the shaggy nomad

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.