Cali and the Seppo meet again
Seppo. That´s me. It´s a nickname I acquired back in London living with a whole house and a half of Aussies. It´s actually a rather common nickname for Americans and comes from classic Cockney rhyme, or whatever you might want to call their form of speak. The Americans are called Yankees, or Yanks, which rhymes with septic tanks…from this they call Americans septics, a beautiful little moniker, isn´t it? So Sep, or Seppo comes from septic…not sure how proud of this I am, but it ain´t as bad as a few of the names we had floating around; at this point, it´s a term of endearment. Cali is Vanessa Cali (hers being one of the more benign tags), and we just happened to be traveling in South America at the same time, on the same schedule and all that after 5 years of not seeing each other, so it´s all pretty cool.
After a few days in São Paulo, and having someone to be in the same boat with, I feel that I´m finally getting a (little) bit of a grasp on this Portuguese. It´s mostly just a matter of pronounciation…the r´s are sometimes pronounced like the rolled Spanish r, and sometimes like an h, which is totally not intuitive. The language also employs more diacritical marks than I´ve ever seen, including the cedilla (ç), tilde (~), an accent, also known as an acute accent (´), a grave accent (`), a circumflex (^), and in Brazilian Portuguese, there´s sometimes an umlaut (¨). Sometimes these change the sound or accent of a word, sometimes not. Then, they count their days…Saturday and Sunday have proper names (incidentally the same as in Spanish), but Monday through Friday are just knows as 2nd – 6th days, so trying to say Thursday necessitates me counting the days until I get the right one.
The Brazilian cuisine has not impressed as of yet. There is no real sugar to be found, just artificial sweeteners including some sort of liquid that´s always on the tables. That be said, they do love their sweets. Often my coffee already has sweetener in it and there are tons of pastry shops around, which are quite popular. Apparently they think it´s not as unhealthy if it´s fake sugar. However, I doubt that the large amount of salt they tend to put in all the food is fake, and I doubt it´s any good for the people. All the food is extremely salty, sometimes almost to the point of ruining a meal…I know a few of you who would really love it, but it´s not for me. Finally, breakfast pretty much doesn´t exist. It does, people have breakfast, but it´s mostly small with just bread…there´s no eggs or anything. We did try to order a breakfast with eggs once…it was called caracu and it came with either one egg or two…we went for one. The waiter brought out a drink, which we thought was our coffee. Then he brought out our coffee, so we tried the drink. It was one of the more foul beverages I´ve ever had. Apparently it´s some sort of liquor with coffee and, well, an egg. Fake sugar didn´t help the situation. Our waiter found our grimaces quite entertaining and was nice enough to not charge us for the caracu.
São Paulo is quite a city; it´s got all your typical city basics…tall buildings, lot of noise and pollution, and hari krishnas. It´s one of the largest in the world with something like 10 million people in the city proper and 18 million in the greater metropolitan area. It just sprawls and isn´t particularly pretty or atractive. There is no real skyline…these tall (20-40 story) buildings just seem to keep going forever, and they´ve nearly all got spraypaint all over them. There´s the old center of town, where we went to a market on Sunday and drank a few (very) expensive beers with a view over the city at a bar on the 41st floor of Edificio Italia, a particularly ugly building we thought. The center, though, is supposedly quite dangerous, so we were glad we weren´t staying there.
The main drag these days is Avenida Paulista, which reminds me slightly of Michigan Avenue, though with not as much shopping. There is an Asian neighborhood (not quite a Chinatown, but a good mix of all sorts of Asian influences) where we enjoyed a fabulous buffet (including sushi!), but we felt like we were missing the action there (we did go back to explore a bit but our thoughts didn´t change on that one).
Another thing we noticed were a lot of helicopters flying around…doing some research on the city, I found that São Paulo is one of the biggest helicopter users in the world. Apparently, the wealthy (extremely wealthy, I suppose) use this for transportation to avoid traffic and the dangers of the city. There´s something like 100 helipads in the city.
Probably the best time we had was in our little neighborhood where we were astaying…we found a Christmas street festival one day with food, drinks, and live music. We also ran into a local samba school practicing for Carnival, and it was really cool. Tons of drums, loud singing, and huge colorful, feathered costumes on display. The locals were singing along, dancing, and just having a really good time. They laid their beats well, and they were quite infectious. It´s a shame not to be in Rio for Carnaval, but we were pretty damn excited for it to be our next destination.
Tags: Brazil, Tag Index
Tania
December 19th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
I have been reading your blog since you left and I love reading it. Keep it coming and have a very Merry Christmas.
Laurie B.
December 26th, 2005 at 9:33 pm
Just saw a TV series promo and thought of you 😉
http://www.aetv.com/rollergirls/