m staying in several places on my trip, but I only put the name of the hotel where I’m staying when I arrive, and I hope that’s enough.

Fortunately, they don’t ask ridiculous questions.  When I applied for my Indian visa, the form asked me to list everyone “known to me in India.”  Depending on how you interpret that question, there could be a lot of people known to me in India — the form doesn’t specify that they have to be known to the applicant personally.

I was a little afraid of a question like: “What is your opinion of Carmen Miranda?”  (This is a trick question: she wasn’t terribly popular in Brazil.  Does one insult a Brazilian or go with the prevailing public opinion?  Oh, the dilemma!)

Then there’s the other bureaucratic stuff.  The Consulate is at pains to explicitly point out that the visa is free, however, Americans have to pay a “reciprocity fee” equal to the amount that Brazilians have to pay for American visas. They’re not alone on this, but most of the countries that I’m likely to travel to that tried to do the same thing–Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey–have since backed down.

Where it gets weird is the Consulate’s insistence that visa applications can only be submitted–and picked up–in person.  If you live in Houston this is merely an annoyance (especially if you live on the other side of town), but for those in Austin it’s a harder decision: do I take two days off from work so that I can drive to Houston, take a personal appointment to drop of my passport, then go back to get it?  Or do I pay an agency in Austin to do it for me–which adds $20 to the “reciprocity fee,” never mind what the agency will charge for the service, a fee which is described on their Web site as “low” but isn’t actually delineated in terms of a dollar amount. What shall I assume it’s low in relationship to?  The cost of gas for two round trips to Houston?  Or the cost of the average emergency room visit without insurance?

All of this is new to me, but exciting at the same time.  I’ve discovered a Portuguese PodClass that I’m listening to in the hopes that when I’m speaking in my rapid-fire European-accented Spanish that I might be able to understand the responses I get, although so far the only phrase I can really remember is É você a garota de Ipanema? (“Are you the girl from Ipanema?”), which isn’t likely to get me very far.

Ah well.  As I’m fond of saying: there are no bad experiences.  Just good blog posts

I pick up the taxi—one of the new metered cabs, not the old black and white ones that prowl the streets looking for prey—in front of the Sheraton in Doqqi.  I figure it will be easier to get to my hotel in Zamalek from the Giza side rather than from the center of the city.

The driver is an old man, perhaps in his mid-70s (although he could be far younger—given his lack of teeth, he’s clearly had a hard life).  As we pull away, he starts babbling away in one of the more fluent registers of Arablish I’ve heard from a cab driver—at least, one who hasn’t later revealed legal or medical training (both are respected professions, but neither is particularly well paid in Egypt).

When we reach the Qasr al-Nil bridge, it becomes apparent that all traffic is being funneled across to the center—apparently the traffic police are under the impression that no one will ever want to go from Giza to Zamalek.  The driver finds a gap in the barricades large enough to accommodate the cab and pushes through.  I’m happy he’s managed to to so—traffic isn’t moving on the bridge, and if we have to cross over to Tahrir Square it’ll add at least 20 minutes and god knows how much to the fare.

“Must be quick-quick!” he cackles.  “No boliceman, kullu tamaam!”

I nod in agreement and hug my backpack to my chest just a little tighter.  Fortunately, the new cabs are also equipped with seatbelts, and it is now apparently the law that drivers (but not passengers) must wear them.

We zip on past the Gezira club, changing lanes multiple times and, at times, inventing our own.  This isn’t my first trip to the rodeo, as they say: roads with two lanes painted on the asphalt frequently accommodate three, four, or five actual lanes of traffic.  Instead of taking the road along the river up past the Marriott, he decides to cut through the center of the island.

“Too much traffic,” he explains as we crawl past the rear entrance to the Marriott and the Gezira Art Centre.  “Everyone has new car now.  For what?  Where it go?  Cairo too crowded already.  No room for new cars.”

He’s not wrong.

On the other hand, it seems as though he’s determined to deal with the overcrowded streets by ignoring the other drivers entirely.  By the time we arrive at the hotel, the only thing really keeping me from jumping out of the cab and walking the remaining blocks is that I’m kind of afraid of him.  He’s nearly run down a bicyclist, cut off several people, and used his horn like it might be banned tomorrow and he needs to get his last licks in.  After I leave him in front of the hotel, he picks a fight with the policeman on the corner.  I just decide to keep walking into the hotel and not look back.

My trip is almost over.  In a few hours, I’ll head back to the airport and start the 24 hour journey home.  I’ve had a good time here, but I’m ready to go.  I’ve grown weary of paying for everything.  I cringe every time I have to dig into the moneybelt that has been my constant girdle for the past week for another 100 pound note—I’ll have to do it again in a few minutes when I finish this meal.

Last summer when I was here, I had a weird feeling—I felt like I should have been enjoying myself more, dammit.  This time, I feel like I’m “back.”  But all the same, I’m ready to go.

Until next time, then.