Igor Brandão retweeted
🇧🇷 Invested in Brazil now because I think Brazil is a good investment after traveling here for a month with my gf
My TL;DR of Brazil after a month is:
🙃 people are positive, friendly, ambitious, excited for the future
🦾 tech in daily life here is way more modern than most of West, almost on par with Asia; for ex, everyone pays each other here by phone instantly with Pix
👺 my (and probably your) Western (developed world) preconceptions about Brazil that it's unsafe, dangerous, are mostly wrong, not completely though, it's just a giant country and very localized where it's good and bad, to me it felt mostly much safer than Colombia where I lived before, esp the South felt very safe
🌇 much of my frame of reference is Asia because I lived there a lot, and I love Asia (from Japan to Thailand) because the cities are the most modern in the world, service is generally great, people are friendly; but Brazil in many ways comes very close, it feels very modern here too, much more modern than the "developed" world of US/EU, unlike there there's development and construction everywhere in Brazil, a big startup scene with companies like NuBank (the Brazilian Revolut running on Clojure); people are younger and more excited here
😊 I think Brazilians are probably in the top friendliest people I ever met next to Thai and Filipinos, all three of these are endlessly hospitable and caring
🤝 relatedly, a thing I realized, which my Brazil nomad friends who also been to Asia a lot told me already, they were surprised how us Europeans are amazed at Asia's service and convenience and development, when that's almost the same in Brazil, so it's more of a developing world thing
👵 the terms "developed" and "developing" are completely irrelevant now of course because much of the developed world (US/EU) is starting to look less developed than the developing world (Brazil/Asia)
🇧🇷 Brazil is in South America but it feels completely different than the rest of the countries here that I been like Colombia etc. it just seems way ahead of them and kinda in a league of its own, the problem is the rest of the world wouldn't know it because Brazil markets itself to the world quite bad IMHO, I think because they don't speak English, which gets to the next point
🇬🇧 English here is pretty much non-existent, which was good for me to work on my Portuguese, I'd say English here is as bad as Korea and Japan, and the people have a similar fear of speaking it and making mistakes (which is silly but I understand it), but that means they never improve it. Oddly I met multiple people who told me in Portuguese they were doing an English course but were hestitant to even speak it with me!
🪧 the problem if Brazil can't communicate its qualities to the world, nobody will find this out. Nobody will understand you can travel Brazil safely if you pick the right regions/areas. All we see is videos of robberies, street football and favelas. But that's not the entire picture. Brazil has a big clothing, aesthetics, tech, startup and domestic travel industry
🏖️ for travel/nomads: there's lots of spots here like Trancoso in Bahia that look better than Bali (and much of Asia), have better beaches, cleaner air (no trash burning everywhere ;)), are WAY cheaper than Bali, have better food, better service etc.
🏴☠️ for me in particular, as an originally Dutch but now Portuguese person, it's amazing to see all the Portuguese history here (essentially Brazil is a HARD fork of Portugal in 1820), and then to see it completely diverge and go its own way, everywhere you go you see old Portuguese churches, little Portuguese houses and town squares, very interesting as a European (this is much more visible than in the US where it's seems mostly built over)
🥩 food here is amazing and CAN BE very healthy, almost everywhere you can get steak and rice, for example at any airport there's a steak place, the quality of the meat here is generally very high too (a lot of it coming from Uruguay)
👌 service in hotels/restos etc here is consistently on a very high level, customers like to give feedback and GENERALLY (not always) feedback is immediately listened to and improved, people also LOVE to customize their food orders here (just like USA), don't even try that in Asia; service ppl generally want to help you with whatever request you have, when most of rest of world (even if you pay insane $) just say "no not possible"
🤲 compared to a country that speaks the same language as Brazil in Europe that shall remain nameless :P, Brazilians do NOT seem so stressed here, everyone generally appears quite happy and like to help you, which is the direct opposite of much of Europe which seems rude compared
And that's maybe the real TL;DR of Brazil:
🥰 The Brazilian spirit to me seems to be that they love to help each other: to make each other's day better, even if you're a stranger, which is a spirit hard to be found in much of the rest of the world right now
Talk is cheap so to get some skin in the game I invested in Brazil with this ETF which owns most of the Brazilian stock market
ishares.com/uk/individual/…
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