São Paulo 2

After a filling breakfast in the hotel, I rang up the airline office to thank the clerk who had made sure that my backpack was recovered and routed to me. Brazilian breakfasts are ample and include lots of tropical fruit, which pleases me. Besides the usual suspects like pineapple and papaya, there were also guava jelly, and passionfruit (maracuja) juice.

São Paulo's metro is clean and fast; I saw a cleaner polishing the panels on the walls. Some platforms have art themes on the walls. In Trianon park another cleaner was polishing benches. Well, I suppose it keeps the city shiny and some people fed which is more than you can say for some other uses of money. But there were definitely divisions along lines of money. Pretty much every building or edifice had a guard, doorman or majordomo to filter the people going through.


Portuguese on the signs were easy for me to decipher with knowledge of Spanish, words were like the Spanish equivalent with rough bits sanded off, e.g. salida -> saida, vuelo -> vôo, tener -> ter. Then there were the loan words from English. Shopping is one noun that is common in many South American countries.

I had a shower, then left my backpack with reception. The afternoon was mine to while away until it was time to board the Trem de Prata. I caught the metro to Clinicas station which, true to its name, was surrounded by medical organisations, and walked down Rua Oscar Friere. This was lined with expensive high-rises with gates and guards. I had lunch of a beirut and a chopp (pita sandwich and draft beer) at Lanchonete Frevo, a piece of São Paulo history, and yes, another loan word. Then uphill to Avenida Paulista where I had an ice cream. Sometime later I had an esfiha snack. There is significant Lebanese influence in Brazil from immigration.

A robot rope climber was the attention grabber outside the art foundation building. In Paulista Shopping I bought several CDs of Brazilian artists I adored. I finally discovered what MPB stood for: Música Popular Brasileira. Obvious when you know it but a mystery if you have never seen the expansion.

Back in the hotel I dozed off in a lobby sofa until it was time for a taxi to take me to the train station. It was rush hour in a huge city so it took more than an hour for the train to put São Paulo's sprawling suburbs behind it. I was served in the dining carriage around 2130. The cabin was cramped and quaint, and the carriages rolled a lot as we trundled towards Rio de Janeiro. Nonetheless it was a taste of a more elegant past.