Diplomatic mission

The best moments in a courtship, a new restaurant or the purchase of, say, a video game (Halo 3 anyone?) is often in the anticipation -- the brief period before the novelty is unwrapped and experienced.

It's the moment imagination hoists itself into the saddle of its nervy steed and gallops off to the promised horizon. A moment to be relished because, as we all know, reality has an unwelcome talent of setting marshland under imagination's hooves.

Right now, I'm in the pre-honeymoon stage of getting to Brazil. Sure, I have flashes of anxiety at the thought of saying goodbye to Paris's cafés and museums and parties and the comfortable life I've built up over more than a decade in this gracious city. But the idea of diving into a new metropolis filled with unexplored delights and terrors and surrounded by The-Land-That-Time-Forgot lushness (and perils) fills me with the sort of enthusiasm I would have reserved for a date with Jane Fonda (circa Barbarella). If you get the mixed movie metaphors. I'm excited.

So it is in that frame of mind I went to the Brazilian embassy to lodge my visa request, pressing the pen firmly to say, yes, I was looking for a four-year stay in the land of Ronaldo, Indiana Jones and the City of God. Signing my way to the LatAm way of Life.

A week later, I was back, called in to at last drop off my passport. But the procedure ain't over yet. I'll still have to go back in a couple of days to pick it up. A foretaste of the bureaucracy that ties Brazil up in knots and frustrates locals and foreigners alike. It wasn't so bad this time, but I've been told to brace for the paper morasses once in the country.

Gathering no moss

In her glass was a bleeding man
She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained hands


For some reason, Mick Jagger was going around in my head. One song in particular: "You Can't Always Get What You Want". Which was so right. Some people have mottos they throw around as if they were wearing a t-shirt with them emblazoned on it. And too many times they are some variation of Carpe diem. I never had any problem carping my diem. But getting what I wanted while carping was something of a headache from time to time.

So: "You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes you might find /
You get what you need." That seemed about right. At the time, I was in a buoyant mood though one informed more by frustrated desire than acquiring basic requirements. I wasn't getting what I want, but I was working on ways to deal with it. The diem-to-diem existence of many people, I guess.

And then, out of the blue, I got satisfaction.

I think I was pottering around the house, trying to step away from the Internet and my nascent Facebook addiction and not succeeding.

The phone rang. And the voice on the other end -- a boss at work -- was congratulating me. But for what? I thought. Had I got a good dose of kudos in a management meeting for the work I put into my last assignment, a crazy dash across to Peru to cover the aftermath of an earthquake?

"You don't know? No-one's called? You've got Sao Paulo," he said.

Sao Paulo? I figured it was a joke. And said as much.

But no -- it was the unexpected result of a job transfer application that had been entirely forgotten, so certain was I that it would never come my way. Brazil was one of those job postings some serious corporate climber got, and I was not of that mould. I was more a corporate tourist, who took one look at the heights to scale and went off to get a nice cuppa chocolate. Climbing those sorts of ladders requires all sorts of qualities I just never picked up. Like smiling and saying nothing.

And yet Brazil was mine. Saint Mick had come through.

You can't always get what you want, no!
You can't always get what you want (tell ya baby)
You can't always get what you want (no)
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need
Oh yes! Woo!


The more I thought about, Mr Jagger and I weren't so far apart after all. Well, if you forgot about a few million dollars and worldwide fame that one has and the other doesn't (hint: not me). But the penchant for Brazilian beauties, the occasional strutting, the partying, the travel and a big honker... yeah, my buddy Mick and I were Paulistanos at heart after all.

And the guy was talking to me!

A few minutes before that phone call I was learning to get along as that bleeding guy in the glass. And after I was pouting and thrusting my hips out in a Stones impression that will cut no ice in sambaland but that more than expressed my enthusiasm for the new chapter opening up before me.

Sao Paulo, here I come! (Woo baby!)