Well now, I could write a BOOK about why I'm not retiring to Brazil or, indeed, anywhere else anytime soon. Oh, the "not anytime soon" is easy enough to explain by intoning just three letters: IRA. I really thought I'd have enough saved to stop working a year from now -- that is, until my independent retirement account became an inexorable shrinking pool.

But on the plus side of this ledger, I was recently hired permanently as an Administrative Specialist working with four research institutes on the UC San Diego campus. The really amazing thing about this is that I have better salary, better benefits, more security and am using more of my skills and abilities than ever in my life! So who knows, I may stay on the job till I drop.

It's the "not retiring in Brazil" that is complicated. I still love Brazil's African heart, Salvador da Bahia, for its music, its old-world architecture, and its marvelous Blackness. But what I discovered in my recent stay is that the place is much better as a tourist than as a resident. Living there I found to be a tough proposition, especially for a single lady of a certain age.

• First, in Salvador it's basically impossible to find friends, which would be crucial to ultimate happiness, unless I were Portuguese-fluent and that I believe would take the rest of my life. It's a very difficult language, especially for a visual person like me, because many letter combinations sound totally different than they look!

• And then the mundane things that make for -- if not a U.S. lifestyle, at least a comfortable life:
  
  • No washers/dryers in lovely highrise apartment buildings so you have to carry it to a laundromat or pay someone to do it.
  • Too few checkout stands in the so-called supermarkets and therefore long lines no matter the time of day. Once I stood in line for 40 minutes for a few small items.
  • Sidewalks in bad condition. I had eyes cast downward much of the time to keep from tripping or indeed falling due to loose gravel, dislodged paving stones or missing "manhole" covers -- which are really foot-square pieces of wood covers over shallow holes dug underneath sidewalks to house electric and other cables.
  •  Buses impossibly jammed and erratic, taxis expensive and as an older person, driving a car absolutely impossible.
  • Fish (and even propane gas) mongers pushing wheelbarrows loaded with their products.and shouting to potential patrons,
  • And then all the warnings against wearing jewelry, carrying good bags, leaving belongings on the beach to go in the water that may only be paranoia but nevertheless spooked me.

Sooo, while Brazil has a stable economic system and new everyman's president "Lula" has made strides in improving education and ameliorating poverty, it is still very much a third-world country -- heavily based on rich people paying poor people to do what they need -- whereas thankfully the U.S. still has a middle class and at least for now, I'm still happily in it!

Positively,
Carolan