The hunt is over!

It started in about October of last year, the hunt. Armed with my trusty iPad I scoured the Internet listings for apartments in Sao Paulo. I viewed hundreds of photos, learned a lot of Portuguese vocabulary as I read the apartment descriptions and discovered the best and worst neighborhoods in this massive city. Once we arrived back from Canada in February, we had appointments to check out several places. I was hoping to be able to move in by the first of March. How naive of me!

While we found a place we really liked in a good part of town, the owner decided in the end to rent it to a friend of hers, so we were back on the hunt again. After an innocent suggestion by my mother in law, we considered looking at a different city, one that is a lot closer to the ministry we are involved with. So...to make a long story short, we are moving to a city called Mogi das Cruzes, east of Sao Paulo.

This long story of ours features lots of visits to different apartments, tossing back the pros and cons of renting a furnished place and many questions from me to David clarifying what the realtor had said (in Portuguese). In the end we settled on a small three bedroom place on the 14th (top) floor. We have an amazing view of the city.

I don't have a lot of experience in renting, the last time David and I had to rent was when we first got married. Living overseas we didn't really have a choice as to where we lived, but we also didn't have to do any of the legwork either! So there were a few things that stood out to me as we embarked on this search.

Getting everything settled with the contracts took a while as we had to scan documents, get a co-signer and witness to sign the contract, have the signatures notarized, send them off to the real estate company to have it forwarded to the owner who also has to go through the same signature process....All in all it felt like quite a long drawn-out process!

But, we finally got our keys and went to show the apartment to friends last Thursday. Imagine our surprise when none of the light bulbs we put in worked. Turns out there were several problems in the wiring that resulted in a short in the circuit for all the lights (and this is a new apartment!)

Another issue we face is switching voltage once again. Sao Paulo is mostly 110 volts, but everything in Mogi is 220. So we'll be calling in an electrician to come doctor up some of our wall sockets. We have to be super careful when plugging things in!

The only thing in our kitchen at the moment is a sink; a nice marble slab with a metal sink, oh, and a tap. It is very weird to me that the renters are responsible for "furnishing" the kitchen. Probably about 80% of the apartments I saw online were being rented this way. So now we are waiting for a few modular kitchen cabinets to be delivered and installed.

Did I mention our place is tiny? Here in Brasil we measure area in square meters and our apartment is about 67; that's about 720 square feet! But it is ours and we are excited about turning it into a home! More to come with photos as the adventure continues...


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Just for fun: My ABC's

Unashamedly copied from my friend and fellow blogger, Dawne.

Age: 27
Bed Size: A small double, but upgrading to a queen when we move
Chore You Hate: Ironing
Dogs: Had five while I was growing up, but now that I have kids, no way!
Essential Start of Your Day: A good cup of tea
Favorite Color: blue
Gold or Silver: silver (or white gold)
Height: 5 foot 8
Instruments I Play: Piano, guitar, used to play cello, euphonium, trombone, and dabbled in most others.
Job Title: Full time momma
Kids: 2
Live: Sao Paulo, Brasil
Mom's Name: Ruth
Nicknames: Taz (high school days) Gambleitis (university days) Tati (my Brazilian name)
Overnight Hospital Stays: only to have babies
Pet Peeve: People who walk really slowly in the middle of the sidewalk.
Quote From a Movie: honestly can't even think of one worth writing down.
Right or Left Handed: right
Siblings: 2 brothers, 1 sister
Time You Wake Up: whenever my kiddos do, usually around 6:00-6:30
Underwear: cotton
Veggie You Dislike: Mushrooms - traumatic experiences with them at boarding school.
What Makes You Run Late: my husband!
X-Rays You Have Had: teeth, arm
Yummy Food You Make: Fettucine Alfredo from scratch
Zoo Animal You Like Best: Tigers

Location:Av. Angélica,Sao Paulo,Brazil

Traffic in Sao Paulo

This just about sums up my experience of driving in Brazil! It is never simple to go anywhere. There are one way roads everywhere, you can't turn right on red and more often than not, you can't turn left across a main road. Which means you really need to know exactly where you're going! If you are not in the correct lane, who knows where you'll end up! We've done a lot of driving since we've been back, and I will illustrate a few interesting situations we've found ourselves in.

On our way to our prospective apartment, we were using David's iPhone's GPS to direct us when we noticed that to turn left, we first had to turn right, left and left again, thus allowing us to cross the road, rather than just turn left. In my diagram, the red shows where we wanted to go and the blue represents how we actually did it! Notice that the first right turn takes us onto a "one way" road that in effect has us driving on the left side of the road. And this is not the first road I've seen in Brazil like this!
As we were returning from the ministry center (about an hour and a half away), we were driving back on one of the main highways, which has been under heavy construction and development in the past year or so. Being away for three months, our usual exit strategy didn't work. We were in the process of changing lanes to get over to the right to take an exit, but instead found ourselves on an overpass taking us where we didn't want to go. Thankfully we had our handy GPS and used it to navigate through some back streets to avoid the increasingly heavy rush hour traffic on the main drags. The red shows where we wanted to go, the blue shows where we ended up!

And if this isn't enough, Sao Paulo has a weird system called Rodizio. It means cars with license plates starting with a certain number can't drive in the center of the city from 7:00 to 10:00am and 5:00 to 8:00pm (i.e rush hour) on a specific day. So on Wednesday our car is out of commission for those hours.
Of course, this just makes life that much more interesting, and I still love to drive! So if you ever find yourself behind the wheel in Sao Paulo, don't forget your GPS!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

No excuses

So, my last attempt to blog from my iPad and include an image didn't really work; I was forced to spend $2.99 to purchase an app to be able to do what I want to. Now, let's see if the money spent will help me blog; after all, I've got to make it worth it, right? I've got no more excuses!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Experimental post

I've had a few blog posts running around in my head these past few days, and haven't exactly kept to my "just do it" plan! One of my big reasons (i.e excuses) is that I can't upload photos into my blog posts from my iPad. So, procrastinator extraordinaire that I am, I've been searching for an iPad app that gives me that option! So this is my test post from the Monarch app. Its a free app that I'm trying out. I always try to get away with using a freebie, but I wonder if I bought one, if that would help my inspiration?

Here is painting I found when searching in google for an image to add to this post. I only got a little distracted by reading the article that it came from! Hmmm, distraction is a good theme to blog about in relation to procrastination now, isn't it?

Procrastinator extraordinaire!

Yup, that's me. After all, this post was supposed to happen sometime in January - actually close to the beginning of the month. You know, the one where you write about all the resolutions you're going to keep this year... Well, I wanted to blog more...but it hasn't really worked out so far, but here I go and really, it's only February!

I'm sitting in bed, the kids are asleep and I'm wondering why it has taken me so long to get down to blogging, I mean it's not that hard, right? In fact, it's taken me a good 10 minutes to convince myself that I should just start writing, with my brain coming up with all sorts of random excuses such as; it's getting late, it's hard to type on an iPad, I really need to cut my nails (yes, a super lame excuse) and so on.

This has made me think about other areas of my life and how we can get into habits of procrastinating that seem to build up until it really becomes a problem. You know the things I'm talking about - leaving the dishes overnight, not taking the extra 5 seconds to put your clothes away, checking facebook just once more before settling down to do a task. The more we allow ourselves to "get away with" putting something off, the more we are robbing ourselves of a productive and satisfying life. The days when I am busiest are usually the ones that are the most satisfying.

The other issue I think I have with blogging, for example, is that I think about it too much and build up a huge expectation in my mind - maybe I am a perfectionist too! So when I sit down to write and it doesn't come out the way I have imagined it, I just give up. And again am left with nothing! I see this in other areas of my life, but more on that later,...maybe.

So, procrastinator and perfectionist that I am, this year I will strive to embody the Nike slogan, "just do it" and stop thinking and planning so much.

And now I'm off to cut my nails, because it really is hard to type on an iPad with long nails!

Traveling with Tots

I love traveling, and especially, flying, at least I used to....now I have two kids to fly with and it's definitely not as much fun as it used to be. Of course, all the hassle associated with flying and security doesn't help either! We just made a cross-continental flight from Sao Paulo to Calgary, through Chicago.

After we had checked in and gotten rid of our checked luggage we still had a stroller, car seat, diaper bag, purse, David's carry on, Lucas' backpack - oh yeah, and the two kids as well. It was quite a feat to get ourselves moving through the airport, and I was devastated to find out we had to dismantle the car seat from the stroller, remove Elena from her sling and Lucas from the stroller, collapse the stroller, and put the whole lot through the scanner (not the babies :)). Then, of course, Lucas was free to run - and run he did! Let's just say we were very glad to get onto the plane and strap Lucas into his seat! Since we were able to board early, Lucas and David had a chance to get into the cockpit to meet the pilot (doesn't happen very much anymore!)

It was a very long flight to Chicago - Lucas didn't stay strapped into his seat for very long - he would much rather be roaming about the airplane and saying hello to everyone who wasn't sleeping on the overnight flight. We had decided to wait until everyone else de-planed before we even started getting our stuff - we had a long enough layover that we could take our time. Thankfully we got through customs and immigration very easily and went through the whole security process again with only a little fuss over the can of coke I had leftover from the previous flight and Lucas' obviously suspicious looking sippy cup which had to be tested before we were allowed to keep it. Once we were in the right terminal and departure hall for our next flight we got some breakfast and let Lucas run around for a while. Eventually he crashed and slept on the seats by our gate for a while. David and I were very thankful for a small respite!

Unfortunately, that respite meant that Lucas was awake and energized for the whole of the three hour flight from Chicago to Calgary. Now we know why some parents want to drug their kids on planes!

One other thing I love about flying is my Flight Log Book. This is a tradition in our family that my dad started for all of us kids. We each have a Flight Log Book and on every flight, we get the pilot to sign our book with the flight details - mine goes back all the way to 1988 and logs over 240 flights and almost 300,000 nautical miles. It's always fun to see the reaction from the pilots when they see my book.

Now Lucas has his own book, and Elena will get one soon so they can start logging their own flights. Even with all of the craziness of trying to keep a toddler occupied for hours on end and caring for an infant at the same time, I still love the hustle and bustle of the airports and how we can be transported across the world.

Of course, it may be some time before we attempt another long-haul flight with two young ones :)