Idle days in São Paulo
I think it’s safe to say that the past three days of my life have been a bigger waste than the 7500 or so that preceded them. Aside from sleeping, eating, and doing a bit of desultory wandering through the metro system, I haven’t really seen or accomplished anything earth-shattering since I left Manaus. In my defense, though, my physical exhaustion from the jungle and the intimidating enormity of São Paulo haven’t exactly gotten me fired me up to go exploring. I’ll give the city its proper due over the next few days, but in the meantime, here’s what I’ve learned:
1- As the most populous metro area in South America, São Paulo is ridiculously large and complex. It doesn’t seem to have any single defined center– instead, it sprawls out indefinitely in all directions, with district following district in an endless succession of noise and confusion. I’ve been wandering the streets for a couple of days now, and I haven’t even begun to make sense of it.
Simplified street plan of Sao Paulo
2- The Liberdade district is home to the largest Japanese population in the world outside of Japan itself– it’s a totally pleasant place to walk around (or “stroll,” as the kids say), but aside from the novelty of seeing Yakult and yaki soba in Brazil there isn’t much of interest there. All the streetlights are painted bright red and shaped like halves of torii gates, though, which is beyond adorable.
3- The São Paulo Museum of Art is extremely legit– I’m going back tomorrow to go through it properly, but at the moment their entire bottom level is given over to a special Vik Muniz exhibition (Vik Muniz being a Brazilian artist famous for creating images from unusual materials such as dust, thread, scattered sugar, dry pigment, chocolate syrup, wire, plastic bugs, toy soldiers &c &c– I would post a couple of pictures but I don’t feel like getting sued. Not that anyone actually visits this site anyway).
4- This has nothing to do with Ṣo Paulo, but Chelsea did an incredible job of suffocating Barcelona today, proving that it is indeed possible to shackle the monster for 90 minutes. The match was taut, tense, and fluid in the midfieldРscoreless but very entertaining. The return clash at Stamford Bridge should be fun.
I spent that whole game thinking we’d get our asses kicked.
By the way, nice blog-thing you’ve got going here, it’s been useful in keeping my spirits up; very entertaining read. Hope all’s going well.
actually untrue about “no center” of the city. there’s a nice little ring around the Republica metro station, right where google maps puts the pin when you just type “sao paulo”