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Published: September 11th 2008
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M: Our last evening in Parati took a surprise turn when we stumbled across some incredible Capoeira players on our way to get dinner. Capoeira is one of my favourite ever things - so graceful, beautiful, respectful and bloody impressive physically. I have long harboured dreams of getting my arse in gear to learn, but having seen their phenomenal strength and acrobatics that evening: shattered dreams.
Last morning in Parati was somewhat marred by plans to cycle in the jungle prior to evening bus to Sao Paulo going down the drain. Decided to be "organised" and visit the bus station to get tickets in advance - all sold until next day. Ensued frantic conversations in Portuguese/Spanish/French/English/Boninfantoddian with tourist office, various bus companies, travel agents etc, to work out how to reach our Paulista (SP bods) homestay that night. Suffice to say we arrived in SP after 8 hour bus trip via Ubatuba (as much of a dusty hole as you would imagine), and were greeted by Daniel and Claudia at their flat in Santa Cecilia.
This was our first foray into couchsurfing.com - good - we´ll do it again. They took us out for a totally different kind of
bar/restaurant experience - chic and quite LA, we felt. Don´t think they appreciated the comparison. SP is renowned for its food in Brazil - there´s plenty of diversity especially with 2nd Japanese population outside Japan, but still not very sophisticated. In Rio & Paraty we had enjoyed fantastic fruit (esp. passion, avocados as big as melons, and the disgusting Caju - fruit of the cashew - best enjoyed as juice with cachaca apparently - yuk!) and basic restaurants where you buy buffet food "al quilo" - you weigh your plate and pay by weight. In SP the "bolinhos" - often bacalau or cassava and cheese were gorgeous fried balls of delight, and the Japanese-town food excellent. Nonetheless, we feel pretty carb and fat exhausted!
Daniel and Claudia took us to SP mercado in Saturday - its pretty renowned and rightly so - seafood particularly impressive with Laurent salivating over the octopus and squiddy beasts in particular. Traffic to get there was hideous - makes London seem all tranquility - think that using alcohol (so much cheaper than petrol) doesn´t exactly alleviate the pollution levels. The metro was a good alternative but as there are no ticket machines there were
literally queues of hundreds of people at the billheterias sometimes - not conducive to cutting traffic.
After the market we wandered around the Cathedral - mass was in full swing but quite a sparse population and the choir - goddamn awful! A disappointment for Martha. We were surprised as we have seen many "Jesus is the Man" type car stickers and t-shirts, and thought the SP cathedral mass would be the apex, but D&C seemed contrite when we suggested many Brazilians were religious. Hard to say...
It was Claudia´s birthday and they were using a space in their apartment block for a little party - good fun. We will remember Joaquim, Patricia and Leandro in particular! A gastro-cultural different was elucidated - they were all popping prawns into their mouths whole, shell and all and we felt precious peeling them so joined in - OK actually. Except for Claudia´s allergic reaction - boo. Laurent drank too much cachaca to compensate for prawn faux-pas.
The next day we were impressed by the Japanese quarter - not only food but great stalls and shops, and less impressed with the famous Avenue Paulista - pretty bland boulevard of offices and
chain stores. Highlight of the visit to the city park was the breakdancers - again, an incredible display of fitness. That´s what all those parallel bars on all the beaches here are for! To bed early, grateful to Claudia for booking us a taxi for 3am to leave for the airport.
2.30 start was hard. Followed by discovery we had to change planes in Lima to get to Quito (Equador). We are taking things as they come and not doing much planning so hadn´t really grasped this - there is a 2 hour time difference so it was in fact a 7hr trip. Laurent maximised time in Lima airport to eat Peruvian Ceviche - mmm! That evening we left our hotel in the Centro Storico for dinner in the New Town - Quito feels completely different to Brazil. As you might expect across this huge continent. People look indigenous Ecuadorian in the main and there are very, very few tourists in the old town so we stand out. However, we certainly didn´t stand out in the New Town and enjoyed happy hour cocktails (including a good Ecuadorian hot drink with cinnamon) and a coal fire - its cold like England here :-(
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soyo
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who'd have thought
2nd biggest japanese population outside japan!