Advertisement
Published: December 3rd 2008
Edit Blog Post
The Swanky Hotel in Sao Paulo
I went to a bar on the roof of this hotel with Alex and his friends. It was my first step outside of the backpacker scene and did the job quite nicely. It is a boutique hotel that is supposed to look like a boat (in case that is not obvious) I had been dreading going to Sao Paulo! Everything I had heard was that it was such a dangerous city. I shared a room with a girl in Ilha Grande for one night who was from there and she had told me about how she had been express kidnapped (this means someone getting into your car and taking you to a cash point). The only problem for her, is that it was not so much of an express kidnapping as there was a problem with the banks and they spent hours driving around to find one that was open!! She did say that by the end she had sort of made friends with her kidnapper.
Although I had been scared about going, I was much more at ease than usual as I had arranged to meet Alex (from our Sydney office who now lives in Sao Paulo) at the bus station so I actually quite enjoyed my 6 hour bus journey from Paratay.
I got off of the bus and for once did not feel scared but sauntered out to the Bobs burger bar (kind of the equiv of McDonalds) to meet him. Only after waiting for ages and
A tiny bit of the sky line of Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo city just goes on and on and on!! This was from the roof of the hotel starting to get a bit scared did I realise there were 3 Bobs in this large bus station and I couldn´t find him anywhere!
As I had already booked accomodation I made myself keep calm and figure out the metro system and got to the hostel in one piece. An old guy sat next to me on the metro and in broken english told me to be careful of my bag and made a snip snip sign and then as soon as I got to my hostel and revealed my money belt the guy at reception wanted to know where he could get one as he thought it would be useful for him in Sao Paulo.
With all of this in mind I did not expect to have a good time and could not believe how much I actually really enjoyed myself here and did not feel threatened once.
Perhaps you could say the difference between Sao Paulo and Rio is a bit like Melbourne and Sydney or Edinburgh and Glasgow or Madrid and Barcelona.
Sao Paulo is a fantastic city with great people, lots of culture (I discovered the bars and restaurant bit of the
culture but did notice a fair few museums and gallaries too!).
On the first night I went out with a Swedish boy I met in my hostel. We were both a bit scared and just went to a bar around the corner for a Caprihina and then home. As soon as we got there we got talking to a group of young local Sao Paulo people (notice I do keep saying young - they were all about 21 inc the swede!) who soon befriended us and invited us to a party. We drove about 30 mins across town (this is nothing as Sao Paulo is huge - it really goes on forever!) and ended up in a really bizarre rock bar for some girls 18th birthday! She was throwing up a lot and I ended up feeding her water.
The next day I met up with Alex and he took me to a roof top bar of a swanky hotel (ww.hotelunique.com.br) with some of his Brazillian friends and then onto a fantastic sushi restaurant. Sao Paulo has the largest Japanese community outside of Japan so they really pride themselves on good sushi. I did end up spending about
3 nights worth of accomodation in one afternoon but I guess you have to splash out sometimes.
The hostel I was staying at was fantastic. I had my first hot shower in almost 2 weeks and it was so clean and modern it was hard not to get stuck there. I stayed for 3 nights in the end which was about 3 nights longer than I initally intended. It had a really mixed bag of guests from all over the world and I met some really interseting people. You won´t belive though I met 2 doctors and a pharmacist - what is going on??????
A big difference between Rio and Sao Paulo is that in Rio the rich and the poor live side by side. You have huge favellas next to millionaire mansions. In Sao Paulo you could be forgiven for not even realising that favellas exist. There is an inordinate amount of wealth here. In fact there are more helicopters per capita than in any other city in the world. As the traffic is so bad here the rich get about in their own private helicopters!!
I was planning on going to the Panatanal after here
Guarana
This is drunk all over Brazil. It is an amazing soft drink. It peps you up but is soft...not like what you would think. but have realised that if I keep adding on extra weeks all over the place I am never going to get to the places I want to go to. Eveytime I meet someone new I hear of more wonderful places..... Also I definitely need to get to BA soon to start Spanish!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.071s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0422s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb