Some events that happened last week took all the energy I had left to write about daily life in Brazil, but let’s try anyway:

→ I started adding whey protein to my diet for fun, and a few days later, when I started to feel less tired, when I noticed my energy had improved, I realised I wasn’t eating enough meat. But how can one eat properly when the price of all meats in Brazil are so high?

→ yesterday I bought a cane at Daiso for my injured knee. It is made of plastic even though it looks like it’s made of wood, and it’s so light! A simple book must be heavier than this cane.

→ people on Twitter are going insane because another Brazilian actor was accused of being a horrible man on set. We can tell some people are trying to destroy his career, as they did with other established actors, but time has changed and it will take more than public opinion to ruin the professional life of an actor only because he is a (straight) man.

→ Amazon must be losing its juice. Prices are very close to the ones we see in a normal place that sells things, making it pointless to take the risk of buying products online - we never know if we’re gonna receive exactly what we bought, or if the product will arrive damaged. In my head it’s safer to go out to buy what we want at the store (just sayin…).

→ I started reading Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book, Be Useful, but stopped for no reason. I really want to go back to it and make something useful of my life. Days go by and we stay where we are because it’s so goddamn hard to change our habits, and one I need to change is my weight. I’m not fat, but being a little overweight will be enough, from now on, to make my knee hurt (maybe a nerve is being pressed?).

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Anne Rios – Brazilian girl writing about Brazilian things

Did you know that after eating, you need to wait half an hour to brush your teeth? And that after brushing your teeth, you need to wait another 30 minutes to drink water? That is a lot of time spent in order to preserve the enamel that protects our teeth.

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I love drinking water after brushing my teeth. The taste of water (usually undrinkable) becomes as good as when we drink water after being thirsty for a long period of time. But, according to “science”, this delightful habit will only destroy the strong-as-titanium bones that natural selection took so many generations to create.

Yet again, drinking water after cleaning my teeth is just one more mistake that I made to destroy my life. I gained weight because I could not handle being ignored by a man that I used to think I loved and by another man who I thought was my friend. Now I can’t walk. I don’t have a shower and need to wash my hair in a bow on the balcony.

One bad decision after another, but, in my defence, I didn’t know about the damage to tooth enamel until last month.

What to do now? How do I make an income for myself after months of being naive in thinking that writing books would bring me easy money? People kept saying “write books, it’s important to preserve our history”, but why did no one bother to tell me this was the worst way to receive a payment for your services? – the internet and all the lies that come with it are exhausting.

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Anne Rios – Brazilian girl writing about Brazilian things

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I bought a can of Pringles yesterday for R$ 10. It was a good deal considering that the normal price is R$ 15.

See, R$ 15 is a lot of money for a 104-gram can of potato chips. I’m not Alan Harper, I’m not that cheap. The price is what it is, and it will be paid by me with no complaining whatsoever. But still, R$ 15 on a Pringles…

Each ‘potato’ inside the can is thin, small and, let’s be honest, tasteless compared with what Pringles was like 10 years ago. Given that, it feels okay to buy it on sale, since the money we would use to buy Pringles at its regular price wouldn’t even get you a large fries at McDonald’s.

Yeah, McDonald’s in Brazil is insanely expensive. If you don’t have much money, and need to buy cheap food, McDonald’s is not the place you would go (which maybe is a good thing?).

Some say that Brazilians are not yet dealing with severe obesity because the hypercaloric food from franchises like this is not accessible to most of the population. And maybe they are right. Long before the post-pandemic global inflation, McDonald’s had astonishing prices here, while in other countries, let’s say the US and England, the story has always been a little bit different (hey, don’t blame me for bringing obesity to the light).

And the cultural aspect also contributes to Brazilians being thinner (but not too much) than the rest of the so-called First World. Being forced to remain a commodities-based country, we have available in our markets a huge variety of real food. Fruit, meat, eggs, vegetables… They may be way too expensive now, but they are still relatively affordable and easy to find.

And most importantly, we want to eat natural food - rice and beans are almost a religion in Brazil.

Call me a conservative if you want, but I can’t, by any means, see how a woman dancing naked in an avenue during Carnival, calling a sticker on her bubbies ‘fantasy’, can be considered something pretty or worth seeing.

Fabric seems to be out of stock in the stores, at the same time that respect and creativity had abandoned those who create storylines for the Escolas de Samba (Samba Schools). One year they celebrate as a hero one of the worst criminals Brazil ever had, and on the other it’s the decapitated head of Dom Pedro II, held by an indigenous warrior, something that, apparently, they deem worth celebrating.

Fortunately Carnival is over, the Oscar season has ended too, and we come back to live our pathetic lives, surviving each month only God knows how, hoping that if some politician wins, things will be different, and being offended by the smallest ‘unpleasant phrase’ someone utters.

Brazilians are too passive. I’m too passive.

And the more technology, and lazier we get. Look at the new Shrek’s CGI (what was that?!), look at our homes. We have a pan-polishing product now, for Christ’s sake. No more steel wool and elbow grease to make our pans shine. And I wonder if people even know what a broom is with the tiny dust robot everyone is using now.

And speaking of the regression of our habits, something that has really worried me here in Brazil is the decay of our medical community. Doctors can’t read exams anymore. They leave college unprepared, their teachers don’t put any effort into the classes, using 10-year-old slides for laziness of making ones with new information, even though we have artificial intelligence to make faster and better things - I use it to study languages, and can’t imagine my life without Grok.

Did humanity give up? And why does the 90-year-old grandma from the farm live with health while the one from the city is in the ICU? How come we have gotten used to such useless culture and lifestyle?

Anne Rios – Brazilian girl writing about Brazilian things

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