The view from my window can be very entertaining and instructive even though I've never been one of those who could sit still for more than a minute to smell the roses.  That's my husband’s department, even though he does have a recurrent reason to sit for long stretches of minutes in our balcony - he's addiction to nicotine and needing to smoke in order to wind down at the end of the day.  But regardless of my restlessness I do have to venture out to our balcony every other day, if not to water our plants, to check up on my kids playing on the playground on the ground floor of our 24-story building in the middle of Jardins, one of the prettiest neighborhoods in São Paulo.  We live on the sixth floor and more often than I would like to their screams and cries pierce my concentration or sleep, and I have to press my face into the safety mesh we've had to place over our balcony and windows to prevent any sudden deaths, and yell to them to behave or else.  My husband throws a fit every time he happens to be at home and sees me doing this, emphasizing that it is not proper building etiquette and that he's horrified with my lack of manners. 

Just like, according to him, it's not proper building etiquette to let my children loose on our floor’s corridor and let them ring the bell of the Jewish lady who lives next door and owns the Persian rug store a block down from the padaria where I get our fresh bread and pão de queijos, and who is always happy to treat them to her fancy truffles and torrones.  Little does he know that I have actually outsourced our two kids to this perfect stranger when the other day I was on my way to an improvised visit to the hair salon next door and she offered to take care of them.  I had to ask her name and tell her mine before I rushed off to get my hairy underarms waxed and my yellowed toenails done.  I came back to find my 4 year old lying on her unmade bed watching TV, ”you see we have no TV at home” he’d told her making his little self at home, and my one year old gorging on a large piece of marzipan.

What I have learned from my view spans many lives and random moments, like the kid from the building straight across who got a plasma TV for Christmas as large as his room and which I could sit and watch from my balcony if I ever felt the need to catch up on the latest soap opera.  I have learned that there's a lively bunch that lives higher up on that same building and on rainy days brings out their guitars and voices to entertain themselves and keep up with the thunders and lightning.  I have learned that whoever lives on the top floor on the building to the left is of humbler means because he doesn't have the standard balcony as the rest of his building, and has instead used the space to build a large improvised bird cage which he has filled with lively parrots and birds that help neutralize the traffic noise from the main Rebouças avenue a few blocks down the road. 

I have learned that we are surrounded by a lot of Corinthians, one of the national soccer teams and the one my husband roots for, because whenever Sunday comes along and one of their games is on there's a lot of shouting and swearing coming out of the windows. I have also learned there's a good listener and caring citizen amongst all those anonymous neighbors who heard our nanny yell for help when a couple of years ago she got locked with my eldest son in his room. He or she took the trouble to come to our building and notify our porteiros that there was an old lady and a small boy yelling for help out of the sixth floor.  I've also learned that there's a new kid on the block that sounds just like my eldest son because just yesterday he was screaming his lungs out and I could have sworn it was my boy throwing another one of his tantrums and stuck my head out of the window a couple of times to double check even if he was out there, even though I had just dropped him off at a friend’s place a couple of blocks up the road.

But mainly what I have learned and enjoy the most, coming from a small city and growing up most of my life in one or two story houses, is that as big and impersonal as São Paulo can sometimes seem, there all these mismatched community pockets rising up in the air where lives pulse and touch on a daily basis.