Sao Paulo

Bom dia! Acho que eu tenho de orgulhar meu talento na lingua! Ha ha. You can translate that either in babelfish.com or wordreference.com.

Anyway, been in Brazil almost a month and 15 of those with Brian so its time to write about all the highly touristy things (or not) we've been doing.

Sao Paulo was my first stop with Aparna. My first time officially couchsurfing too! Spent almost a week with Luanda and her mum (her sister Maira is studying for a year in TISS). This super energetic Amelie Poulain took us to to two really great Samba places- one doing popular songs that EVERYONE was singing to and the other a younger trendier neighbourhood chorinho- samba. I can just stop there for SP right!

BUT, Denise, their cook also did a whole Brazilian (but vegetarian- for Luanda) lunch! Took me to the thursday feira down their street too. I now have a decent enough repertoire of ingredients and cooking words and a couple of recipes. I hope it will be more helpful when we are in smaller places (where they dont also have alternative menus in English or people who speak it!)

The rest of our food tour in SP was conducted mostly in one afternoon by Luiza, another CSer. Another vegetarian, she was a darling, showing us all the snacky stuff- salgados (salty snacks), including the Arabian Esfiha and one we didnt reach- the famous Paulista Pizza!

Of course, one of the highlights was Cordao de Ouro, SP. CM Kibe took class both days and it was so great to be accepted as part of the family, the distant relatives they've never met but heard of... I think we did a decent job of keeping up in the class too. ( thats more than I can say since then, when classes have been few and far between). We're now more confident of making it to Capoeirando in Ilheus in Jan.

Checked out only one museum- Museu de Arte Moderne. I don't think we were really in museum mood so we took some silly pictures and left soon. Walter Smteak played with sound and instruments and Cover featured various artists and ideas of repetition, imitation, etc- very postmodern!

Went to the Paulo Freire Institute. Thank you Mary Ann for introducing me to him and to Amar and the EPS gang for letting me know there was the institue. Wish I could have spent more time, getting to really know the work that the institute does. As it stands, his son and all at the institute were really welcoming and hopefully I'll be able to do something with them in the future and catch up at the World Social Forum.

Also met Luisa- Shammi's friend. She's been to Van Vadi and lived in Chandigarh! She also happened to be moving that week into an apartment in the same building as Luanda! AND she had bumped into Dinesh aka Axe from Nina Stone's capoeira group (Just because he was Indian and she spoke English). Too small a world I say :D !

I liked Sao Paulo. No beaches but I liked our one week there. Introduced to Brazil graffiti- some spectacular and others down right ugly, specially when they deface heritage structures. Otherwise, Brazil is surprisingly more western and developed than I imagined. Toilet paper available everywhere but thrown in baskets because the drainage system cant handle it. Bottled water. All the hired help can read and write. Good bus system, particularly if you have the card that lets you travel in 3 hours for the price of one ticket. No honking. The only thing that I had to wrap my head around was hearing a different language and seeing policeman so heavily armed.

(pics for this will be up later. brian has them at home right now)