So, I’ve been in Brazil for a week. I wanted to take some time to organize my thoughts, since things have been pretty busy so far. I expected my first week to be slow and sedentary, peppered with a few failed attempts at reintegrating myself into society and instead spending my time lamenting my unfortunate exile and counting the number of people I know who have better lives than me. Not that I didn’t feel that way for a while, but it only lasted a few hours. Then I got moving.
The best way to describe Sao Paulo is to say that it will be one of the first cities in the world to reach 
sci-fi levels of scale and structure. Like Blade Runner’s LA, or maybe an underfunded Coruscant. In 30 years people who see this place for the first time will immediately hope they had Philip K. Dick or William Gibson as their real estate agent. Some neighborhoods are very run down, especially near downtown (which, as in any South American city, is invariably referred to as the “Center”). The buildings are Iberian-Colonial , of the kind that looks especially derelict combined with the absence of a recent coat of paint. Picture Buenos Aires or Madrid, and multiply the number of people by 3 and the number of motorcycles by 350. Having said this, there are neighborhoods which are extremely modern. Morumbi is an amalgam of mansions and luxury apartment buildings, and Berrini has so many modern corporate highrise developments that you can almost forget you’re in a city surrounded by drug-fueled shantytowns.
Since I was born abroad and have never acquired the proper documentation which every Brazilian has, my goal for last week was to get all of my papers in order. There are basically four different documents you need to do anything in Brazil. Literally anything – banks and federal/state governments will always ask for three out of four if not all of these for even the simplest of transactions. These are your:
- CPF (Physical Person Registration)
- RG (General Registration)
- Voter’s Registration
- Birth Certificate
The first two are obviously redundant. The official story is that one is state-issued and the other is a federal document, but how does that justify anything? You could have infinite reductions of identity management until every county and township is issuing ID numbers. Anyway, it takes a lot of time to get these from scratch, but time is all I have.
Over the past four years I had forgotten how much can be done in a day if there’s no one around with the power to tell you what to do. Every day found me at a new government office for at least four or five hours. Yo
u would think this would leave a lot of time to make some headway into Lord Jim or the newspaper but the truth is that so I’ve had very little down time when waiting for bureaucracy. Generally you’re assigned a number and don’t have to stand in any kind of physical line. While many people choose to sit around and wait for their number to come up, the smart thing to do is to just calculate the average speed that the numbers are moving at, multiply that by the difference between your number and the current number, and then go for a walk for that amount of minutes. This method was worked perfectly when I went to the “Poupa Tempo” (literally “Time Saver” – this is the official name of a government office, kind of an aggregated service center for all of your bureaucratic needs). Too bad that when I finally sat down in front of my very own Hermes Conrad, the entire network crashed and they told me to come back the next day.
