My Year in Brazil - A Bargain Bin Memoir

My year in Brazil: the good, the bad and the ugly (and why I can't wait to go back!)

I've been meaning to do this for a while. Thing is, every time I decided to put pen to paper it never felt like the right time. It's as if 8,5 months on I was still digesting what has turned out to be my life's true formative period. This is a year in Brazil, not a year in Provence and while I won't end up getting my ‘memoir' published à la Peter May, if it helps even just one person in the slightest, that'd be great 😊

My background before going to Brazil

In August 2017 I was working in finance in Dublin, Ireland when I met the love of my life, a Manauara named Glenda. It's hard not to get swept off your feet by a Brazuca but this one was genuine! Fast forward a year and a half and we decided to get married, have a child (who's now a beautiful bouncy boy of 16 months) and move to Manaus to try life there for a year before returning to Ireland. In the meantime, I learned and spoke hundreds of hours of Portuguese, my Portuguese was borderline B2 level and I was feeling very confident about using it in Brazil.

Why we chose Manaus

I'll be honest, I've never spent as much time in my life standing in front of a map saying “No, Rio's down here, Manaus is all the way up here” and “No, you can't commute to São Paulo for work in your car”. Understandably, Copacabana and the statue of Christ the Redeemer are what stick in many people's minds when it comes to Brazil. Manaus is the home city of my wife. She was the only Manauara we both knew of in Dublin, and there are 10,000+ Brazilians there, I certainly got something different! Most people looking to set up in Brazil probably won't give Manaus too much consideration: hot even by Brazilian standards and exacerbated by the humidity, no natural beaches, isolated – there are no roads to other parts of Brazil. Well, there is the BR-319 which puts the cosmopolitan hotspot of Porto Velho within reach, 800km later. But … yeah… you get what I mean. If you're coming from Europe through São Paulo it adds an extra 5-6 hours onto your flight time. However, if you're of the more resilient type you'll be richly rewarded by this amazing city in a unique setting! 😊 Manaus won't win any prizes on paper but it has completely won over my heart!

How it went

Brazil is higher risk, higher reward. I had the most amazing experiences there but almost lost my shirt on numerous occasions too! For the first two weeks I stayed there with my wife and kids we used an Airbnb apartment in downtown Manaus as a base for looking at apartments to rent and getting to know the city. The apartment was on the 17th floor and we had great views of the Rio Negro.
After we found our apartment for the next year, we started the process of getting married. We started the process around November 18th 2018 and finished on March 22nd the next year. No Vegas style weddings here! However, the most arduous process was yet to come, yet one that should have been a lot more enjoyable: the birth of our son, baby Noah.

If I had known I wouldn't have listened for a second, but that's why first-hand knowledge of anything in Brazil is so valuable! My wife suggested that Noah could be delivered in a public maternidade. It'd save having to fork out R$14,500 in a private one and she had already given birth twice using the public system. It'd be okay, I was told. Yikes. The total lack of being looked after during the pregnancy should have been a big red flag. My mother, a nurse, sounded bemused beyond belief every time she called, asking what date we had been given for the c-section to take place and I'd reply “Glenda told me that you just come there on the night when you start getting contractions”. Still, Glenda, my wife, was happy with the situation so I trusted her.

Fast forward to April 2nd 2019 and it's time to go to the maternidade. We arrive at our local unit. “Um yeah uhh you're not having contractions” the nurse said sheepishly. Basically Brazilian code speak for “We don't have enough midwifes or equipment available” or “Yeah, I'm not feeling up to delivering another one” We decided immediately to go to the main maternity hospital in Manaus. My wife was put sitting on a hard plastic chair, surrounded by other women who couldn't wait. Some were doubled over with the pain, some first time mothers were sobbing into their mother's dresses, others just sat there while their mother or father demanded an ambulance so they could take their daughter to the nearest private hospital. It was complete and utter chaos, fully reminiscent of scenes charities use in their commercials. My wife was finally admitted, 16 hours after she arrived at the maternidade. Her C-section was performed beside another woman in a theatre only meant for one operation at a time.
Baby Noah was born just in the nick of time, he had to be resuscitated but it could have been a lot worse had my mother-in-law not hounded the doctor on duty to ‘do it now'. Maybe they don't deserve to be the butt of so many jokes!

Before this day, we were considering returning to Ireland. Now, it was our duty to do so. It was too much to even imagine this could happen to our kids and their future partners if we stayed in Brazil.
The next 8 months, well, babies make things go fast. We made better friends, not many, most people still wanted to collect their gringo tax. I gained permanent residency. We go out more. I made it my mission to try all the foods only found in the Amazon. I started going a lot more to the Mercado Adolpho Lisboa. We stopped watching the endlessly bleak stream of murders and corruption that made up the news on Globo. We stopped watching Alô Amazonas. We went out more to restaurants and indulged my love for the historic center and its authentic charms. My parents visited in June and we saw Manaus like we never did before. I got to know the best of Manaus and began to fully embrace it for what it was, warts and all.

A huge thanks to abthree, Emerson, Cecilia and Marcelo. Without you, I wouldn't have held on, let alone thrived. Your advice, friendship and evenings out refocused my mind and made my last 8 months a lot better than my first 5!

What I learned

These are what stood out for me the most. Things that, had I known in advance, would have made the year in Brazil significantly less stressful. There are hundreds of other tips, tricks and pieces of advice all around the forum and I won't cover those ones.

•    Don't compare your country to Brazil

Just don't. You'll spare yourself endless hours of misery and arguments with your other half, in-laws and friends. Like many inexperienced expats who've posted on the site, I was like this too. For months. I complained about Brazilians not having a culture of doing the right thing, about not giving a crap about the customer, about not having a culture of success, about being gossiping layabouts, about how it doesn't even occur to people that the way they see the world is completely messed up.
Now, there is some truth in that, but the population are acutely aware of its limitations. They're also aware of their homicide rate and general levels of corruption. They don't need to be reminded. So ‘ame-o ou deixe-o'. Yes, Brazil might be a heap of crap on paper compared to wherever you're from in Europe or the States with your sky high HDI ratings, but life isn't lived on paper.

Instead, look at the country as a whole. Look at all the things you could never see, experience or taste in your homeland. Brazil is higher-risk, higher-reward. If you can learn from your ‘negative' experiences and disappointments then you will have an incredibly rich and rewarding experience, becoming a far more resilient, resourceful and wise person in the process.

•    ALWAYS get a second opinion and probably a third one too

When you arrive in Brazil, you'll probably need to enter into a fair few administrative processes: getting a CPF, extending your 90 day visa, permanent residency, visiting a cartório to notarize some documents or to get married. As you can imagine, Brazilian administrative processes are tailored to Brazilian citizens. Birth certificate, RG, CPF and pronto. When you come along with your foreign passport, criminal record (hopefully blank) and other foreign documents (all translated locally and apostilled) there's inevitably going to be a moment of confusion.
The first group of employees will tell you “Uhhh I'm not sure we can do that here”, the others will tell you “You're going to need more documents”, the odd one or will say “Yeah, that looks about right”. So, why get a second opinion. From experience this is how it'll go: first group's advice turns out to be wrong, the process is open to foreigners, it's just that they haven't a clue and they can't be bothered to find out.
The others waste 6-7 weeks of your time getting documents issued and apostilled in your home country only for another employee to inform you that the extra documents aren't needed when you finally gather them all together to be handed in.
The odd one or two employees either know the process 100% or not at all. It's usually feast or famine with them. You're spared all the hassle above or you arrive on the day, after waiting all that time, and are told “Não deu certo”

PLEASE also shop around if you are advised by the cartório to use another professional to assist in your process. As part of my marriage process I had to get various documents translated. They advised me to visit a certain translator that many hapless Manaus expats have fallen victim to, a certain Minerva. R$600 to translate a US birth certificate and an extra R$300 if I wanted ‘express' service i.e. within 2 weeks ! She justified her fees by claiming “There's lots of little boxes with funny words”. Yeah, I've always wondered how to translate ‘hospital' into Portuguese !

I left without saying a thing. This wasn't just paying gringo tax, it was paying deferred tax for all the years I hadn't lived in Brazil ! A quick google search later told me that there was another translator, Paulo Renan Gomes da Silva, in the city centre. R$170 for the same document and he did it in 2 days. Paulo is another one of those people that helped me stay sane. A true gentleman, he did his work quickly and professionally and was always willing to do my translation within the same day if it was really urgent. He always stayed for 15-20 minutes to chat with us when I came to pick up any translations, Paulo we can't wait to meet you again when we return to Manaus next year!

•    Where there's a will, there's a way – always

Brazil is a nation of certified Grade A ball-breakers when it comes to arbitrary and completely illogical requirements for the most simple of processes. Want to buy a soap holder and a whisk at a small store that might well have closed down in the next 5 minutes if you hadn't bought them ? Yeah, we'll need to send you to three different counters to scan the same items and then we'll need to know both your parents names. Don't ask why, they don't know either.
There are more serious situations however. Say you don't have that document. Say the deadline was yesterday. Say you were given a 10:15 timeslot and its now 10:35. Enter the magic words: ‘Tem outro jeito … ?'

Imagine a poor government employee working since 7 a.m. after a 1h bus ride. Complaints after complaints about the service, about why they should work faster, about why the person in question should have got a favourable decision and that it's the employee's fault. I've seen it so many times. These people get the rule book thrown at them. The employee isn't paid enough to care and certain not enough for this.

When the magic words ‘Tem outro jeito … ?' come out of your mouth, you're effectively saying “Let's try and work on this together, I'm on your side” On numerous occasions this has saved me. I thought I had messed up on my marriage process when it wasn't possible for me to get my passport to New York to have it apostilled. They said the whole process wouldn't be completed until I could do so. How was I going to be able to do that. I shook my head and with a scowling “Obrigado”, left. After 5 minutes of fuming outside and a ‘getting it off my chest' phone call, I was prompted by my future wife to use the magic words. When I sat in front of another employee, explained my situation and used these words they said. “Hmmm … maybe you can have the passport copied and certified as an authentic copy with the seal of the US consulate here in Manaus” Bingo! It worked !

Conclusion

So there you have it, the incoherent ramblings of a wet behind the ears expat in Brazil. It was an adventure. It did change me as a person. Significantly. It taught me how to be more patient but at the same time, how to assert myself in order to move things on. It taught me how to tolerate people who are more close-minded and ignorant, how to coax and cajole them towards the path of knowledge but also when to draw the line and stand up for what's right. Brazil will teach you about people, about the importance of true relationships, about how to judge a person's true intentions.

8 months ago, I swore I'd never return to Brazil. That I'd never forgive it for anything that had happened there. Now, not only have I made peace with Brazil but I can't wait to go back there again. I miss the sun. I miss the food, I miss the ‘anything goes' vibe of Manaus, the unique traits brought on by its remoteness. I miss visiting my off-the-grid relatives and eating their tambaqui and matrinxã. I miss the honly-tonk centro and its views of the beautiful Rio Negro.

Guys, I'd highly recommend everyone to try Brazil. It will change you significantly and for the better. Stay smart, stay safe and stay open-minded.

Thanks for reading.

Brian