Getting acculturated

We've been here a month, and the question I get the most is, "So, how are you guys settling in?" Well, we live in our apartment now, out of the same suitcases we've been enjoying since before Thanksgiving. Our car is (possibly) en route to us, but it should take another couple months. Hopefully it will get here before the World Cup does, because we can probably count on, oh, nothing being processed through customs during those couple months. Meanwhile, I can walk around our neighborhood and explore what there is to find. This is especially fun being 7 months pregnant and pushing a double stroller filled with little girls who are definitely big enough to walk on their own. But I'm building my muscles, right!
Sometimes we take a taxi to the embassy and hang out there. There's a fun park, a kiddie pool, a commissary and wireless internet to take advantage of. We get to eat lunch with Kevin, and the one time Naomi decided to take her nap on the grass by the pool, we spent the whole day there and had a blast.
We finally got our CPF cards last Thursday, which are our official ID cards issued by Brazil. Now that we have those in hand, they will ship our things from the US. We can get cell phones. And we can get cable and internet... in our own home! I hear there are these things called the "Olympics" going on right now. While I realize it's just a bunch of people slipping and sliding around on the ice and snow, it's really something I'd like to watch. And if you read my last post, I was saying how nice it was to be without the internet in my house. If you read carefully, what I meant was it was nice to live in real-life, accomplishing real things, and getting a lot done. But it's majorly inconvenient, and it gets a bit lonely without being able to contact anyone or call on skype.
So once our CPF cards came in, we set up an appointment for cable and internet installation, sometime between 12 and 6 that day. At 5:55, the guy shows up. He looks around at our apartment and says, "Well, I don't have time to install anything today." Then he left. The next time, a guy came, pulled wires out of random sockets, got our doorman to come in and hold stuff while he did something on the roof. He was in and out of our apartment to get tools, to go on the roof, to get our doorman, and eventually... I realized he'd left. Okaaaay.... So the third time we made an appointment, no one showed up. That was fun, waiting at home all day. Then today was the fourth time. Two guys showed up at like 3 PM, holding cell phones but nothing else, no tools or anything for installing cables. I don't really understand everything in Portuguese, but they were too early for something or someone who was late, so they wouldn't be able to do anything. Aha, but this time I was prepared! Kevin gave me the number of one of his IT friends to call and explain the situation and help me communicate better. I waddled back to my room, got the number, and brought it back to them at the front door. The cell phones were put away in pockets by now, and they said they'd call from the car. I tried to insist they call from my apartment, but they refused and left, not taking the number with them, of course.
I cried. This isn't news, because I'm pregnant and I cry all the time. But I went back to my room to call Kevin, and cried to him on the phone. While I was talking, I had little fingers jabbing into my eyes, because Penny followed me into my room and was wiping away my tears. She gave me a big hug and proved once again to be one of the sweetest people on Earth.
Right now we're borrowing a friend's satellite hotspot, an internet thingie that uses a sim card and just connects like a cell phone. We owe them big time!
And the internet people are set to come again on Monday.
I'm not holding my breath.