hanging out in Brazil

It’s a foregone conclusion that Brazilian women wear bras and that lingerie stores in Brazil sell bras. It’s an obvious assumption that you can come to Brazil and purchase a bra. You shouldn’t even have to speak Portuguese to purchase a bra, you simply enter the store find a bra you like, find your size and… Well that’s where it gets complicated. In order to actually find a bra your size you must, without exception or deviation, be a cup size B. Only B cup sized bras are sold in Brazil. You probably think I exaggerate. But I don’t mean that most bras sold in Brazil are B cups, I actually mean that ONLY B cups are available for sale in Brazil, exclusively! If you are a 44C you have to buy a 46B or 48B and make do. In fact, if you are Brazilian, not knowing any better, you will naturally think that 48B is your bra size. If you are a 46D you are doomed to live your entire life stuffed into a B cup. If you are a DD your only option is a B cup! I kid you not!

Of course I had questions for the poor, blameless, unwitting sales ladies. In the first store she told me that she had, in the past, seen a few bras that had the letter C instead of the normal B, but she didn’t have any of those in the store. She had a hidden talent for expression and managed to verbally italicize the word ‘those’. In the next store the sales lady didn’t know bras came with any other letter than B, she didn’t know B was the cup size, she simply thought it was a letter they put on bra tags. Mind you, the word for bra in Portuguese does not start with the letter ‘b’.

There was a quick piece on a variety show about Brazilian women wearing the wrong bras. What do you think the show was about? Did you guess wrong bra sizes? You guessed wrong. Apparently Brazilian women wear the wrong bras not because they all wear B cups, but because when they dress they choose strapped bras when they should have gone strapless, or regular when they should have gone push up, colors, textures etc. Nothing about cup sizes! Cup sizes are simply nonexistent in Brazil, no one has ever heard of the concept.

I miss California at a whole different level now.

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