The time-traveller's tale

Amazing what you can get used to - no, not just a country like Brazil, which I hope to escape before I really get used to it, if it's not already too late - but being locked in your own home. Not for the first time, I find myself without my set of keys, P having taken them alongside her own by mistake. We live in a two-storey building without the usual doorman. But getting in and out of the flat is a minor military operation, involving flights of stairs, long corridors and several doors to be locked and unlocked. When this first lock-in happened, I was in a panic: what about health and safety ?! What if this, what if that ? But now, I just slink back to my usual room, annoyed that I will have to postpone my chocolate fix but wearily resigned to my fate. It's a sh*tty old building we live in, spacious, yes, but suffering from terminal underinvestment by the owners who obviously are just waiting to sell it to the highest bidder, now that the area has become a Korean boomtown.

As well as being locked inside the apartment, we have also been locked out of it, thanks to hopeless keys and locksmiths. We also used to be regularly locked out of, or inside, our bathroom, again thanks to brilliant door design and non-existent locksmiths. Eventually, after much begging and attempted bullying, it was semi-fixed. If you've ever stood outside a much-needed bathroom holding a screaming baby in one hand while wrestling with a door handle in the other, you'll have an idea of how "inconvenient" such problems are.

I noticed today that the still dreadful building site next door has served as a makeshift lake for the legions of mosquitoes that, despite the much cooler weather, continue to attack us night after night. Again, I am strangely philosophical about my inability to do anything about the problem. Perhaps because I am now in a new mode of simply waiting to escape.

When we went, for the umpteenth time, to Policia Federal (the immigration department) the other day, I was finally able to pay off my overstay penalty for an expired tourist visa. Now that I am almost Brazilian, I was not in the least surprised when told it was impossible to pay by credit or debit card. Nor did I register any discomfort when told that the local bank was closed, where we would normally pay. Luckily I had sufficient cash on me, so we were directed to go down the road to a little streetside newsagent, more of a shack than a shop, and pay our cash to the woman there, plus of course some extra for her own pocket. As we did so, I noticed that as well as magazines, she also had an old-fashioned typewriter prominently displayed. I remember in the movie Central Station how the Rio woman would type letters for illiterate customers. We then walked back to the immigration building and jumped through a few more hoops. Cash, cash, cash. I used to think and read about the cashless society, but those days are long gone, I have become almost Brazilian.

P has been having her own banking nightmares today. She has been trying to sort out a couple of bounced cheques (she wrote them). She has already paid a hefty fine but since you cannot find out details about your account except from the one branch where you opened it, and since you have to keep laboriously notifying your bank whenever you move address, and since she has been told to get ten Notary stamps for some validation reason ... I'll stop there because like most things here it's just too tedious and moronic to bother explaining. But the key word is "notary", something that conjures up images of reams of paperwork and a nineteenth-century character sitting behind a desk, using a quill and ink ... I have become too well acquainted with notaries in this country - just another sign of its anti-consumer, anti-business straightjacket, and most importantly, a punishment imposed on the masses by a culture in which trust is non-existent.

Truly, I have time-travelled. I must prepare for dizzying culture-shock when I return to the modern world.