- A Brazilian acquaintance said: "It is incredibly hard to start your own company here but it is impossible to close a company." This made me think of a meeting recently with an elderly Brazilian couple - he an Egyptian-Jewish immigrant from the early 1960s - who were once wealthy, having owned a large textile company. But their business was decimated by Chinese competition and now they rely on handouts from a Jewish charity. The wife obsessively shows you her photo albums, brimming with former glory, and she clutters up their cramped apartment with objects from a lost past.
- Annalisa, a middle-aged woman from a once very wealthy Brazilian family, today she is still comfortable but not as before. She, like many other Brazilians I have met, pines for Miami or the US.
- Rosanna, a Brazilian woman who spent many years working in London. She returned reluctantly to Brazil some years ago to care for her ill mother. She works as a PA in a Sao Paulo financial company, often 12 hours a day (7am to 7pm) and she earns a decent salary of R$ 9000 plus bonus. But she despises the "spoilt", "disrespectful" Brazilian bankers for whom she works - people who have been imbued with an unearned sense of entitlement - and longs to go back to the UK. "I am suffocating here and can't cope any more with this life."
- My friend Luiz, who lived for many years in New York while working for the UN, but returned to his hometown of Sao Paulo. Like many lucky Brazilians he has a European passport and has lived and worked in that part of the world too. Despite the passage of time since returning, Luiz struggles to find anything positive to say about most of his compatriots, with their myopic, defensive nationalism.
- The taxi driver on Sunday who, while stuck in traffic caused by rich people driving about ten feet from home to church, cursed the mentality which makes life on Sao Paulo's roads so wretched.
- The unknown man - asleep ? In a drug-induced torpor ? A corpse ? - lying naked except for a pair of shorts in the tiny island between the car and fume-filled highways, just inches from our lethal wheels and baked by a relentless sun. So near but so far from the church goers clutching their Palm Sunday greenery and looking forward to a nice lunch. And, yes, so near but so far from me, too.
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