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Published: October 26th 2007
Brasilia is an expensive city which I guess justifies staying at a horrid little place like Pousada Vila de Zen. We had been quite excited at staying somewhere with the same name as our cat, Zen, but when we were given the small, airless room between the kitchen, laundry and loo we soon lost our enthusiasm. We had arrived after dark and the area around the pousada looked really devoid of life. But just a couple of corners away was a lively shopping street with two very nice restaurant/bars and a handy supermarket.
Franz, the co-driver of the Dragoman truck, had been in Brasilia recently, and very kindly lead a group of us on a walk tour of the city. Being an architect he had a great interest in this planned city that was now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Oscar Niemeyer had been the principle architect and we had already seen his work in Curitiba.
First we stopped at a beautiful church on our street with tall blue and pink stain glass windows.
Next was the TV tower. Brasilia didn't exist 50 years ago and the centre is planned for freedom of movement of vehicles rather than
pedestrians. We had to scoot across six lanes to reach the tower. There were maps in the tourist office here and a big closed market. We went up the tower for free and got our bearings of this big ugly city. There was a huge expanse of grass leading down to the senate. Most bizarre city centre ever.
We walked down the grassy centre feeling rather conspicuous with 6 lanes of traffic on either side. We passed the Rodoviaria (bus terminal) that was smack in the middle of the city, and proceeded to the opera. It was rather run down but an impressive design. Across the other side was the library, a big dome and the church partially sunk into the group. It had beautiful windows and angels hanging from the ceiling.
On the way to the senate we got hungry and stopped between two of the identical ministry buildings where there was a fruit stall. They were fantastic fruit salads with yummy toppings like condensed milk. There were lots of office people on their lunch breaks from their government jobs. Some played dominoes, the board balanced on the two players knees while they slammed down their pieces.
Some were having a beer that we soon discovered was being served from some guy's car boot in the car park. There was a complete lack of restaurants and cafes in the area. I guess these were all inside the buildings for employee use only.
There are dress regulations for visiting the senate and because of flip flops and shorts most of us didn't go in. We had already lost two of our party who thought they could walk to the bridge (turned out to be a long way off) and two went in the senate. This left us, Franz and Luke from Australia. Wandering the plaza behind the senate we found a model of the city in an underground room, built in 1992 for one of the architects 90th birthday. We also found an interesting museum with a dark upstairs room where a Portuguese commentary played and there was a pretty stain glass window opposite a series of pictures depicting saints and important Brazilian history. Staring for a long time (we had comfy seats for weary bodies) we all noticed an oil lamp in each picture. We still haven't figured out what that means.
There are at
least a couple of malls in Brasilia. The one down the road from us proved useful as Pieter needed a new wallet and I wanted a new bikini. We also went to the movies there. We saw the Bourne Supremacy which was really good.
We spent our evenings at the restaurants near our pousada. One of them was a Chopperia, an outdoor bar where they serve beer (Chopp) automatically. Of course you can always say no 😊 They were also serving tasty little savoury pies. To keep record of your consumption they left a score card type thing on your table. It had rows and rows of little pictures of frothy bear mugs and a few rows of pictures of pies.
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