Going to Brazil

A week ago Corey sent me a spreadsheet that he'd started that compared different homes in Brazil. He wanted me to start to look at things in case we go down there. Then the next day he said he probably needed to go down for a few days - they have an office there and it's in need of a bit more leadership if their going to be able to make it to market in January. So it quickly went from "I might need to go down" to "mind if I fly out tonight?" I said sure, I'll pack up your luggage and bring it to you in an hour. But that opening disappeared and he ended up booking a ticket to fly out a week later, which is tomorrow. But that is going to work out nicely because the Governor of Utah is going down there for a trade mission and they might get a little more pr that way. He'll be gone for a week and a half, and I've already started to sing "I will survive" to myself.

It will give Corey a chance to test the waters mentally if he really wants the whole lot of us to move down there. I'm fine either way. Part of me would love a break from the grind of busy school life, and the other part of me knows that once I was down there it would be a slightly purging/refining experience for me again and that I'd be really itching to return to the US asap. Still, just in case we go, we've starting to look at places where we might be able to stay. Last Monday Corey sent me a few websites that have home to search.  I browsed around for a few minutes, but none of the ones I saw there had any furnishings at all. That ain't gonna cut it. I then decided I didn't want to waste my time looking right now since it's not a for sure thing. (I feel like I've spent years of my life looking for houses, in our years of renting. Not a great way to spend my mental energy, it prevents me from being present.) plus the house has been a major mess for a few weeks and I really need to stop giving in to distractions and kick things in gear.

But I browsed through a few of those, but there was no furniture in any of them, including no stove or fridge... no beds, no silverware, no table... We are not going to be able to survive for a few months in a place that doesn't have the basics. I started to google some vacation rentals and found a few... I have a hard time finding rentals when it's in America and in English. Not sure how to go about it in Portuguese in Brazil. But this site seemed tourist friendly... didn't have a monthly rent price, but some houses did say they'd consider long term rentals. These looked nice and doable - one, two, and three (although I thought our 2007 chacara looked nice online too... Ah, the chacara! There ended up being quite a few issues that caused Tiffanie the pregnant mother of 6 children some serious stress... issues like our house being flooded through the roof lights (the water for our home got pumped from a well and stored in a big container in an attic-type area above the home, but more than once the pump busted and wouldn't stop pumping, hence it overflowed and started to flood our bedrooms via the ceiling lights... see ) But it was my first time out of the country, and now I'm a seasoned mother traveler, so I'm sure I'd be able to handle the glitches in the system better this go around. (?) Keep up that self talk, Tiff!

So since I was in the area (online at least), I thought I'd try to locate our old chacara on Google Maps. It took a few brain cramps, but I found it - R. Emílio Coelho, 1755 - Village Campinas, Campinas - SP, 13085-702, Brazil. We are the lot on the south east stretch below that point there, outlined in yellow.

Pretty cool. Our lot was on an angle. That was very confusing for me, since I come from Utah with it's easy north south east west streets. I felt quite disoriented most of the time. Being south of the equator didn't help either - the sunrise and the sunset locations made no sense to me. And there was no north star either, so I was disoriented at night time too. I was in a bit of a twilight zone.

We lived in Brazil from February to June 2007. That there is the whole journal entry/emails to families of that time. Also a quick story from Corey that he gave at church (1/3 of the way down at that link). That was a good experience. It's all turned into happy memories - I think that Heaven retrospective thing CS Lewis wrote about has happened to that experience for me. The bad and painful memories have faded, it's all just happy experiences and memories now. Funny how life works like that. So that's probably why I'm open to going - I know it will turn into a pleasant memory once we survive it all. And to help me be more grateful for life in the US right now ~ cause as I said the busy-ness of it all is wearing on me, I'm already wishing for summer vacation! Not a good sign since we're not even in winter yet... Ok, going to go be productive.