I Love São Paulo
Thursday, 2. November 2006, 00:09:23
MONDAY, October 23, 2006
The guy at the TAM Airlines booth at the Goiânia airport must have thought we were nuts… We had two tickets to New York, but we only wanted to use the domestic portion of the ticket to get to São Paulo… even though we wouldn’t be able to use the international tickets at a future date.
Back in July we had to get round-trip tickets in order to get a tourist visa, and with our visa extension, we no longer needed to return to the States. So why not fly to São Paulo “for free”? Our excuse was to see our immigration lawyer in São Paulo, but our ulterior motive was to visit friends in Ribeirão Preto on the return trip. Since the flight had already been paid for, we’d just have to pay for the return bus fare and our 38-dollar-per-night hotel.
Our 600-mile flight had two stops along the way… Uberlândia, and Ribeirão Preto. We got into the Guarulhos airport in São Paulo around 7:30 p.m., and took a taxi to our hotel.
The area around the hotel had a lot of foot traffic late into the evening, so we felt safe exploring the neighborhood.
We chose the best of the four Lebanese restaurants for dinner.
For the first time since we arrived in Brazil we were able to wear our sweaters. The cool night air of early spring felt good.
TUESDAY, October 24, 2006
Our hotel was in a great location, right next to a metro subway station, and near the center of town.
Bob and I had the morning free, so we walked toward Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s busy shopping and business district. We had beautiful California weather, with the perfect combination of sunshine and cool breezes. We found a restaurant that served a fruit platter for about $2: guava, orange, apple, pineapple, melon, watermelon and papaya.
We walked to a nearby mall, and then back to our hotel, where we enjoyed a great view of the Orthodox Cathedral.
We got information about transportation to our lawyer’s office across town. We chose to go by bus, and just as we stepped up to the bus stop, our bus materialized. We felt like we were taking a “city tour”. It took us an hour and 40 minutes to get to our destination, but I enjoyed the ride along Avenida Paulista, and through the umpteen other neighborhoods. I was impressed with how many trees and green spaces they were able to squeeze into a densely populated city like São Paulo. A dozen different times I wanted to get off to go exploring… To visit MASP, the Museum of Art of São Paulo, the various malls we passed, the Agrarian Reform Shop, the Afro-Brazilian shop, and other points of interest. We found Fernanda’s office, and were happy to finally meet her after so many phone calls. She speaks very good English, which helped Bob and me both. We spent four hours with her going over details of our immigration process. Bob and I went down the street to the “cartório”, where we had official and authenticated copies made of all our documents. In all, it cost over $100. The funniest part was having two copies made of each of our passports… Even each blank page had to be copied and authenticated. What next? I wondered. Will we have to pay hundreds of dollars to have the blank pages translated from English to Portuguese?
Right at rush hour, we had to return to our hotel. With Fernanda’s help, we were able to find a quicker way back to the hotel. It involved taking a bus to the subway station. The Barra Funda transit station was teeming with people. It took a while to get oriented and figure out which line we needed to take. Then, it was a matter of joining other frantic riders in the battle for a space on the subway. The same surging wave that pushed us into the subway train pushed us off when it was time for us to transfer to the next line. We got back to the hotel in only about an hour, feeling giddy that we had survived such an ordeal. We went to Esfiha Chic for dinner, but it was disappointing compared to the meal we had the night before. Not all Lebanese restaurants are created equal. We went to a little supermarket and bought a few things, including a package of “nespera”.
I think they’re really loquats, but whatever they are, they are juicy, sweet, and delicious. We went to another one of the Lebanese markets for a selection of desserts.
It is estimated that descendents of Lebanese immigrants in Brazil number over 9 million, making up a sizeable percentage of the population. One estimate is that ten percent of the politicians in Brazil are of Lebanese descent.
We went back to our hotel, where we were now accustomed to the lobby being on the “Zero” floor”. The street-level floors in Brazil are not numbered, since you have to go UP a flight of stairs to arrive on the first floor. Elevators usually have a T for “térreo” or a zero to denote the ground floor. I always think the T stands for “terra”, Earth, but in fact even the Brazilian elevators are incapable of taking us to planets other than Earth.
WEDNESDAY, October 25, 2006
We had to go back to the lawyer today so we could give her the power of attorney to represent us in all matters regarding our immigration visas. We were disappointed that we didn’t have the whole day to play, so we planned a few adventures along the way.
We took the subway to Liberdade, the Japanese neighborhood near the center of town.
From there we walked to the Cathedral, which was open to the public.
We took some time to sit and meditate in the huge, ornate building.
The plaza around the cathedral was being renovated, and the less fortunate of society were more in evidence here.
We had the transportation system figured out, and got to the Lapa neighborhood in time to find the vegetarian restaurant we had heard about near Fernanda’s office.
Fernanda called to say she would be late to our appointment, so we hopped on a bus to explore a park we had seen the day before on our bus ride.
Agua Branca had the appearance of a has-been zoo.
It is home to a horse-riding area for people with special needs, but otherwise it appeared to be a zoo for cats,
chickens, geese,
and bees.
It was a place of natural beauty in a crowded city, and seemed underappreciated and nearly empty.
We took the bus back to Fernanda’s office, and went to the cartório. This visit cost us about $50, but it was worth it for the entertainment value.
In order for us to give Fernanda power of attorney, we had to prove that we were
1.of sound mind, and that we could
2.understand Portuguese.
Number one was hardest for me. Number two was hardest for Bob. Fernanda, our lawyer, coached Bob so that he could spontaneously respond when the legal guy in the cartório office would ask in Portuguese, “What is it you want me to do for you?”
Bob responded, “Quero dar procuração para ela pedir o meu visto.” “I want to give her the power of attorney to ask for my visa.”
If Bob had faltered, we would have had to go downtown to another cartório, where a friend of Fernanda’s friend runs the place. Being a friend of a friend, he would be obligated to do whatever Fernanda asked him to do.
Another scene from the series, “Brazil is truly a land of many contrasts”, appeared unto us.
The legal guy at the cartório had a computer and a printer, but he used a manual typewriter… not unlike the one we saw the next day at the Botanical Gardens Museum.
The appointment with Fernanda ran into the evening, so our trip back on the subway was more tranquil. We got back to the hotel around 7 pm, and had dinner once again at our favorite Lebanese place. We ate outside, as it had warmed up since Monday.
THURSDAY, October 26, 2006
We walked from our hotel to Ibirapuera Park, the São Paulo equivalent of New York’s Central Park.
We encountered the only crabby person on our trip when we asked a woman at a magazine stand where May 23 Street was. She told us where it was, but she made it clear she’d rather just sit and smoke and not be disturbed by customers.
Traffic can be problematic. We had to cross a couple of thoroughfares which looked kind of like freeways. They paint white lines across the streets in places, but we couldn’t figure out what on Earth they wasted the paint for. We stood and waited at the “crosswalks” for about three minutes as cars sped by, venturing out onto the street only when no vehicles could be seen. The SUVs that dominate US freeways are a rarity here. Everything is pretty much a car or a truck… or a motorcycle.
The park’s obelisk was closed for cleaning, so we went to the main part of Ibirapuera. I asked for information about the nursery on the premises, and I was given two maps and directions.
We wandered around the amazing place for about half an hour, happily taking pictures before a guard politely informed us that in this area, we could only take photos with authorization.
So, these photos are all the more beautiful knowing that they are “unauthorized”.
Just when we thought we had seen everything, we discovered the big huge lake, which is the central feature of the park.
We walked back towards the hotel, a mile or so away, stopping for lunch at our favorite Lebanese place. I ate four spinach “esfihas”, my new favorite food. I enjoy both the "closed" esfihas, and the "open" variety that appears as cheeseless pizza.
We wanted to visit the Botanical Gardens, next to the zoo, but on the map it looked far away. Our informants told us that we could hop on the metro, and take a bus the rest of the way.
Sure enough, we got to our distant destination in about 30 minutes.
I had expected formal gardens with flowers, but the place was as much an educational experience as anything.
There were trails through the “Atlantic Forest”, which was nearly wiped off the map during centuries of development along the coast.
We got the feeling that if there hadn’t been schools visiting on field trips, we would have been the only ones in the place.
I took advantage of the opportunity to take too many pictures.
We took the bus and metro back to the hotel during rush hour, but it was a much more tranquil experience than our Tuesday evening metro experience in which we envied sardines for the expansiveness of their cans.
In the evening we walked to the mall by our hotel… our wonderful thirty-eight-dollar-per-night hotel… and bought a few things… failing to find anything like Dockers pants for me.
FRIDAY, October 27, 2006
We returned to the fruit-platter restaurant for breakfast, and took the subway to the inter-urban bus terminal. Our cushy bus left just before noon. The trip to Ribeirão Preto lasted about four hours. We traveled on perfect toll freeways from one affluent city to another. The scenery from São Paulo to Ribeirão Preto was of green forests, sugar cane, orange trees, and plantations of deciduous trees. Apparently the sugar cane alcohol industry is helping to make Brazil prosperous. You can fill your car with alcohol at $2 per gallon, a better bargain than gasoline, which approaches $5 per gallon. You get better mileage with gas, but still, alcohol is a bargain. Most cars run on both alcohol and gasoline.
We arrived in RP just as Cássio was getting off of work from the University where he teaches oral-facial surgery. He picked us up and took us to Sertãozinho, a suburban city I dubbed the “Bellevue” of Brazil. Bellevue, Washington, has about the same population as Sertãozinho, but I’d much prefer living in Sertãozinho.
Cássio took us out for pizza,where we celebrated his 41st birthday a few days late. We then went to the city square, where we feasted on ice cream. We stayed at a hotel in the center of town.
SATURDAY, October 28, 2006
Cássio and Thales and Enzo met us at the hotel in the morning, and Cássio took us into Ribeirão Preto for some sightseeing.
RP is a beautiful city, and because of its many parks, it reminded me of Portland, Oregon.
We visited the state university where Cássio teaches and performs surgery.
Ana Claúdia and her mother, Dona Nair, had spent the morning preparing lunch for the entire family.
In my honor,they prepared extravagant broccoli dishes.
Bob and I were the guests of honor, which meant we were the only ones who didn’t have to provide food or lift a finger to help. Cássio and Ana Claúdia live in a beautiful condo, with a large “leisure area” for entertaining large groups.
It had been about five months since Bob and I had gotten together with Cássio, Ana Claúdia, Thales and Enzo back in Seattle. It seemed almost surreal for us all to be in such different surroundings, but it felt good to have a sense that we had been made members of such an amazing family. Dona Nair and Seu Antônio had been guests in our home in Seattle, and it was very good to see them again,too.
We spent the entire afternoon eating, but somehow found the willpower to go out for dinner at Ribeirão Preto’s best restaurant: Mirai, which serves excellent Japanese food. Other family members joined us.
Dinner conversation touched on a UFO story from ten years ago known as “The Roswell of Brazil”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_incident
SUNDAY, October 29, 2006
We were invited to the home of Dona Nair and Seu Antônio for breakfast.
I loved their open-air breakfast area, and I took advantage of the opportunity to have one more feast before the trip. Thales and Enzo love to play in their grandparents' large back yard.
On the way to the bus station in Ribeirão Preto, Cassio and Ana Claúdia took us to her dental practice.
Bob's dentist in the US had recommended that he get an implant to replace a crown he had on one of his front teeth, and Bob wondered if such a thing would be possible. So Dr. Cássio and Dra. Ana Claúdia took an x-ray to see if an implant was possible. The x-ray showed that the crown wouldn't need to be replaced right away, but Dr. Cássio said he'd do the implant procedure at cost if Bob would opt for the procedure.
So, now we have free dentists. All we need now is a free physician, a free taxi service, and a free restaurant, and we’ll be able to retire.
The bus ride from Ribeirão Preto to Anapolis took about 12 hours. We stopped along the way at truck stops for meals, and we stopped here and there to take on or drop off passengers. It was national run-off election day, with most of the attention focused on the presidential race. President “Lula”, as expected, won by a huge margin over his “private enterprise” rival. The election was probably the reason there were so few passengers on the bus. The bus was cushy.
The trip from Ribeirão Preto to the edge of São Paulo state was comfortable and uneventful. We had an on-board video to watch, about the life of Péle.
I was reminded of my bus trip from São Paulo to Anápolis nearly 20 years ago. At that time, the bus crawled behind a long line of sugar cane trucks, as they crept up one hill after another on one-lane roads in São Paulo state. This time, the bus traveled on toll freeways too perfect to be in any place I’ve been in the US.
Once we entered Minas Gerais state, the scenery changed… Less prosperity, more grazing land, and pineapple fields… But not as many pineapple fields as I had remembered from 1987. The freeways ended, and we found ourselves on a narrow one-lane road, filled with trucks. We realized how dangerous the road was when we passed the wreckage of a head-on car-truck accident. The authorities hadn’t yet arrived on the scene. The Uberlândia newspaper reported that the lone survivor was airlifted to a hospital.
Once we entered Goiás state, the freeways began again, followed by an endless construction zone as the state worked to complete the freeway to Goiânia.
We got to Goiânia around 10 pm. I hardly recognized the huge Goiânia bus terminal that I frequented in 1987 when I lived in the city. It had been transformed into a third-rate mall, circled by buses. We boarded an underpowered, no-frills bus to Anápolis, and after a one-hour ride, we had a taxi take us home from the bus station. We got home before midnight. The 12-hour trip from Ribeirão Preto seemed tame compared to the 28-hour international flights that get us to and from Seattle.
I LOVE SÃO PAULO
Why do I love São Paulo?
It’s a first-world city, populated with helpful, friendly people… Eleven million helpful, friendly, people.
Or, if you prefer, there are 19 million helpful, friendly people in the metro area.
Or, as the Brazilian government claims, there are 29 million people living in the “extended metropolitan area”… making it second only to the Tokyo area, which is home to 35 million people.
Bus conductors and subway workers went out of their way to make sure we got to our destination. The value that Brazilians place on helping one another was just as strong in the Big City.
In the four days Bob and I were in São Paulo, we crisscrossed the city by taxi, subway, bus, and on foot, and there were hardly any clues that we were not in the United States or Europe. I imagined that New York City and Los Angeles had merged to form the city. The city is very prosperous, and was a combination of New York skyscrapers and LA sprawl… with the high-rise skyline stretching off to the horizon in every direction.
We had the LA palm trees superimposed over the Manhattan skyline. We had LA’s freeways and New York’s crowded subways.
Bob’s impression was that “São Paulo is like a tropical New York.”
The transportation system was impressive. Subway stations and buses magically appeared whenever we needed them, and we never had to wait more than a few minutes for our ride.
Twenty years ago when I went to São Paulo for the first time, I remember seeing squatters’ shacks lining the freeways. This time, I saw only two places in the city with small enclaves of substandard housing, but these low-income neighborhoods were so small in comparison to the surrounding homes, that it will only be a matter of time before the peer pressure from the rich neighbors will force the people of humble means to become upwardly mobile. And besides, even these humble homes each have a satellite antenna on the roof.
I never felt that my personal safety was threatened. The guy who stole dad’s wallet in São Paulo 18 years ago has either been put behind bars, or he has reformed, because I didn’t see him anywhere.
I have noticed that as the United States gets deeper and deeper into debt, Brazil is getting more and more prosperous. Thanks to sugar-cane alcohol and offshore oil, Brazil is now self-sufficient in energy. It has a huge trade surplus. Its currency has gained 30% against the dollar in the last year or so.
I had wanted to pinpoint the exact moment in which Brazil and the United States traded places… As Brazil would become the richest nation in the Western Hemisphere. I had the feeling that in the case of São Paulo, at least, the change has already happened.
I did see a few homeless people and beggars in São Paulo, but no more than I see in the streets of Seattle… And I had the impression that begging was a vestige of the old Brazil, instead of the growth industry that it is in the States. People in São Paulo who work in the informal job market… street vendors, for example… are certainly under-employed, but I saw no signs that a class of people lived in abject poverty.
I was impressed with the green trees I saw all over São Paulo… lining freeways and boulevards, for example. Cultural opportunities abound. Huge malls are everywhere. São Paulo is a literate city, and there were five bookstores within a few blocks of our hotel, and universities all around.
There were four Lebanese restaurants within blocks of our hotel, so we had plenty to eat. We had lunch at one of the dozens of vegetarian restaurants in the city. On our bus trips across the city, I found myself wanting to get off dozens of times to go into one unique shop or another… or a museum.
But there is one other thing. Just when I had convinced myself that maybe I had been in Belgium for four days, someone reminded me of the unrest in the greater São Paulo area about 6 months ago. The PCC, an organized group of criminals, went on the offensive against the police, and scores of people died before it was over. (I can’t prove it, but Puget Consumers’ Coop, in Seattle, appears to have no connection to the PCC in São Paulo.) A year ago even Paris had unrest in the streets, so I suppose that sort of thing can happen anywhere.
Somewhere in the city there must be something like poverty, but with layer upon layer of conspicuous wealth, it remained well hidden.
The picture-perfect freeways and obvious affluence extended to the edges of São Paulo state. Only after our bus entered Minas Gerais state did I feel like I was back home in Brazil.
ENGLISH
The main difference between São Paulo and Los Angeles is the use of English in store signs.
English is much more common in São Paulo. It seems like English is used in half the shop names in São Paulo, while Spanish dominates in LA. A few examples of English usage:
Cat Hair Cabeleireiros (Hair salon. Here, a foxy lady is referred to as a “cat”.)
Happy Weekend Plaza Shopping Hotel
Top Center Shopping (Mall)
Trade Garden (Hotel?)
We see strange combinations of English and Portuguese… Words which don’t really work together.
Limp House (house cleaning business)
Visite Nosso Show Room (visit our show room)
You can also find products on store shelves which seem to have lame names.
HALLOWEEN
Our hotel lobby was filled with Halloween decorations… with the slogan in Portuguese, “Our prices don’t scare anyone.”
Other businesses had Halloween decorations, and those that didn’t were obliged to start setting up for Christmas. We saw a few Santas and a few Christmas trees around town. When you don’t have Halloween and Thanksgiving to protect you from way-too-early Christmas displays, there’s no limit to how early the decorations start appearing.
Vegetarian Restaurants
There may only be one vegetarian restaurant for each one million people in São Paulo, but that’s still 30 or so restaurants. We had lunch at one such place a few blocks from our lawyer’s office. They had a huge list of exotic fruit juices to choose from, so I chose the most exotic of all… framboesa, “raspberry”. It was really good. I must be truly Brazilian now, as things from the States now seem exotic to me.
The guy at the TAM Airlines booth at the Goiânia airport must have thought we were nuts… We had two tickets to New York, but we only wanted to use the domestic portion of the ticket to get to São Paulo… even though we wouldn’t be able to use the international tickets at a future date.
Back in July we had to get round-trip tickets in order to get a tourist visa, and with our visa extension, we no longer needed to return to the States. So why not fly to São Paulo “for free”? Our excuse was to see our immigration lawyer in São Paulo, but our ulterior motive was to visit friends in Ribeirão Preto on the return trip. Since the flight had already been paid for, we’d just have to pay for the return bus fare and our 38-dollar-per-night hotel.
Our 600-mile flight had two stops along the way… Uberlândia, and Ribeirão Preto. We got into the Guarulhos airport in São Paulo around 7:30 p.m., and took a taxi to our hotel.
The area around the hotel had a lot of foot traffic late into the evening, so we felt safe exploring the neighborhood.
We chose the best of the four Lebanese restaurants for dinner.
For the first time since we arrived in Brazil we were able to wear our sweaters. The cool night air of early spring felt good.
TUESDAY, October 24, 2006
Our hotel was in a great location, right next to a metro subway station, and near the center of town.
Bob and I had the morning free, so we walked toward Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s busy shopping and business district. We had beautiful California weather, with the perfect combination of sunshine and cool breezes. We found a restaurant that served a fruit platter for about $2: guava, orange, apple, pineapple, melon, watermelon and papaya.
We walked to a nearby mall, and then back to our hotel, where we enjoyed a great view of the Orthodox Cathedral.
We got information about transportation to our lawyer’s office across town. We chose to go by bus, and just as we stepped up to the bus stop, our bus materialized. We felt like we were taking a “city tour”. It took us an hour and 40 minutes to get to our destination, but I enjoyed the ride along Avenida Paulista, and through the umpteen other neighborhoods. I was impressed with how many trees and green spaces they were able to squeeze into a densely populated city like São Paulo. A dozen different times I wanted to get off to go exploring… To visit MASP, the Museum of Art of São Paulo, the various malls we passed, the Agrarian Reform Shop, the Afro-Brazilian shop, and other points of interest. We found Fernanda’s office, and were happy to finally meet her after so many phone calls. She speaks very good English, which helped Bob and me both. We spent four hours with her going over details of our immigration process. Bob and I went down the street to the “cartório”, where we had official and authenticated copies made of all our documents. In all, it cost over $100. The funniest part was having two copies made of each of our passports… Even each blank page had to be copied and authenticated. What next? I wondered. Will we have to pay hundreds of dollars to have the blank pages translated from English to Portuguese?
Right at rush hour, we had to return to our hotel. With Fernanda’s help, we were able to find a quicker way back to the hotel. It involved taking a bus to the subway station. The Barra Funda transit station was teeming with people. It took a while to get oriented and figure out which line we needed to take. Then, it was a matter of joining other frantic riders in the battle for a space on the subway. The same surging wave that pushed us into the subway train pushed us off when it was time for us to transfer to the next line. We got back to the hotel in only about an hour, feeling giddy that we had survived such an ordeal. We went to Esfiha Chic for dinner, but it was disappointing compared to the meal we had the night before. Not all Lebanese restaurants are created equal. We went to a little supermarket and bought a few things, including a package of “nespera”.
I think they’re really loquats, but whatever they are, they are juicy, sweet, and delicious. We went to another one of the Lebanese markets for a selection of desserts.
It is estimated that descendents of Lebanese immigrants in Brazil number over 9 million, making up a sizeable percentage of the population. One estimate is that ten percent of the politicians in Brazil are of Lebanese descent.
We went back to our hotel, where we were now accustomed to the lobby being on the “Zero” floor”. The street-level floors in Brazil are not numbered, since you have to go UP a flight of stairs to arrive on the first floor. Elevators usually have a T for “térreo” or a zero to denote the ground floor. I always think the T stands for “terra”, Earth, but in fact even the Brazilian elevators are incapable of taking us to planets other than Earth.
WEDNESDAY, October 25, 2006
We had to go back to the lawyer today so we could give her the power of attorney to represent us in all matters regarding our immigration visas. We were disappointed that we didn’t have the whole day to play, so we planned a few adventures along the way.
We took the subway to Liberdade, the Japanese neighborhood near the center of town.
From there we walked to the Cathedral, which was open to the public.
We took some time to sit and meditate in the huge, ornate building.
The plaza around the cathedral was being renovated, and the less fortunate of society were more in evidence here.
We had the transportation system figured out, and got to the Lapa neighborhood in time to find the vegetarian restaurant we had heard about near Fernanda’s office.
Fernanda called to say she would be late to our appointment, so we hopped on a bus to explore a park we had seen the day before on our bus ride.
Agua Branca had the appearance of a has-been zoo.
It is home to a horse-riding area for people with special needs, but otherwise it appeared to be a zoo for cats,
chickens, geese,
and bees.
It was a place of natural beauty in a crowded city, and seemed underappreciated and nearly empty.
We took the bus back to Fernanda’s office, and went to the cartório. This visit cost us about $50, but it was worth it for the entertainment value.
In order for us to give Fernanda power of attorney, we had to prove that we were
1.of sound mind, and that we could
2.understand Portuguese.
Number one was hardest for me. Number two was hardest for Bob. Fernanda, our lawyer, coached Bob so that he could spontaneously respond when the legal guy in the cartório office would ask in Portuguese, “What is it you want me to do for you?”
Bob responded, “Quero dar procuração para ela pedir o meu visto.” “I want to give her the power of attorney to ask for my visa.”
If Bob had faltered, we would have had to go downtown to another cartório, where a friend of Fernanda’s friend runs the place. Being a friend of a friend, he would be obligated to do whatever Fernanda asked him to do.
Another scene from the series, “Brazil is truly a land of many contrasts”, appeared unto us.
The legal guy at the cartório had a computer and a printer, but he used a manual typewriter… not unlike the one we saw the next day at the Botanical Gardens Museum.
The appointment with Fernanda ran into the evening, so our trip back on the subway was more tranquil. We got back to the hotel around 7 pm, and had dinner once again at our favorite Lebanese place. We ate outside, as it had warmed up since Monday.
THURSDAY, October 26, 2006
We walked from our hotel to Ibirapuera Park, the São Paulo equivalent of New York’s Central Park.
We encountered the only crabby person on our trip when we asked a woman at a magazine stand where May 23 Street was. She told us where it was, but she made it clear she’d rather just sit and smoke and not be disturbed by customers.
Traffic can be problematic. We had to cross a couple of thoroughfares which looked kind of like freeways. They paint white lines across the streets in places, but we couldn’t figure out what on Earth they wasted the paint for. We stood and waited at the “crosswalks” for about three minutes as cars sped by, venturing out onto the street only when no vehicles could be seen. The SUVs that dominate US freeways are a rarity here. Everything is pretty much a car or a truck… or a motorcycle.
The park’s obelisk was closed for cleaning, so we went to the main part of Ibirapuera. I asked for information about the nursery on the premises, and I was given two maps and directions.
We wandered around the amazing place for about half an hour, happily taking pictures before a guard politely informed us that in this area, we could only take photos with authorization.
So, these photos are all the more beautiful knowing that they are “unauthorized”.
Just when we thought we had seen everything, we discovered the big huge lake, which is the central feature of the park.
We walked back towards the hotel, a mile or so away, stopping for lunch at our favorite Lebanese place. I ate four spinach “esfihas”, my new favorite food. I enjoy both the "closed" esfihas, and the "open" variety that appears as cheeseless pizza.
We wanted to visit the Botanical Gardens, next to the zoo, but on the map it looked far away. Our informants told us that we could hop on the metro, and take a bus the rest of the way.
Sure enough, we got to our distant destination in about 30 minutes.
I had expected formal gardens with flowers, but the place was as much an educational experience as anything.
There were trails through the “Atlantic Forest”, which was nearly wiped off the map during centuries of development along the coast.
We got the feeling that if there hadn’t been schools visiting on field trips, we would have been the only ones in the place.
I took advantage of the opportunity to take too many pictures.
We took the bus and metro back to the hotel during rush hour, but it was a much more tranquil experience than our Tuesday evening metro experience in which we envied sardines for the expansiveness of their cans.
In the evening we walked to the mall by our hotel… our wonderful thirty-eight-dollar-per-night hotel… and bought a few things… failing to find anything like Dockers pants for me.
FRIDAY, October 27, 2006
We returned to the fruit-platter restaurant for breakfast, and took the subway to the inter-urban bus terminal. Our cushy bus left just before noon. The trip to Ribeirão Preto lasted about four hours. We traveled on perfect toll freeways from one affluent city to another. The scenery from São Paulo to Ribeirão Preto was of green forests, sugar cane, orange trees, and plantations of deciduous trees. Apparently the sugar cane alcohol industry is helping to make Brazil prosperous. You can fill your car with alcohol at $2 per gallon, a better bargain than gasoline, which approaches $5 per gallon. You get better mileage with gas, but still, alcohol is a bargain. Most cars run on both alcohol and gasoline.
We arrived in RP just as Cássio was getting off of work from the University where he teaches oral-facial surgery. He picked us up and took us to Sertãozinho, a suburban city I dubbed the “Bellevue” of Brazil. Bellevue, Washington, has about the same population as Sertãozinho, but I’d much prefer living in Sertãozinho.
Cássio took us out for pizza,where we celebrated his 41st birthday a few days late. We then went to the city square, where we feasted on ice cream. We stayed at a hotel in the center of town.
SATURDAY, October 28, 2006
Cássio and Thales and Enzo met us at the hotel in the morning, and Cássio took us into Ribeirão Preto for some sightseeing.
RP is a beautiful city, and because of its many parks, it reminded me of Portland, Oregon.
We visited the state university where Cássio teaches and performs surgery.
Ana Claúdia and her mother, Dona Nair, had spent the morning preparing lunch for the entire family.
In my honor,they prepared extravagant broccoli dishes.
Bob and I were the guests of honor, which meant we were the only ones who didn’t have to provide food or lift a finger to help. Cássio and Ana Claúdia live in a beautiful condo, with a large “leisure area” for entertaining large groups.
It had been about five months since Bob and I had gotten together with Cássio, Ana Claúdia, Thales and Enzo back in Seattle. It seemed almost surreal for us all to be in such different surroundings, but it felt good to have a sense that we had been made members of such an amazing family. Dona Nair and Seu Antônio had been guests in our home in Seattle, and it was very good to see them again,too.
We spent the entire afternoon eating, but somehow found the willpower to go out for dinner at Ribeirão Preto’s best restaurant: Mirai, which serves excellent Japanese food. Other family members joined us.
Dinner conversation touched on a UFO story from ten years ago known as “The Roswell of Brazil”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_incident
SUNDAY, October 29, 2006
We were invited to the home of Dona Nair and Seu Antônio for breakfast.
I loved their open-air breakfast area, and I took advantage of the opportunity to have one more feast before the trip. Thales and Enzo love to play in their grandparents' large back yard.
On the way to the bus station in Ribeirão Preto, Cassio and Ana Claúdia took us to her dental practice.
Bob's dentist in the US had recommended that he get an implant to replace a crown he had on one of his front teeth, and Bob wondered if such a thing would be possible. So Dr. Cássio and Dra. Ana Claúdia took an x-ray to see if an implant was possible. The x-ray showed that the crown wouldn't need to be replaced right away, but Dr. Cássio said he'd do the implant procedure at cost if Bob would opt for the procedure.
So, now we have free dentists. All we need now is a free physician, a free taxi service, and a free restaurant, and we’ll be able to retire.
The bus ride from Ribeirão Preto to Anapolis took about 12 hours. We stopped along the way at truck stops for meals, and we stopped here and there to take on or drop off passengers. It was national run-off election day, with most of the attention focused on the presidential race. President “Lula”, as expected, won by a huge margin over his “private enterprise” rival. The election was probably the reason there were so few passengers on the bus. The bus was cushy.
The trip from Ribeirão Preto to the edge of São Paulo state was comfortable and uneventful. We had an on-board video to watch, about the life of Péle.
I was reminded of my bus trip from São Paulo to Anápolis nearly 20 years ago. At that time, the bus crawled behind a long line of sugar cane trucks, as they crept up one hill after another on one-lane roads in São Paulo state. This time, the bus traveled on toll freeways too perfect to be in any place I’ve been in the US.
Once we entered Minas Gerais state, the scenery changed… Less prosperity, more grazing land, and pineapple fields… But not as many pineapple fields as I had remembered from 1987. The freeways ended, and we found ourselves on a narrow one-lane road, filled with trucks. We realized how dangerous the road was when we passed the wreckage of a head-on car-truck accident. The authorities hadn’t yet arrived on the scene. The Uberlândia newspaper reported that the lone survivor was airlifted to a hospital.
Once we entered Goiás state, the freeways began again, followed by an endless construction zone as the state worked to complete the freeway to Goiânia.
We got to Goiânia around 10 pm. I hardly recognized the huge Goiânia bus terminal that I frequented in 1987 when I lived in the city. It had been transformed into a third-rate mall, circled by buses. We boarded an underpowered, no-frills bus to Anápolis, and after a one-hour ride, we had a taxi take us home from the bus station. We got home before midnight. The 12-hour trip from Ribeirão Preto seemed tame compared to the 28-hour international flights that get us to and from Seattle.
I LOVE SÃO PAULO
Why do I love São Paulo?
It’s a first-world city, populated with helpful, friendly people… Eleven million helpful, friendly, people.
Or, if you prefer, there are 19 million helpful, friendly people in the metro area.
Or, as the Brazilian government claims, there are 29 million people living in the “extended metropolitan area”… making it second only to the Tokyo area, which is home to 35 million people.
Bus conductors and subway workers went out of their way to make sure we got to our destination. The value that Brazilians place on helping one another was just as strong in the Big City.
In the four days Bob and I were in São Paulo, we crisscrossed the city by taxi, subway, bus, and on foot, and there were hardly any clues that we were not in the United States or Europe. I imagined that New York City and Los Angeles had merged to form the city. The city is very prosperous, and was a combination of New York skyscrapers and LA sprawl… with the high-rise skyline stretching off to the horizon in every direction.
We had the LA palm trees superimposed over the Manhattan skyline. We had LA’s freeways and New York’s crowded subways.
Bob’s impression was that “São Paulo is like a tropical New York.”
The transportation system was impressive. Subway stations and buses magically appeared whenever we needed them, and we never had to wait more than a few minutes for our ride.
Twenty years ago when I went to São Paulo for the first time, I remember seeing squatters’ shacks lining the freeways. This time, I saw only two places in the city with small enclaves of substandard housing, but these low-income neighborhoods were so small in comparison to the surrounding homes, that it will only be a matter of time before the peer pressure from the rich neighbors will force the people of humble means to become upwardly mobile. And besides, even these humble homes each have a satellite antenna on the roof.
I never felt that my personal safety was threatened. The guy who stole dad’s wallet in São Paulo 18 years ago has either been put behind bars, or he has reformed, because I didn’t see him anywhere.
I have noticed that as the United States gets deeper and deeper into debt, Brazil is getting more and more prosperous. Thanks to sugar-cane alcohol and offshore oil, Brazil is now self-sufficient in energy. It has a huge trade surplus. Its currency has gained 30% against the dollar in the last year or so.
I had wanted to pinpoint the exact moment in which Brazil and the United States traded places… As Brazil would become the richest nation in the Western Hemisphere. I had the feeling that in the case of São Paulo, at least, the change has already happened.
I did see a few homeless people and beggars in São Paulo, but no more than I see in the streets of Seattle… And I had the impression that begging was a vestige of the old Brazil, instead of the growth industry that it is in the States. People in São Paulo who work in the informal job market… street vendors, for example… are certainly under-employed, but I saw no signs that a class of people lived in abject poverty.
I was impressed with the green trees I saw all over São Paulo… lining freeways and boulevards, for example. Cultural opportunities abound. Huge malls are everywhere. São Paulo is a literate city, and there were five bookstores within a few blocks of our hotel, and universities all around.
There were four Lebanese restaurants within blocks of our hotel, so we had plenty to eat. We had lunch at one of the dozens of vegetarian restaurants in the city. On our bus trips across the city, I found myself wanting to get off dozens of times to go into one unique shop or another… or a museum.
But there is one other thing. Just when I had convinced myself that maybe I had been in Belgium for four days, someone reminded me of the unrest in the greater São Paulo area about 6 months ago. The PCC, an organized group of criminals, went on the offensive against the police, and scores of people died before it was over. (I can’t prove it, but Puget Consumers’ Coop, in Seattle, appears to have no connection to the PCC in São Paulo.) A year ago even Paris had unrest in the streets, so I suppose that sort of thing can happen anywhere.
Somewhere in the city there must be something like poverty, but with layer upon layer of conspicuous wealth, it remained well hidden.
The picture-perfect freeways and obvious affluence extended to the edges of São Paulo state. Only after our bus entered Minas Gerais state did I feel like I was back home in Brazil.
ENGLISH
The main difference between São Paulo and Los Angeles is the use of English in store signs.
English is much more common in São Paulo. It seems like English is used in half the shop names in São Paulo, while Spanish dominates in LA. A few examples of English usage:
Cat Hair Cabeleireiros (Hair salon. Here, a foxy lady is referred to as a “cat”.)
Happy Weekend Plaza Shopping Hotel
Top Center Shopping (Mall)
Trade Garden (Hotel?)
We see strange combinations of English and Portuguese… Words which don’t really work together.
Limp House (house cleaning business)
Visite Nosso Show Room (visit our show room)
You can also find products on store shelves which seem to have lame names.
HALLOWEEN
Our hotel lobby was filled with Halloween decorations… with the slogan in Portuguese, “Our prices don’t scare anyone.”
Other businesses had Halloween decorations, and those that didn’t were obliged to start setting up for Christmas. We saw a few Santas and a few Christmas trees around town. When you don’t have Halloween and Thanksgiving to protect you from way-too-early Christmas displays, there’s no limit to how early the decorations start appearing.
Vegetarian Restaurants
There may only be one vegetarian restaurant for each one million people in São Paulo, but that’s still 30 or so restaurants. We had lunch at one such place a few blocks from our lawyer’s office. They had a huge list of exotic fruit juices to choose from, so I chose the most exotic of all… framboesa, “raspberry”. It was really good. I must be truly Brazilian now, as things from the States now seem exotic to me.
WIDGETIZE
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