Rio - The move, the happenings, the rant

Well in my hope of reviving the blog again and rant out i am back!! lets see how long this stint lasts!

Its been almost 8 months (after almost an year wait for my work visa) that i have been in rio.. Absoulutely have fallen in love with the city But still there are things i miss or like to rant about!

1) Top of the list is lack of good Indian restaurants/dhabas and indian spices:
Ah i miss thoise tandoori chickens/ chicken tikka masalas and tandoori rotis. We did work our way around for indian spices by managing with available brazilian spices which are very much enough for day to day cooking. But when it comes to making delicacies oh i miss fenugreek, amchoor (dry mango powder), Pav bhaji masala, Chickpea flour, Lentil varieties to make dosas and idlies. And to add salt on wounds apparently all these things are abundantly available in Sao Paulo! Dang!!! kill me already...

2) Everything is so friggin expensive: When it was time to move me and ujjwala decided that we won't be bringing in our furniture cos a) we had no idea what kind house we´ll be taking in, and b) we expected to find better furniture here. Trust me when i tell you, you would probably end up finding furniture of worst qualities and 10 times the price you would find in india. Add to this the misery of uncertainty over time of delivery. For example when we bought our furniture they gave us this rough idea. Anyday from monday to wednesday next week and anytime from 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM. But this is just not limited to furniture , take real estate take electronics take anything , everything is so costly. And in most circumstances even with a lavish budget you end up compromising on quality. For example it took us to 3 months to find a decent apartment which according to me was worth the rent. The rent which i considered to be lavish before i moved to rio that turned out to be petty for areas like Zona sul. Take the case of electronics, a) they are costly, b) Uncertainty over delivery date and time c) Branded companies here charge you to install their own electronics d) If you do get it installed by other guys who do it for much cheaper, well you loose your guarantee then.

3) Red tape/Bureaucracy. : This was one thing i wanted to say i miss and am glad. And if you have been to India you would know what i mean. I had heard most of American expats friends coming to India Complain about how slow things are here. And how long it takes a thing to get down. And to be honest i agreed with them, in fact i was so happy to be getting rid of the same when i was moving to Brazil. But in fact i was being naive. Sometimes you actually feel that Brazilian Red tape dwarfs the Indian bureaucracy.

4) Friends: This i do not blame totally on country itself. But inadvertently is related to any move you make. If you are totally new to place you have to make new friends. without knowing anyone around socialising actually becomes difficult. but one thing You do hope to find is, some own country men with whom you could discuss few things in local language or sometimes are more comfortable. But to my horror when i came here i couldn´t find single indian family/bachelors here (in person on streets or through many networking sites like internations/facebook/expat-blog). The life was indeed becoming tough when we accidentaly saw some tourists (one in saree ) and we got introduced to an indian family they knew here has been settled for 40 years. And to my further "utter" horror, they told us there are not many indians except for couple of families (who furtther to make matter worse were far away from our age-group) but something is better than nothing right?? Guess what its been 8 months and we haven't met these other two families till date. But we ended up finding indian families here thanks to sudden O&G crowd influx. But sadly most of these guys live far away from happening Zona sul but much better developed and Americanized area call Barra. Plus there were my colleagues with whom we did socialize and slowly our friend circle has grown so much that we hardly get time for ourselves.

Though my rantings can go on i think its enough for day. Now lets come to good things which actually make me sad that after 1 and half years it would be time to go back

1) The Food. Anyone who has had Brazilian Feijoada, picanha and Churrasco will vouch for me when i say, that any hardcore non-vegetarian will absolutely adore teh place for its food.

2) Caipirinihas: Strong and sexy drinks with various fruity flavors (though my favorite is lemon) its made of local drink called Cachaca. Six of these and you will forget all your stress :)

3) Brazilian love for India: Almost every Brazilian i have met has been so happy to have met Indian. They have this hunger for learning more about India and its culture (thanks to one of the old soaps here by name "Caminhos das India" ) that it seems they are more Indian than me.

4) Lapa : If you are a party person, this is the place to be on any given night, though i assure you you´ll enjoy this place most on Friday and Saturday nights, with jam packed streets with people holding on their booze and shouting/singing/dancing on streets. The first experience scares the shit out of you but once you get into groove you wouldn´t want to party in any other place.

New things i have learnt thanks to move here

1) How to make Chickpea flour from Scratch
2) Expertised in making proper Dhokla from above :P
3) Making Dhaba type Tandoori chicken
4) Making Ghee
5) Making Rasgullas

This one takes the cake
4) Making Paneer ( the way you get in Indian market in cubes) from milk

Soon.. i´ll share all the recipes and my day to day rants :)