Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
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Although Rio is an obvious must-do, I was equally excited about seeing Sao Paulo as I have a thing about visiting the top 10 biggest cities in the world. (I think I have the top 25 covered except for Karachi and Lagos.) I had in my mind already that Rio was going to be the San Francisco (beautiful, easy to navigate, compact) to Sao Paulo's Los Angeles (overwhelming, sprawling, no real center), but Rio is to San Francisco like Sao Paulo is to Toronto or Melbourne. Sao Paulo is another world altogether. It doesn't feel like anywhere else, and neither did the state when I went out to my friend Fabio's farm about 320km west of Sao Paulo as the highway is far and away the best road I have seen in Brazil. It's a road to nowhere as there are no large population centers west of Sao Paulo. As my Paulista patriot friend, Fabio, pointed out, the road was built using only state funds, the unsaid rejoinder being that the north is squandering away their funds.
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Sao Paulo is huge! These are two views of Sao Paulo from the top of a bank building downtown. It really looks like this for 360 degrees. It goes and goes and goes forever. Normally I get my bearings to a city pretty quickly, but in Sao Paulo I never did. A lot of people don't know this, but "Sao Paulo" is an ancient tribal Indian word meaning "Land of the Sixty Reais Lunch". (That's an inside joke for Fabio.)
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Sao Paulo has the largest Japanese community outside of Japan in the world, but maybe the only mainstream crossover is yakisoba. This is a funny cooking video spoof
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A story: I was eating lunch in a dive in the Liberdade district of Sao Paulo. It was said to be the Japanese part of town, but there are just as many non-Japanese Asians and if you go on the northern side from the metro station it is very run down and an entire block seems to be nothing more than used book stores, prostitutes and cheap places to eat. It was actually good for me as I needed two of those things.
So I am eating my five reais (US$2.00) prato feito (fixed plate) of roasted chicken, beans and rice, my hands and arms getting sticky on the unwashed table, when an old, grizzled homeless man stops and asks a guy sitting at a table next to the sidewalk if he can have some food. The guy shakes his head but the homeless man is undeterred and keeps pointing at the table. The guy shakes his head again and a waiter (for lack of a better word in a place like this) yells at him to go away. Instead, the homeless man grabs the guy's little bowl of beans
and sips
them like a soup. The guy is startled by his brazen behavior and gets up to move to another table like he might contract the Ebola virus if he stays.
At that moment the Chinese proprietor, a thin, wiry man who looked like a lifetime of cigarettes was about to get the best of him, burst out from the back, grabbed a chair and went after him yelling.
OK, here we go, I thought. Finally I am going to see a Brazilian go berserk. I have been waiting a long time. Brazilians are surprisingly not hot-headed at all unless you are in a soccer stadium. It is an admirable trait I hadn't expected in Latin America.
The homeless man sees the owner coming after him and hastily rushes off. At that moment the Chinese man spun around with the chair in his hand and came back to where he started almost just as fast, laughing with everyone else now as if the thought of attacking the homeless man with a chair was the most impossibly absurd thing to do.
I felt gypped.
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After staying at three horrible hostels in Rio I fell into the lap of luxury at Fabio's in Sao Paulo. I wanted to just gel and do nothing, but Fabio always wanted to go outside and do stuff. He claims this is him swimming but I believe it is a stunt double.
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If you look closely in the background you can see Fabio's pool guy, whose name may or may not really be Chico Piscina. Sometimes I never know if Fabio is fooling me or not.
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I am into these trees. Apparently these are more common the farther south you go, and I weighed that heavily when I was deciding whether to extend my visa.
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Happy cows at two of Fabio's farms. If I was less lazy I might have a gotten closer to take the first photo.
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Fabio's dog, a formidable opponent when you want him out of your room, and a view through his car window.
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Snob toilet paper. Most people in the rest of the Brazil would guess that this is from Sao Paulo--and it is. Wasp's nest--serpents in paradise, you know.
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Anytime I meet someone from Sao Paulo I ask them if they have heard of Taquarituba or Itaporanga or even the crossroads town of Avare, and no, nobody knows them even though it is only 200km or so due west of Sao Paulo. It goes to show how huge Brazil is.
The artwork on the right is from Fabio's parents' house.
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The sign is only funny in Japanese. It means "pain".
I love this stuff on the right, acai. I was warned that it is highly caloric, but I don't care. I love it in this kind of ice creamish form as well as a murky drink, acai composto. It is a tart berry from the north. I MISS ACAI!!!
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I also visited Nancy and Robert (I like how Brazilians pronounce his name: Hoberch!) and they treated me royally, taking me out to enormous meals and also to this party outside of town in Jundiai. The host had an odd indoor BBQ. It was Nancy's 14 year old godson's birthday and he was thrilled because he got his dream gift: the book "When Nietzsche Wept".
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Life vest on a statue and a book vending machine inside the Sao Paulo subway. I have never seen such a thing and maybe you can't see it, but there are three Nietzsche books on offer. THREE!
I'm telling you, Brazil is different.
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Brazil
to kentfoster.com