capital city - brasilia

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From the first capital of Brasil to the current: Brasillia. Brasillia, what can I say. It’s a city that was planned and built in the sixties, apparently in the middle of nowhere or in the centre of Brasil whichever you believe. Personally the time it took on the bus to get here, i'm leaning to nowhere. Of course we arrived in Brasillia on a Monday so everything was shut. It was like a city out of the twilight zone, a sixties vision of what the future would look like. The buildings were bizarre, the government zone was arranged in perfect straight lines, you could get a ruler out and measure them perfectly. After the haphazardness of Salvador it was weird to be in such a perfectly planned place. Manjit said it looked like “The Jetsons” I have to admit I did expect to see flying cars and people wearing crazy silver suits. We saw the government buildings from the outside, Suhirtha got to see artificial waterfalls which in no way prepared her for Iguacu and I just found the whole place, well, plain strange. That’s not to say its not worth visiting, its just a weird capital city.

Brasillia also has a stupid Lebanese restaurant, that takes years to find and also serves no vegetarian food (that includes couscous and falafals). Also their pizza oven does not open till 6pm it was 4pm and we were starving. I have to also curse the bloody Rough Guide for mentioning it. We ended up going to a fish restaurant where we had chips. The waiter nearly had a heart attack when we told him we didn't eat meat. To be fair, we must be the only idiots in the world to go to a fish restaurant and not eat fish!!

We finished the day going to the cinema, in a shopping centre (could’ve been Ilford) the film was actually a English movie with Portuguese subtitles. So we three English people, watched a movie about London, England in Brasillia. Strange.

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