Brief Brazil Stopover!

We are at the airport in Sao Paulo..getting ready to kiss South America good bye and
move onto Europe.

After our epic adventure to get to our flight to Lima –> then Sao Paulo, the in between was pretty low key. What can I say, long layovers and red eye flights are one of the most horrid things. I have this list of things I despise about airports brewing in my head, maybe one day I’ll write a post about it. Greg is reading this over my shoulder and mocking me… what a jerk 😛

We arrived in Sao Paulo at around 0800 in the morning, just in time for some rush hour traffic to our hotel. Sao Paulo is a large, sprawling metropolis, home to the 8 million mark or so of people (something like that anyway ..and yes I got it from wikki!) There are a lot of high rise buildings intermingled with old churches and things.
Also a heck of a lot of graph art and regular graffiti.

It’s also much more expensive here then anywhere else we have been. It cost 100 reals or so (50 AUD) for the taxi trip. The taxi drivers are quick to turn on the meter here as well! In La Paz and Cusco, you wrangle your price first and then it is set – and it was pretty darn tootin’ cheap most of the time!

So, we arrived and unpacked and did all the things you do after you’ve been on a plane for far too long. I booked a reasonably pricey place named Hotel Paulista, and it was great. Amazing hot water shower. Awe yeah.

We had no real clear plan about what to do for our time in Brazil. We went for a stroll, found a local coffee jaunt and had some java along with some bread and cheese thing. Our fragile grip on Espanol was nothing compared to the complete zero comprehension we had of Portuguese! I managed to get a black coffee though, even if it was an espresso. (I saw heaps of people drinking it like that, so I was totally blending in anyway). We wandered around for a bit, went to the main street/area known as Paulista Avenue. We were looking for an art gallery that was on trip advisor.
We turned the wrong way on the avenue though, so just got a city stroll instead! The city is large and divided into several districts, we stayed in the Bela Vista area, which is an Italian-ish area (apparently!)

We returned to the hotel room to re-group and figure out what to do with our day. I found some info about a place called the Butantan Institute of Brazil, which is a place where they brew up vaccines and anti-venom’s. They also have a large reptile centre and a few museums you can visit, all for 12 Reals (6 AUD). It was a pretty cool way to spend the afternoon. Although I am not fond of snakes, it was very interesting. They had a few juvenile anacondas there, which were still two to three metres long! Ack. Also, rattle snakes and huge frogs. There were snakes in every colour of the rainbow!

We totally found a Brazil version of Chewie…no tatts though!

There was also a microbiology section where you could look at slides of all the little micro organisms floating around in river water, head lice and all those sort of heeby jeeby things. There were models of the common cold and flu virus, which was cool. I actually really liked the exhibit, it was like a flash back to early uni  (which, ironically at the time, I hated!).

We chilled out that evening in the hotel and had dinner there, which was ok, but not stunning. The hotel is in a soft open mode, so the food was all microwave gourmet. We watched a few episodes of Downton Abbey on the laptop, then crashed out for some hours!

ZZZzzzzzZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Today, after a generous sleep in, we got organised for our next country hop then went out for a few hours. We visited Parque do Ibirapuera, which is a large park and recreation area in the city. (It was still a 20 minute drive through traffic!) The place has art galleries and museums, sculpture parks and etc. We had a load your plate up style buffet thing for lunch. They weigh your plate and charge for food by the kilo, which seemed odd to me. We both took the opportunity to eat some broccoli (don’t worry mums!) and some other green things!

We wandered around a bit and checked out the kids playground (which was awesome!) and the sculptures, which were ok 😉 Here are some pics of us twitting around.

There was a dome style concrete structure in the park called the “Oco” which had a “Rock!” exhibit on. It cost 20 Reals each to get in, but it was really quite good. Wogan’s Dad would have loved it. There were music time lines and a big electric guitar display. There were also heaps of collector’s item merchandise and paraphernalia (possibly fan donated)  from heaps of different bands. Vinyls, outfits, guitars, set lists from concerts in Sao Paulo and even signed shoes. There was an outfit worn by David Bowie and Max’s cargo pants from Sepultura, it was pretty cool. The upper level had bean bags with a projector display, you could lay down and put some headphones on and enjoy loud rock and metal music. Greg got all fan-boyish when some Metallica came on 😉

Having chewed up our day, we went and picked up our bags and took off to the airport. It was quite simple this time 😉

Here are some more cool pics from the park.. it was wall art.

The plane flight was gross, I had an awful lady next to me. She came close to meeting a crazed and terrible ending. Berrrgle.

So, South America is done! I might do a final round up style post, but as I am already one day onto Zurich in Europe, it may fall by the wayside!