Exploring São Paulo

June 14^th

If today’s weather holds out for the rest of our trip I’m going to have to change my blog title! Today it was a balmy 70 degrees and sunny outside. After a good breakfast on our hostel’s patio Angelika and I decided to explore the central city in the morning. We got a map and direction to some points of interest in the area and we were off! We took a 15 min walk to the metro stop and rode the line into town. As you emerge from the Se metro stop the main Cathedral is immediately to your right. We walked around the building taking tons of touristy pictures and peeked in on the mass. Apparently today was some kind of military service mass because the entire cathedral was packed with different police and military branches receiving a benediction. After we left the cathedral we walked in the direction that we thought was towards the Banco do Brasil Centro Cultural which has free art expositions and public installations. However, it was not until we reached the Liberdade (little Japan) metro stop (one prior to Se) that we realized that we had been walking in the wrong direction for about 15 min. Once we retraced our steps and re-consulted the map we were able to find the cultural center located off of several cute pedestrian only streets. There were three expositions going on that were coordinated by the artist Cai. Cai did a four story gunpowder painting of the flowers and birds of Brazil and he brought in two Chinese artists, one whose designed and built robot artists and another who built planes and submarines from scrap. Elements of both collections were hung as an installation around the exterior of the building over the pedestrian road. The building itself was gorgeous mix of baroque and art deco elements and the exhibits were really interesting.

After we left the cultural center we headed off to the large market, once again sure that we were walking in the right direction… Several wanderings later we were crossing a large pedestrian bridge that took us to another pretty church, however, this was not where we were trying to go. After retracing our steps again and consulting the maps we could not match any of the street names with the ones on our map around the same location. At this point we were hungry and tired of walking so we decided to ditch the market and head to Avenida Paulista to get lunch and see the famous shopping district. We took the metro again and successfully made all of our transfers (finding out in the process that you do not have to pay for additional metro line transfers!) and looked around for somewhere to eat. The stretch of Avenida Paulista that we were on was mainly shopping complexes so we ended up in a food court. It was not the ideal lunch location for our first day in Brazil (being non-original and over-priced) but it was sustenance and we were fading fast. We were caught in the tail end of the lunch break rush so getting food took a while, but on the other hand it was an interesting time to people watch. After refueling we went back out and looked at some more shops, but we didn’t manage to find the picturesque shops we were looking for. Angelika and I decided that there must be some rule about walking around and getting lost on your first day in town. We also decided that since we’d already had our day of this we would be ahead of everyone else when they arrive tomorrow! This evening were going out for dinner in the Vila Madalena neighborhood where will hopefully meet up with the two other Vandy students here!