Excursion to Paulista?

July 19th
Allison and I started our day off right by stopping into the Italian bakery right next to the bus stop to get coffee and split and éclair. While there we met up with several other members of our class, Elliott, Molly, Roxanne, and Tanya before walking down to PUC. Today we had our final written exam in Portuguese. So far we have taken three tests relating to our Portuguese class and all of them have been somewhat confusing and vague. Apparently, this is common in Brazilian teaching styles, the exams lack directions and are subjective in the types of answers that are considered correct. Mary, our Brazilian TA, said that our sections with directions such as ‘say this in another way’ or ‘answer like a Brazilian’ are not atypical and that multiple answers are considered acceptable based on the grader. I find this to be extremely frustrating coming from the American style of educational testing where the directions are all very clear and the answers are standardized or at least the question typically has a set right answer (and the only subjective answers are in short answer or essay form so that you have room to make your case). Anyways…after the exam we went to get a quick lunch before meeting up with our professor in Paraiso at the beginning of Paulista for our planned excursion walking up the Avenida. Aileisha, Mary and I all ate together and talked about how the program has gone and the interesting nature of being in a study abroad program with a group as large as ours is.
Aileisha and I walked up to the bus stop on Cardoso to take the 175P all the way down to the beginning of Paulista to meet up with our group at the Catedral Ortodoxo. As the name implies, this is an Eastern Orthodox church which was founded by Syrian-Lebanese immigrants to Brazil after they began to have success in the growing business sector of São Paulo and relocated their neighborhood from the 25 de Março area in the Centro, towards Paulista. The church itself was gorgeous, the iconography and frescoes were so detailed and bright! The ceilings were triple domed and had beautiful ornate crystal chandeliers. We had a lot of time to explore the church and we were actually able to walk up to the choir loft and all the way up the bell tower since the doors were left open! The only downside was that there was not a great view from the tower. When we came back down (Daniel and I were exploring the roof) we spoke with our professor about immigration, relocation of immigrant communities once they become settled and begin to do well, and the perceptions of Arab and Jewish identities in Brazilian culture and politics.
We left the church about 2:45, and it was starting to get chilly. Gone was the sunny heat wave of yesterday and this morning which had tricked me into wearing a light sweater and sandals, and in to not carrying and umbrella! The clouds were rolling in fast and I knew we would not make it back up Paulista before the sky opened up. And open up it did right as we arrived at our second stop, the Casa das Rosas, which was an old Coffee Barron’s house leftover from the era when Avenida Paulista was mansion row for the coffee and industrial elite. Today it is a cultural center and small art gallery that is free to the public. We went inside and explored (hoping that the rain might let up a bit) and looked at their current exhibit on modernist experimental art (Velocity, Beba Coca). We were also able to see some of the original rooms in the mansion that were preserved. The original bathroom was gorgeous; it was large and bright with beautiful period details in the marble and wood work. It is interesting to note that this house was built about the same time as the Casa Modernista. They are both paragons of drastically different aesthetics and use of space. The Casa das Rosas is much more traditional in its use of space, it is less utilitarian than the Casa Modernista, das Rosas had compartmentalized spaces on the first floor for entertaining guests, while space in the Casa Modernista was set up to be almost exclusively a private space for the family.
The rain had refused to let up by the time we were leaving so we paired up with umbrella owners and walked out into the rain to get a few blocks down to our next stop which was the Itau Cultural center on the lower floors of their bank (like the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil). Since the tax laws here (re-written in the post-dictator era) encourage the sponsorship of public space and cultural activities as a tax break for businesses, many of the large Brazilian companies sponsor/own movie theaters, art galleries, and libraries. This Itau cultural center had several exhibits going on; the primary one was of the life and times of Mario de Andrade (one of the important Brazilian Modernists in the 1920s). I spent most of our time in the exhibit watching a 1920s period newsreel-type movie about ‘Parques Infantil’ which were a sort of a scientific type daycare/afterschool care that was supposed to improves children’s physical fitness, intelligence and moral behavior.
It was still raining as we left the cultural center so we quickly set off down the Avenida to get to our final stop which was parquet Trinon (coincidentally located right next to everyone’s favorite Charme and my house!). We did not spend much time talking about the park, but discussed public monuments and the particular monument there to the image of the Bandeirante (or the pioneer hero) of the São Paulo interior that we had read about previously in class. Since our professor ‘conveniently’ ended our tour at his favorite bar only two blocks from his house, most of our group sat down to share beers and fried mandioca while waiting for the rain to stop. We only stayed for a little while, as we were all pretty damp, my sandals in particular took a beating and I felt like I was walking home in a permanent puddle.
As soon as I got back I took a hot shower to warm up and rested before getting ready to meet back up with our group (at Charme again) so that we could walk down to a balada, called Sarajeva, on Rua Agusta that was going to have live music. I was a bit disappointed with how slow the music was to start, but the band was pretty good even though we did not really know any of the songs. At the end of the evening Daniel and I were able to actually walk back to our apartments since we only lived a few blocks further back down Paulista.