the shaggy nomad

Sorry for the recent lack of updates– I spent the better part of last week lying sick on a cot in Buenos Aires. I think I caught a virus (or, as it’s called in the colorful local language, “un virus”), but I recovered just in time to swing into Uruguay’s cozy little capital for the weekend.

Despite its small size and heavy dependence on capital from Argentina, Uruguay ranks among South America’s wealthiest and least corrupt countries, having recovered fairly well from the economic implosion it suffered in 2001. (Taking Spanish lessons in Argentina, I learned to say “foreign debt” before I learned how to say “breakfast.”) Montevideo was every bit as clean and orderly as I had been made to expect, and it would have suffered from quaintness– that most obnoxious form of cuteness– had it not been so endearingly seedy. I can enjoy pedestrian arcades and peaceful 19th century architecture, but only when they coexist with an appropriate smattering of obese prostitutes and homeless burnouts who address you as “amigo.”

The city’s historical center was mostly constructed during the heady days of the 1880s beef boom (what a grand beef boom it was), and is defined by a row of five psuedo-stately plazas, each one a few minutes’ walk removed from the next.

The middle and most important of these is the Plaza Independencia, which boasts the Puerta de la Ciudadela (which I took to be the country’s national symbol) and, directly underfoot, the sort of mausoleum which I assume will one day house my own revered remains.

Above ground, the plaza has been surreally given over to several winding rows of six-foot-tall bears, each one decorated by artists from a different coutnry. The exhibition was put on by an organization called “United Buddy Bears,” which, according to their rather somber mission statement, exists to bring about everlasting world peace through the cross-national exchange of painted bear statues. (I wish I could have been there for the eureka moment that gave birth to this project. I kept picturing tense strategic arms limitation talks in Moscow– the American envoy leans in slowly and, in gravely subdued tones, whispers, “President Medvedev, let’s leave this subject aside for the moment; We have developed an airtight means of deterring all future wars, and indeed all violent conflict of any sort for the entire subsequent history of this planet. We urgently request of you 250 life-sized linoleum bears, three barrels of glaze, some bright paint, and a freight vessel bound for southern Uruguay…)

The Iranian bear was one of the best

I forget which country this was-- Trinidad & Tobago?-- but props to them

I couldn't tell you why, but Belarus chose to go with a submarine theme

The first stage of my trip came to a fitting end this morning, when I left Brazil mysteriously on a flight I can’t recall. My memory dims to black at about 2am last night, in an abandoned hotel (now a psuedo-legal dance club) with ghostly decor, ominous staircases, and the vaguely sinister vibe of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. (I think they were playing New Order, but I might have invented that). The reel picks up early this afternoon, under merciless fluorescent lights, in line for passport control at the Ezeiza International Airport on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

When I first arrived in Sampa I made a list of all the tourist sites and museums that I intended to see, and ten days later that list is still sneering at me, triumphant, having survived with barely a scratch. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll return to São Paulo at some point, though of course it’s impossible to say when. For the moment, though, I’ll be spending the next month living more or less in Buenos Aires, taking Spanish lessons by day during the week and travelling on weekends. There’s a greasy Israeli girl at the computer next to me, cackling loudly. I need to go to bed.

If you were to lock an unimaginative eight year old in a room for several months with an infinite supply of Legos and nothing to eat but bread and Adderall, the São Paulo cityscape is pretty much what you’d end up with. São Paulo is a city of evenly spaced squares, obedient rectangles, and rows of parallel lines which, when they’re feeling a bit naughty, intersect at perfect perpendiculars with other rows of parallel lines. Being in a country as charmingly anarchic as Brazil, it’s really odd to see this sort of geometric regularity– so odd, in fact, that I didn’t even notice it until I climbed to the top of São Paulo’s skyscrapingest skyscaper to get the Mount Olympus view of the city. As you can see, much as chaos may reign over Brazilian life, its empire does not extend to the architecture of 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.

Yesterday I made the first of what I can only assume will be many tactical errors on my trip. I arrived in Belem with the thought of setting off immediately by boat down the Amazon, in hopes that spending five days on a hammock in mosquito-infested humidity would… give me a feel for the jungle? Actually I don’t know what I was expecting, but for some reason it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. (Impulsiveness is probably my worst flaw and my greatest asset when traveling.)

In any case, because of the holiday, no boats were leaving for Manaus until Tuesday, a schedule which would have killed off about half my time in the Amazon. After wandering the city for two hours attempting to find an internet cafe that wasn’t closed for Easter weekend, I finally bit the bullet and ducked into a travel agency to buy plane tickets for Manaus. Now, I’m trying to resist using this blog for random hating– every day on Ipanema beach in Rio we saw a 350lb black dude wearing a pink fluourescent string bikini, and I let that slide–  but the woman behind the desk extinguished whatever dwindling embers of hope I might have had for the human race. If your imagination is depraved enough, try to picture a cross between Charlie Weis and Sally Struthers as she appears on South Park, with the mental agility of a defective tortoise. After 25 labored minutes, I managed to get on a morning flight to Manaus, which is where I am now. I’ll spend tomorrow finding a good agency for jungle trekking, then hopefully set off properly on Tuesday.

Until then, happy Easter!

Four days ago I left Brazil’s current capital city and touched down in its first one, and the effect was something like leaping from an ice bath into a jacuzzi. Nothing could contrast more strongly with the cold, lifeless sterility of Brasilia than Salvador da Bahia, the splashy, colorful, and at times ragged colonial city best known for being the hub of the New World slave trade.

Lonely Planet, in its characteristically corny style, refers to Salvador as the “African soul of Brazil,” and even though the phrase is tacky it’s pretty much on point. Geographically and culturally, Salvador is the closest thing Brazil has to an African city. Racial classification is notoriously difficult in Brazil, but by the best estimates over 80% of Salvador’s population is either “black” or “Pardo” (brown)– indeed, most of the current population of Salvador can trace its lineage directly back to the West African slaves who flooded into these ports in unimaginable numbers between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Salvador was the most populous city in the Americas at the time of the American Revolution, so history looms very large here. The Upper city, a UNESCO world heritage site, is a zigzagging maze of cobblestoned streets emanating from a central plaza called the Pelourinho. Nowadays the main square in Pelourinho is the site of pulsing Tuesday night street parties, expensive restaurants, and sunscreened tourists, but it got its name because it was traditionally used for the “pillorying” and public beating of disobedient slaves. The plaza is still presided over by the administrative buildings of the Portuguese, miraculously well preserved and still in their own way imposing. The Lower city, meanwhile, is a beehive of commercial activity, consisting of the port and the market which, instead of selling slaves and sugar, now mostly hawks imitation leather purses, pirated DVDs, and sugarcane juice.

Two more things are worth pointing out about Salvador. First, it has a small cluster of fantastic art galleries on the narrow roads that veer off from Pelourinho. I spent three tense hours over two days negotiating the purchase of a painting (see below) from a Portuguese artist named Arlejo, working down from R$3500 to USD$700 in an animated duel of jerky gestures and bitter broken Portuguese. (The longer and more hostile the negotiations, the better I assume I did).

Second, the beaches here are criminally underrated. The waters are smooth and hypnotic, the sand soft and powdery, and once you get to the outskirts of the city the untouched beachfront stretches for miles. Before sunrise tomorrow I’m off to Belem to start two weeks of trekking in the Amazon Rainforest, so I don’t imagine I’ll find a better beach anytime soon.