Arrival to Rio

I've finally decided to write a little again, because we finally have two basic requirements: a permanent apartment, and our own internet connection.

So, we moved to Rio De Janeiro this August :) .

Our first impressions are mixed, as usual. Rio is a big city, with lots of people, lots of cars, lots of neighbourhoods. It’s a busy city, much bigger than Barcelona. It has lots of mountain ranges, lots of green areas, and lots of residential zones and places to walk around. It’s also a nice change from Adler, since we have more options of apartments, shops, and things to do in general. 

However, Rio also is a very dirty city, with greyish buildings, lack of efficient public transport, old constructions and styles…and there’s a lot of poverty around (no, we haven’t visited any favelas, but we have seen quite a lot of them from a distance), and it’s also less secure than Sochi or Barcelona.

People are really nice here. Most people are helpful and attentive, and they love children. Strangers usually stop in the street to say something to Elay, and everybody treats him quite nicely. Most people smile a lot when attending you. 

At the same time, traffic is terrible and aggressive. They don’t respect pedestrians like in Adler, while driving in a similar way that causes huge traffic jams. Motorbikes, meanwhile, ignore any type of rule, security or common sense and beep around as if that would be enough to get right of way.  Personalities change a lot when they are behind a vehicle…

The weather has been rather nice. You can see it is normal to have some clouds around and sometimes its rainy or stormy, but we arrived in the middle of “deep winter”, and that only meant that it was rainy and that temperatures went below 20° Celsius (even reaching 18° clearly a cold wave). When it’s sunny we easily reach 30°. That’s “Winter”. We don’t want to imagine “Summer”….At least, it seems it is not as humid as Singapore or other such regions...

The first month and a half was not the easiest period. We started in a temporary apartment, but it was booked just for a week. Then we had to move to a second temporary apartment, where we luckily stayed until we found our permanent one. The temporary apartments were…barely adequate, to say it politely, but it was enough for us, for a while. 

We had to do a lot of paperwork. Brazil loves bureaucracy, and the amount of useless papers you need to make is insane. For example, you may need to notarize your signature and notarize documents. But nobody really cares about it, they don’t check signatures and who are you that closely, they just want to have a stamp from a notary. To live here you also need 3 different documents, and to work you need a 4^th one. Most of these documents are fast enough to make, but you need to queue first, and that can take several hours. Which makes no sense, because they have timetables and numbers….

Lots of people here are really inefficient. It took us a lot of time to get the apartment, and lots of this time was wasted in administrative steps or going through agencies, which have hundreds of other clients and cannot attend your demands, while a simple direct call to the owners would be enough.

You can also see that there is lots of corruption, since lots of apartment owners want to rent the place without declaring it, and even get angry or increase the price when mentioning that you will do everything legally. 

My office is pretty awesome, new and nice (with cafeterias and a small terrace/garden), and it’s next to the subway so we needed a place connected to the local subway. The subway in Rio is quite limited, it has only 2 lines so far, and they share a big amount of stops. Most of it communicates the “Zona Sul” with the actual centre of the city, so we have been searching apartments in the Zona Sul, Rio’s posh area for tourist and expats. 

Initially we wanted to live in Ipanema, which is extremely nice, but it is also more touristic, less safe and further from work. It is also very expensive, so in the end we found a nice place in Botafogo, further from the beach but still 10-15 minutes away from Copacabana or Ipanema in subway. It is a very residential are, with plenty of shops and a couple of shopping malls around. 

The ideal area, where everybody wants to live now, is called Barra. It’s extremely residential, very nice and clean, with lots of commerce, clean beaches, new buildings, and cheap rents. It’s also 2 hours away from the centre by car thanks to traffic (unless you wake up at 05:30 and go to the centre at that time), and it has no subway, so we discarded that option quite fast. Botafogo is older and not as nice, but our building is quite new. 

In here it is very normal to have common areas and services in the building. You usually need to pay some extra for them, but even in buildings that have nothing you may pay 100 euros or so for them, so it was worth investigating, to find a building with nice services. The one we have chosen has, among other things, 24-hours security, a park for kids, a swimming pool and a gym, so we’re quite happy it^^. We haven’t used the pool yet (we have been less than 2 weeks in the building, and last 2 weekends were annoyingly cold or we had other things to do), but it’s nice to know we can go there if temperatures get crazy.

The apartment itself is quite new, and while not very big, is more than enough for us, while having room for visits too. (So, everybody’s invited^^). 

We haven't done much toursim yet, because with Elay it's not as easy. There are very green and tall mountains (like the Pao de Açúcar or the Corcovado) that make the landscape look awesome, and the combination of these weird mountains and the beaches is beautiful. However, we do have walked around, and gone to plenty of restaurants. Local food is pretty awesome, and the fruits and juices are simply incredible....

After the first days of paranoia, the city does not seem as dangerous as you would think. There is plenty of people in the street most of the time, and the Zona Sul and the workplace are quite busy all the time. I don't doubt that walking in areas with less people is not healthy for you or your wallet, but things are not as bad as one would imagine, and we're told the city has imporved a lot in the past few years.

All in all, it's quite an interesting place :). We'll see how it goes...