upwards and outwards

A little catfish in a bowl cleans the glass over and over, at a gig where a geeky-chic man is singing an incredibly drunk girl falls over and is patiently looked after by the security guards, a man looks around as he gives you back your change: don’t let people see you’ve got money, his manner implies, bad bad sexy santa outfits, service staff who seem too accustomed to being in service, edgy cool middleclass creatives rule the street. A homeless man’s cracked heels as he sleeps on a bench on a concrete island in the traffic. A marijuana plant flourishes in the garden, dogs howl in the morning, high fences and gates, is it a house a shop an office? The bus looks like the one on Bus 174. And the paderias with their huge selection of things that are kind of made of bread, a man heaps two huge spoonfuls of sugar into a tiny cafezinho, the beads of condensation on a cold guarana can. Antarctica Beer has blue penguins on the can and oh it’s cold and good. How did they get up there to scribble that graffiti? The advertising hoardings have all been taken down and the graffiti is the only word on the street. Cars don’t stop. Tower blocks go up. Friday night parties rage from bar to street to house. Chlorophyll green pops loudly from between the concrete slabs. Friends radio each other on mobile phones with aerials and helicopters whirr overhead.

The population of Sao Paulo is increasing exponentially. If you look over Sao Paulo, you can see that this city is growing upwards and outwards. The lack of planning laws means that, as Fernando said as we surveyed the cluster of houses sprouting from the side of a hill “the conditions here are the architect”. At a party in his place last night Anatoli lamented that there aren’t enough good houses; developers buy a cluster of them, knock them down and throw up a high-density ‘luxury’ apartment block. The skyrises here aren’t social housing; they’re coveted. People like living high: it’s safer. Apartment blocks have security guards and swimming pools.

We drove out today to the Jardin Pico do Jaragua with the two brothers, Rodrigo and Fernando. Winding up the a road through the forest, huge rain drops splatting on the windscreen, out of the top of the clouds, then a climb up to the television aerial that crowns the hill, and a vista over the whole sprawling city and its suburbs.

Money takes you upwards in Sao Paulo, away from the streets and the favelas and the crime, up into the luxury apartment blocks, and finally, from the top of buildings in the helicopters which buzz across the sky like so many insects, away to somewhere exclusive.



We drove back through one of the districts which clings to the edge of Sao Paulo. Roughshod thrown-together houses all on top of each other; little entrances between them from the main road into alleyways that rapidly become a labyrinth. There’s no planning here, amenities are stretched. A sign on the side of one building proclaims that it’s a hairdressers and beautician, another equally non-descript building is a Pentecostal church. It’s a million miles away from the gated mews that we sipped caipirhoskas in last night. Boys and men fly small kites everywhere; taking off into the sky.

Last night we were trawling the streets trying to find the house of a friend. It was dark and we were nervous and felt pretty lost as we trekked up an extremely long road for the elusive number 74 (we couldn’t find it, we eventually discovered, because we had misheard Juliana and should actually have been at the other, much safer end of the street looking for number 724). I wonder if we’re safe here? we asked each other, not exactly sure what signs of menace we should have been on the lookout for. Exactly at that moment two young blokes rounded the corner – and a second later we realised that both of them had white canes and were feeling their way down the road with their arms linked. The blind leading the blind, quite literally.
Our immense enjoyment of the visual embodiment of this uncannily appropriate expression had us dissolving into laughter, not least because it keeps happening here (yesterday we saw a bag of shite). Anyhow, we stopped caring that we were lost, and all sense of menace dissipated.

We have added Flopi sweets and Diamante Negro chocolate to our collection of misnamed foreign foodstuffs.