Monday night, 11.30PM. I am currently watching one of the grand successes of brazilian TV, Miss BumBum (Miss Best-Butt).....Bemvindo ao Brasil. TV here is extraordinary.
Moving on: yesterday Guillaume and I woke up early to go on an excursion to an indian reservation with the Tupi (an indigenous brazilian language) class from uni. We arrived at 10AM in the place where the teacher had told us to meet. There we saw no one, except for the (I suspect) evangelical bus driver for the faculty. We stayed there for about 40 minutes, mostly listening to the bus driver recount various details of his personal life (after a while in Brazil, you find this completely normal) and then he decided to leave as nobody, not even the teacher, had shown up. We decided to walk to the metro and do something else in the city centre instead, and as we were walking, saw the group of people going on the excursion, in a completely different place. The teacher decided, after this
There we did some chores to organise for our trip to the Amazon and had lunch. 'What do you want to eat?', asked Guillaume. Arroz e feijão e omelette! (rice, beans and omelette), I cried, 'It's been like one day since I've eaten arroz e feijão!' So, we went to a lanchonete (snack bar).
It appears that in Brazil there exists only one store for every single snack bar in the country to buy their materials and signs. You can be sure to find the same facilities and menu in every single one. Some examples of thing you will see, without a doubt, in whatever snack bar you enter in Brazil:
Menu board offering a variety of mysterious 'X' burgers.
Glass box filled with the same lollies, through which the designated 'money-taker' peers through a small hole to take your money and give you change.
A wide range of extremely potent drinks, cachaça being a vital member of this collection.
A Skol (or possible Brahma too) fridge filled with beer.
A collection of salgados (savoury baked goods, and always the same one at that).
This, and the knowledge that you can have a massive and tasty meal for about $7AUD. Um, Awesome. The 'X'-burger thing however (first picture) was problematic for a few months. Every time I entered one of these places I would wonder to myself, what on earth is an X-burger?! There appeared to be variations of these mysterious burgers - egg, salad, chicken.. And I did think it was weird that every single restaurant used the same word.. until one day it was revealed: X in portuguese is pronounced 'shiss'. This is a way of abbreviating the English word cheese, because in portuguese they use the English word too - cheeseburger. I was floored. In my English brain, it was not a 'shissburger' but an 'exburger'. That only took three months.
After lunch I grabbed some leggings from a clothing store on Avenida Paulista. This is a good opportunity for a word on stores in Brazil, or even, on commerce in general in this country. I have maintained since the beginning of my stay here that there are so many unnecessary jobs here! Any store you go into will be swarming with employees, deeply disproportionate to the number of customers. And still, at that, it takes longer than in any store in Australia or Germany or Canada or USA or anywhere else I have ever been. For my leggings excursion, I was saved too much hassle: I went to the counter where the shopkeeper was totally free, she pointed to one of the other employees, who came walking over nonchalantly to take my leggings to another part of the store to put them in a bag and write on a piece of paper what I was buying and the price, I waited there for the paper to take it back to the unoccupied shopkeeper at the cash register, she gave me my change and stamped the piece of paper as pago (paid), and then I walked back to the other lady, showed her that it was god-damned pago, and she gave me the bag with the leggings.
Shoe shopping? Don't even get me started. There will be all of the above barriers, plus a few extra: one person greets you and sees what you need, one person grabs the shoes, a different person put the shoes in a box, you line up to pay for the shoes, they give you a receipt, then you have to line up again to get the bag with the shoes. It is unthinkable for a shopkeeper to do more than one of the above tasks, otherwise the whole system will be destroyed, and things might actually become efficient. Hah.
This variety of 'teamwork' is rampant in Brazil. Again, something you get used to..
Miss BumBum has finished for this evening and so have I. Until tomorrow!
You linguistical issue about the x-burguers was... delicious! x'D
ResponderExcluirAnd were on earth, I mean, São Paulo you've been buying clothes and shoes? Normally I'm "only" attended by... 3 people haha! The seller, the one that you have to pay to and the one that give you the goods you bought. Sometimes the same person that gives you your things is the person you paid for them.
Hmmm... okay, it's strange rsrs. But I'm used to this way, offcourse.