San Paolo Brazil anyone??

[stilldazed]

There is a possibility that DH could be posted there for 2 years...I know nothing about the place.

I have 2 dc's aged 3 and 18mths...v.worried!

can anyone give me any comfort?

anyone

It's a massive booming city. It's very wealthy and very poor. Have a look on some expat websites. There are Brit curriculum schools so I would start with them on the internet, so you can see where you should live and what your housing allowance should be. Do not compromise on your housing as any expat will tell you. We have been stuffed in the past and it's miserable. Keep posting on here:) I would go, but be prepared to runs small hotel with visitors and not to keep flying back to uk for Christmas etc- its expensive and won't help you settle IMO

thanks windandsand, good advice.

anyone else know anything about san paolo...i'm getting very nervous!

I've never lived there, but have been there quite a bit. My overwhelming feeling on the place is it's MASSIVE. Huge. And so busy. I class myself as a pretty confident driver (could drive through London) and I couldn't drive there. There are also loads of helicopters (I guess to beat the traffic). And it rains. A lot.

It has a very diverse population, but (as far as I could see) few problems with integration.

What support could you expect from your DH's company?

We used to live in Sao Paulo (not San, that's Spanish, not Paolo, that's Italian) when I was a teenager. Mum is Brazilian, Dad is English, we'd lived in Brazil before so obv that all made it easier. I visited recently with DP (English, speaks some Portuguese) and our DD, who was 7 months at the time.

There's lots that's fab about it and in some ways I'm actually pretty tempted to relocate there myself (we're aiming to spend a couple of years in Brazil when DD is about 5 or 7 or so). The cultural life is excellent, and the food is, as well. Traffic & driving conditions are awful but the metro is pretty good. Brazilians are very good with kids both culturally and organisationally: you will get preferential treatment in metro and airport queues because of having little kids.

It is however a big, dangerous, polluted city. At the moment Brazil is pretty expensive for English visitors so you need to be sure if the financial package concerned. There are good schools but they're expensive too; if your eldest is only three it probably wouldn't be a big impact but likewise health costs are (I believe) also potentially high.

I would certainly recommend Brazil in general as a place to live for a couple of years; Sao Paulo wont be easy but there are so many people of all sorts there, and so much to do, that it will have a lit of compensations. Unless it's all a bit too culture shock-y - I take it you do live in London / are used to big city life?

Ps The general level of English speaking amongst ordinary Brazilians (waiters, taxi drivers, etc) is not great but people are normally pretty well-disposed towards foreigners in terms of being interested in them, happy to try to use their language skills even if in a broken fashion, and so forth.

I was there on holiday a couple of months ago and found the language a really big problem. Also as others have said cost of living was pretty expensive because of the exchange rate.
My advice would be so go for a few days to check it out.

Thanks for your repies.
comixminx - I currently live in Milan and have lived in london and new york so the big city thing doesn't worry me that much. I speak fluent italian (dh is italian) so although it will take some work i am happy to have a good go at learning portuguese.

My big worry is safety if I'm honest, (I am not really mentioning this to DH as I am a bit of a whimp!!). We will get a good package so will be able to afford to live in a decent area, but I keep hearing that it is a dangerous city. If we drive to the beach at the weekend would it be risky??

Risk is all in how you handle things there. For instance, there's no point in living in a house, an apartment is easier and more secure: a house needs major security because it is an immediate flag of richness (unless in a poor area, obv!). You shouldn't go out wearing much if anything in the way of jewellery or expensive watches in the street, and if you're driving around at night you don't stop at traffic lights, you slow down to check for traffic and then carry on. I have heard worse things about Cape Town but I've not been there to be fair.

The beach is a four hour drive away or thereabouts, so people do sort out beach houses to stay in. Mostly, if you can afford it, these are in private areas that are then secure (gated). We were members of a club in a reasonably central area of SP, which had swimming pools, tennis courts, sauna facilities and so forth: that might make better sense for you than going to the beach at weekends except for longer breaks where you hire somewhere.

I think it's perfectly possible to be there for some time and not have major problems, but equally if you go there expecting it to be like the UK you could run into problems right away. I don't know how it compares to Milan at all, but it's good that you have a feel for the Latin vibe. On our recent trip we were there for about ten days, walking and taking the metro, and although we looked like foreigners (English buggy, blond hair, foreign clothes) we actually had no problems at all. One thing about SP though is that there's a massive variety of looks there so it's much harder to stand out as a foreign visitor.

I would also say at Brazil is such an amazing country with such variety of places to go and see stuff you can't easily see elsewhere that it's really really worth thinking about seriously. Waterfalls: Iguaçu Falls in the south. Rainforest: not just in the Amazon, also much nearer to Sao Paulo. Wildlife: the Pantanal swampy area bordering on Bolivia, with flamingoes and armadillos and capybaras (may not be your ideal holiday with little kids, but amazing nevertheless).