Daily Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Just call me a matchmaker

I have been getting more emails than usual from potential expats and soon-to-move-here expats. Seems Rio's a hotspot these days! There's also the constant stream of people leaving and selling things so if you are looking to buy or sell household goods, send me a quick email at dailyriolife at gmail dot com and I'll put you in touch!

 

Quick Tip : Christmas Cards from Abroad - great tip for Expats

Last year I spent hours doing Christmas cards. Bought them at Costco in Canada, designed a photo montage to put in the card, printed the photos in Brazil ($$$), handsigned them, wrote a little poem on a slip of paper and decorated it with stickers, spent over an hour at the post office getting postage for all of the different places they were going, which took a full two hours to attach to the envelopes, only to have most of them arrive long after Christmas had passed despite mailing them at the beginning of December. It was truly a project.

This year I found a smarter expat solution. Shutterfly mails out personalized Christmas cards for you from the US! I am pretty sure I spent less on them this year than last, and even with having to manually input all of my addresses (a one-time thing) I still think it was less labour intensive than last year, and going forward now that the addresses are there, it will be a breeze.

There was even space for my little poem inside...

 

Security Tip - Zona Sul Key Chains

Zona Sul Supermercado (grocery store) has a loyalty program which allows customers to give personal information in exchange for discounts. Kind of like your safeway card back home, likely the data of how many times you buy milk in a month is sold to marketing firms. I have no issue with this. It's also handy for deliveries because when you use your card, your address automatically pops up on the screen, so they have it. Now, the VERY security conscious would probably not want to use a Zona Sul card at all, for this reason.

As I've discussed I'm a medium-security-conscious kind of person. I have a Zona Sul card, but I don't carry it on my keychain, because I figure that if my keys are ever stolen, all the person has to do is buy a chocolate bar using my Zona Sul card and they will have access to my address. Something to think about.Instead of using the card, I just give my CPF # to the cashier, and it pulls up my account.

 

It's Rio Restaurant Week!

www.restaurantweek.com.br

Great Gift Idea for people in Brazil

Gift Cards haven't totally caught on here in Brazil but I found some innovative gift-card-like packages at FNAC in Barra Shopping. They are put together by a company called A Vida e Bela. There are spa packages, hotel packages, leisure packages, hostel packages, adventure tourism packages - all at what I am assuming is a significant discount (the hotel package gives you a night's accomodation with breakfast for 2 people at your choice of 60 different hotels, for a whopping R$119).

The gift of choice - isn't that what everyone wants?

 

Great Photofinishing Service

After taking my photo printing business to the super-expensive photo place in Shopping Leblon for the past 2+ years I thought I'd shop around a little bit before processing photos for thank you cards after mine & the Canadoca's jaunt to Canada. I found an amazing service that delivered to the apartment (in my case, within ONE day), for a third of the price of the other place. Plus shipping but let's face it, it's a rainy week, I could have easily spent that on cab fare going back and forth to Shopping Leblon. The web site uploaded the photos fairly quickly, it could be a bit more user friendly in terms of allowing more customization with the number of prints (what I ended up doing with those I needed multiples of is uploading them multiple times. Which was easy because of how quick the upload time was).

Where oh where is this fabulous site?

FotoRegistro

 

 

Deals Deals Deals!

It seems as though there are deals to be had everywhere online these days. The newest thing I've gotten onto is Groupon back home (cities in Canada and the US) and Peixe Urbano in Brazil. Each are sites offering great deals (usually discounted by more than 50%) for gift certificates for products, services, etc. Today's deal in Rio is 80% off salon services at Werner's in Barra. Today's Calgary deal is 50% off of ice cream or ice cream cakes at Marble Slab Creamery. Pretty sweet!

So far I have bought some photobooks to help me get motivated as I am so behind on organizing my photos! Also some snowboard tuneups for Christmas gifts. Haven't bought anything from Peixe Urbano yet but I look forward to it! Check it out.  I also recommend doing this for awhile before TRAVELING to these cities - could find some sweet deals!

Best-ever Rainy Sunday Deal in Rio

I'm putting this up tonight as there's a good chance there will be a rainy Sunday this very weekend!

Rio's Theatro Municipal recenty underwent a large-scale restoration and the results are quite stunning. The official web site can be found here.

Now, for the best Sunday deal in Rio - at 11:00 am every Sunday, you can enjoy a performance at the Theatro Municipal for the big expense of ONE REAL per ticket. You heard it here, people. (And to give credit where credit is due, I heard about it from seasoned-Rio-expat and "scener" as I've dubbed her, T.)

To my visitors who came before I knew about this - sorry! Now I guess you'll have to come back ;)