EDIT: VIDEO IS DONE! You can watch it here, no password- pass it around https://vimeo.com/99654474
I shot timelapse in Rio, Brasilia, Natal, Chapada Diamantia and Sao Paulo. The footage is all mixed in together- as a Brazilian, do you recognize some of these locations? To americans- most of them won't know where or what they are other than the Rio shot. I was wondering if this rough edit is enjoyable to watch for Brazilians. Especially, is the opening shot of the Nacional Congresso recognizable? I want the first shot to be attention getting.
thanks for any thought or reply you have; I'm planning on finishing it up tonight and go live with it tomorrow. :-)
Check out Rio on Wikitravel. Really good stuff there and there are some useful maps (metro specially).
I'll let people who live there to give extra info, I'm not really up to date on the non-touristy things to do there. As other people pointed out, it's not scary unsafe, you just need to know where not to walk around and try not to get lost in bad neighborhoods.
Have fun!
Some tips:
Take care of your expensive things. Don't walk with your camera/wallet/expensive jewelry/etc. as if you are in Paris or Vancouver. We are not like gaza strip or some another country who are in war, but of course we have security problems. Just use your common sense in Brazil, don't walk in a desert street, don't follow anybody who you don't know,don't walk with all your money or important documents (like passport, tickets for the matches, etc).
Learn some vithal phrases and words in portugues. (Ex: Obrigado [Thank you], Por favor [please], Tchau [bye], Quanto custa ? [How much?]. When you are ordering some food, point to the menu and say - Eu quero este. [I want this]. Oi, me leve ao hotel por favor. [Hi, take me to the hotel, please].
Restaurant tips: Colarinho, in Botafogo (bar), Carretão do Lido and Rio Brasa for autentic brazilian bbq (search in the google for "churrasco" and you will se).
If I'm tourist in Rio during the World Cup, definitely I would avoid bus or public transport, taxi it's your best option.
For hotel try this site and for apartments try this one.
Enjoy and have fun.
So one thing I know about truck drivers in Brazil is that quite a few of them like to hang out on the voice-based social network app, Zello, to kinda have some sort of company in their long drives. 3G is generally spotty on highways, but it's been getting better lately, and it's usually decent at the stops.
Here's their most popular channel, with over 50,000 subscribers:
http://zello.com/channels/k/wxj9
If you download the app, you can subscribe to the channel and listen to them talk. If you can get someone who can speak portuguese, you could probably interview them via the voice chat. I mean you could even try English or Spanish, out of all of them there must be at least one who can speak English.
i mean still dude...either way, if someone just gives you a sentence of "phonetic portuguese," unless you have an audio recording as well to go along with it you'll probably look like a fool trying to read it. Example:
"Eu nao falo nenhuma palavra de portuguese, mais vou tentar falar de qualquer maneira."
ew no'ong fah-low neng-uma pah-lahv-rah dje poor-chu-gayz, myze voe tent-are fah-la dee qual-kerr man-nay-rah.
I know how it's supposed to sound, and I can't read my own phonetics out lout at anything resembling a reasonable pace. It's like I'm my own tex2speech robot. also, for the record, that was a pain in the ass to turn into phonetic english, and it was only one sentence.
(just found this: google translate does a decent job. translate from portuguese to portugues and click the 'listen' button)
If you want to stand out with your application, learn about the specific place you're going to be sent to. Just about every city has special festivals that only happen there, and if you can't find that I can pretty much assure you that they have some special traditions surrounding carnaval. Show you're interested and deserving by being interested and deserving.
If you're set on this ide talk to rlimagon, but frankly I don't think this will turn out as well as you think. Portuguese is a very easy language to mutilate and contains certain sounds you're probably not used to making, which will make the phonetics harder to read.
I believe there's no way of paying boleto from overseas. :( Boleto is an automatically generated file with all the payment details from that transaction and an unique barcode. You scan it using your bank app and pay directly from there or you go to local place here and pay it using cash. I think the best option would be to send the money through PayPal and then your friend pays for it.
Edit: maybe using Wise can help you! https://wise.com/help/articles/2978036/how-to-pay-by-boleto
Sorry, can't help you a lot with that. But I want to say: don't mind some comments in here... Mostly brazilians in reddit are from higher classes and can be very finicky when it comes down to be in popular places with other people in here. It's cringeworthy, to me as a brazilian, to read some things in here.
Look up in TripAdvisor and similar sites to have an general idea for hotels. This site also seems to have some good info about the city. AirBNB can also be a good idea and cheaper than staying at a hotel and plus, can give you a host who speaks portuguese.
I hope you have a lot of fun in here!
i would consider looking into somewhere in or around Natal. you can fly into there for cheaper sometimes too and when i asked my family a similar question they almost all said Natal. one of my uncles has lived in every state there and Natal was also his first response. have fun wherever you go!
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g303518-Natal_State_of_Rio_Grande_do_Norte-Vacations.html
*also, Ilhabela was always my favorite vacation spot as a kid.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g609135-Ilhabela_State_of_Sao_Paulo-Vacations.html
Hi there, native here, living near to UFRJ. If you still haven't checked out google maps yet, here's a link to its location. I live in Governador Island, right to the north of UFRJ (zoom out a little bit and you'll see it). A lot of workers, teachers and students of UFRJ also live here in Governador Island. I used to study there, Math, but dropped it to study Computer Science somewhere else. Anyway, the University City, as we usually call UFRJ, is huge, with multiple buildings for both teaching and reasearch. There's also a Student Housing - link in portuguese - there. Anyway, if you come to study here, you won't feel, as we say, like a fish out of water, because there's a lot of foreign students there, and most of them are from South America, so you'll hear a lot of spanish there also. I hope this helps a bit, feel free to pm me for more info.
For music, try here and the rest of the thread, also. There are a lot of regional musical styles in brazil, forró, baião, samba, frevo, maracatu, sertanejo, choro, etc. But pop songs on radio and mainstream media are, IMHO, crap songs made of mixture of brazilian traditional music with pop and foreign influences.
If I had to pick only one album of brazilian music for a foreigner, I'd choose Acabou Chorare. Classic 5 star stuff there.
Brazilian cuisine is huge, every region has its flagship dishes and traditional courses and habits.
But, usually, brazilians have three main meals during the day. Breakfast, that depending on personal preferences and region contain bread, pastry, fruits, coffe and milk. Lunch is the most important meal for brazilians, a dish with rice, beans, salad and some kind of meat is the most common course; and at night people may have dinner or some lighter meal with contents similar to breakfast. It really depends on the household/personal preferences and state/region.
Frozen foods are not very commom. For lunch brazilians that eat out usually go to self servicing restaurantes with buffet that charges by the kg. Fast food is not cheap and people usually avoid to eat junk food for lunch.
Fitness is very present in our culture, but not predominant. In states and cities in the oceanside, with beaches, people are more fitness prone because bodies are exposed more frequently in public. Instagram is not the best measure of brazilian habits.
American who lived in Brazil here — https://www.duolingo.com — this website is your friend.
Learn Portuguese. Your everyday life will suck if you don't learn it, making you dependent on your boyfriend to do the simplest tasks for you when interacting with others.
After you arrive in Brazil, I would advise you to not speak English for at least six months — it will help you learn the language much faster.
Brazilians are extremely forgiving of foreigners making an effort to speak Portuguese — pretty much the opposite of the way immigrants are treated here in the US by "English only" assholes.
If you enjoy the outdoors- you can easily spend a week and still wish you had more time. I was there for about 5 days- loved it. I just posted a timelapse video from my Brazil trip- there's some shots in it from Chapada Diamantia. Poco Azul is not to be missed :-) It's the cave/lagoon you can swim in https://vimeo.com/99654474
Here is an example from Para. The state has a huge Japanese population. the Emperor even visited in the 1980's (a rare event for any country)
https://www.amazon.com/FOSET-49491-Electric-Shower/dp/B00V8IT7KC/
dont forget to buy a compatible electrical resistance for it,
and good luck finding a contractor that will be able to install it at your place
---
that said... why do you guys want an electric showerhead ?
you are aware that they suck ass during winter times, do you ?
There are restrictions to some contents in some regions. The games are not available if you don't use VPN because it's Fox who own the rights to show it in the US, something like this.
I watched the México vs Argentina this way. Got NordVPN on BlackFriday and now it's available to me. When I turn off the VPN the content is not available anymore.
I recommend:
Short Stories in Brazilian... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07R7QQKGC?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Basic Portuguese: A Grammar and... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0415633206?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
And Duolingo
A book about Brazilian legends:
Hardcover but not cardboard papges:
Soft Cover, I bought this one for my son:
This app alow you to buy subway tickets digitaly and avoid lines in stations cashier https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.autopass.top
Here is the link for Moovit
Our outlets are 110v, like in USA, you don't need voltage converters, unless you have something that is 220v. Our outlets have three holes, like in the link below, so you might need an adapter, as far as I know outlets in other places are different. I would also bring a camera, like a G7X II or something like that, to take better pictures.
Since you wanted a primary source and a religious text, dealing with the relationship between the Church and the Indigenous peoples, I suggested to you some old priests’ text.
But I’m thinking here with myself. If you are allowed, there is an interesting possibility on which you could work: to translate a text made by an Indigenous Brazilian shaman dealing with the relations between spirituality, the forest, and the white man. It’s a book written in Portuguese by a French Anthropologist, fluent in Portuguese and in Yanomami language. He taped his dialogues and interviews with the Yanomami shaman for decades, translated the answers of the shaman into Portuguese, and then published the book as a co-author with the shaman. It’s an amazing book. The book is called A Queda do Céu (The Fall of the Sky), by Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa.
>Would it be possible to find these books in a bookstore in Rio or São Paulo? Any good bookstores that can be recommended? Any other graphic novels that can be recommended?
This may be more of an opinion than a fact, but I am not familiar with good bookstores in São Paulo since Cultura and Saraiva basically lost the market to Amazon. Considering what I've heard from former employees, you can't quite blame Amazon on this one, since Cultura and Saraiva barely invested in technology.
In any case, you can order from Amazon Brazil, be it from where you live or during your stay in Brazil.
I already said Calvin and Hobbes, but if you happen to find Valente in Portuguese, buy it. It's a coming of age graphic novel. I believe it has an English version as well, so you could compare both version if you want to do that.
Here is a a book specifically about Rocinha (the community where I used to live)
Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio's Biggest Slum
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345806832/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It was OK - but if you don't know Rocinha then it might not be for you?
I highly recommend the trip to Antonina/Morretes, either by train (as felipebf mentioned above) or by car via the gorgeous Estrada da Graciosa.
Gratuitous plug: /r/curitiba is a small sub but you might get some fine advice from locals there.
According to their support page, sending to BRL limits are $250,000 BRL per transfer and $10,000 USD per year. The same page says you need their bank account number, branch code, bank name and code, CPF, and phone number.
Visit Wikitravel page on Curitiba: http://wikitravel.org/en/Curitiba You are about 6 hours drive from Iguaçu Falls, you can easily take a bus there. Not a day trip but worth every penny. I am not from Curitiba, but have visited many times. It is a great place to live and work.
I am not really from recife and I haven't been there in a while, no any natives please correct me if I am wrong.
How about traditional food restaurants like Picui?
Tipical dishes like Carne-de-Sol and fried/cooked cassava (aipim/macaxeira) with some bottled butter are a must and I would definitely recommend.
Well, zumniga may be going to Manaus... or Porto Alegre! Easy!
Here another good author in English he has several books: 1808: The Flight of the Emperor: How a Weak Prince, a Mad Queen, and the British Navy Tricked Napoleon and Changed the New World https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/0762787961/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_181PHP6F849VZYW7RNHK
Sign up for alerts from trip advisor for your route. This tool from google is also very handy. TAM usually has the cheapest flights to Brazil. If you're leaving from either NYC or Miami you are going to have the best options. There will most likely be no direct flights from the US to Fortaleza that are anywhere near affordable. You'll probably have to have a layover in Sao Paulo or Rio for the cheapest airfares. Still, even in the low season the best deal you're going to get is in the $1k range. Lowest I've ever seen it is $920 from NYC. My wife is Brazilian so we fly there at least once a year to visit family. March is always the cheapest time to go, but the world cup has thrown all the prices out of whack.
As far as hotels go, everyone who owns a semi-decent place to stay there has quadrupled their prices for the world cup. Brazilians are not ones to pass up an opportunity. However I would advise you to stay in a safe place and just fork over the cash. Brazil can be dangerous, and there will be many enterprising scumbags looking to rip off tourists during the world cup. Some drug lords have even been bragging about how much money they are going to make robbing tourists during the wc to the media. I would not go the airbnb route unless you're familiar with the local neighborhoods. You do NOT want to stumble home drunk one night to a favela. You WILL be robbed. Anything safe and within walking distance of the stadiums is going to be outrageously expensive, though maybe not more expensive than renting a car and getting accommodations farther away. Traffic will be a nightmare.
Also, if you are American you will need a tourist visa to enter Brazil, which costs around $200 by itself. Do you have your visa yet?
I work at a non-profit which targets foreigners, and yeah, you will regret not knowing even a little of the language. Get Pimsleur