Sao Paulo
Now here is a city with a horrible reputation. I have never heard anything good about the place. So, up it went on my list of places to go. Sao Paulo is the third largest city in the world with a population and area about equal to the New York City metropolitan area – 18+ million folks. As exciting as New York can be due to its immensity, I found the same with Sao Paulo. It has a pulse of a very large and busy city. In human terms, Type A personality all the way. But whereas New Yorkers OFTEN(!!!) come across with a very bad attitude, Paulistas are one very happy lot. We found the expected poverty of a Brazilian city, but we found a lot better things, too, and my last 36 hours in New York let me see a lot more problems here than there. (I failed to write much in Brazil, but I will try and remedy this now that I have my computer again… in the meantime, I am now at JFK headed for Morocco riding one very big cultural shock wave… I already miss Brazil and Latin America a lot.)
I haven’t used all of the great subway systems yet, but Sao Paulo has the best so far. It is very large, efficient, safe, quiet and clean. Miss a train and nada… the next one will be there in 2-3 minutes. We used the Metro often to move through the maze of downtown. Our first adventure was to the Botanical Gardens for a break from the intensity. The subway went fine and we even managed to catch the bus. Mind you that this first day still had us nervous that criminals and thugs are waiting to gun us down and rob us. But this started to erode quickly when we kept meeting people that always smiled and always wanted to help us. I was looking for a shootout between the gangs and police. The bus stalled. Randy was still wide-eyed taking in the views, sounds and smells of crazy Latin American streets. The starter did not work. I kidded, “next thing you know, they’ll have us pushing the bus.” We smiled at the other riders and the woman collecting money (it takes two people to operate a bus in Sao Paulo – one to drive and one to collect). Then the driver kicks us off the bus… with a smile of course. We are standing outside the bus when we see the driver trying to get walkers to help. We get that he does want us to push the bus! Randy leans against the bus (note: Randy is a very large guy) and it starts moving – he left it in neutral and now it is rolling with him next to us! The driver jumps in and about six of us start pushing… drop of the clutch… vroom-vroom… all aboard again! Lots of happiness on that poor old bus.
The botanical garden did not have the promised orchid house because it is being renovated, but we did get two see a couple of monkeys in its forest area. This botanical garden does not have the repuation of the Rio garden, but we found it to be far superior. I am learning for each country that guide books are almost worthless. The Brazil guidebooks say a lot of things that are totally false and it seems the number of false claims follows the number of residents – so Brazil with 186 million residents has all kinds of things said about it.
Randy had his hair cut and the guy fussed over it for an hour. I was pulling my hair out waiting! I think he spent $7.50. I had my hair cut in Salvador. The Salvador guy took a half hour with so little to work with. This is usually a domestic highlight of each country for me and my experience as well as Randy’s did not let us down. My guy used the electric razor followed by scissors followed by a straight edge razor. Lots of fussing over so little! In the end, great cut and cost me less than $5. Rocco in NYC can’t touch it considering he charges $9 for fifteen minutes of time and a lot less fussing.
My great friend, Vivian, met us for the weekend. She took us to see a samba school. Things did not really start cooking until 11 PM afterwhich we were swept up for a few hours by the drums. I had a great time and my feet hurt a lot the next day. The schools compete at carnaval. Currently, they are working on themes for next year and will soon choose the best theme so that they can focus on pulling it together for February. They take this stuff seriously and I do have to wonder if samba as well as football is just a national diversion from reality. The closer we got to the drums, the better it gets with samba.
We reluctantly went up the Edificio Italiano – tallest building in Sao Paulo. We were reluctant because they wanted 15 reals each for the privilige to sit at their bar and pay more. We did it because we really wanted a break from the day pounding the pavement wandering streets and markets and we had been shutout the day before from going up the Banespa building because we had no ID. The fifteen reals turned out to be a good deal because the three of us spent four hours overlooking the city and watching the sunset. The canyons of central Sao Paulo are deep and you only get glimpses to see how big is Sao Paulo. Getting fifty stories up let us see a lot more, but it is impossible to see the ends. We learned this more when we had a rental car leaving the city for the coast, returning from Rio and finding the airport the next day… all with a very inadequate map.
When we picked up the car, we drove by the accident site at the airport from last month where the plane went through the end of the runway, over the highway and crashed into what appears to have been a gas station and parking garage. What a mess and nothing I want to see again.
After five days in Sao Paulo, I was ready to get out. Overall, I like Sao Paulo, but I wouldn’t add it to the normal vacation locale. It has good museums and sites, some nice historical buildings like churches, great restaurants and many other things that the great cities have to offer, but there is a much more fun city just north that I will write about soon. I am very glad to have seen the world’s third most populated city because I am not on vacation and you can’t see the whole world without seeing the biggies. By the way, Tokyo is the largest metropolitan area with 35+ million people followed by Mexico City with 19+ million and New York and Sao Paulo even at 18+ million. Mumbai, Delhi, Shanghai, Jakarta, and Buenos Aires round out the top ten – all on my list. Tokyo for a relaxing vacation, anyone?
Tags: brazil, south america, Travel
vagabondrick
where are the pictures??? Randy said there were pictures????