A to B

Sao Paulo is impossible to get around. Paulistas insist that the only way is to have a car, and the rubbish public transport system does bear this out to some extent. But new apartments are built with seven parking spaces each, and the number of cars, like the population, is increasing exponentially. The pace of change here is incredible – yesterday, in a bookshop on Avenida Paulista (the busiest commercial district in Latin America) we found two photographs comparing Sao Paulo in 1902 with the view of the Avenida today. In a hundred years it has gone from a few stately mansions set on acres and acres of land that stretches out to the hills, to the skyrise mega-metropolis it is now.

But it’s a city that feels like it’s almost at breaking point, like a heart with badly clogged arteries. Paulistas describe over and over the pressure of their working days, which often don’t end until 9pm and involve a 3 hr daily commute. Yesterday, (by accident rather than design) A and I ended up in Barra Funda metro station at 5.30pm, rush hour, in the end of the line station that serves an enormous industrial quarter of the city. We were virtually carried down onto the platform, where the queues for the train doors (which build up in little fenced-in corridors) were already 30 people deep. When the trains arrived it and the doors opened it seemed, as A said, like a vacuum – the speed and force at which people seemed to be sucked in to the train, literally running, or being swept along anyway, was like nothing we’ve experienced before. London rush hour seemed like gentle tea dance in comparison. The train arrived and we found ourselves relinquishing all control and surging forward, riding a wave of people from the platform to the middle of the carriage, clutching each other’s hands and whooping with laughter.

One of my favourite things is going to a city where I have friends and doing as the Romans do when in Rome, getting carried along with whatever ride they take you on. Wednesday night in SP found us tagging along with Fabian, which turned into meeting Anatoli for a Lebanese dinner, then doing a bit of riding in cars with boys, and finally pitching up at the opening of a furniture design exhibition at the Museo do Casa Brasileiro at about 10pm. Free champagne bar in a marquee outside, filled with the elegant an beautiful of SP, A and I trying and failing miserably not to look like bedraggled backpackers after a day battling the rain. A did nothing to help the situation by smuggling free canapés into her bag to eat later. Who gets invited to these events? I asked Fabian. Oh, it’s not invitation, he told me, you just find out about it and turn up. Seemed to me like a fairly arbitrary entrance criteria to the champagne lifestyle here, but we weren’t complaining. We all ended up so sitting on a terrace, so drunk on conversation and laughing so hard that it was a surprise to discover that everyone else had gone, as had all the furniture, and we had two waiters apiece hovering for our empty glasses. We continued in form by nicking someone else’s guarda chuva (umbrella) on the way out – someone had nicked ours first but we definitely ended up with a better one. All in all, a solid endorsement for following the law of placing yourself in someone else’s hands and seeing where you end up.

Left Sao Paulo on Friday after a lovely last evening where we went out with Ju, Rodrigo and Anatoli and ate, literally, a boat full of sushi in Liberdade, the Japanese district (SP has the biggest Japanese population outside of Japan) and then, perhaps unwisely, gave in to Anatoli’s boundless enthusiasm for our company and ended up playing pool in a karaoke bar til 3a.m. Final shameful score Brazil 2, England 0. The next morning, flew to Rio to avoid the six hour bus, which was perhaps a false economy given that it took us two groggy hot cross hours to the airport, which we had to arrive at two hours early to pay for our one hour flight, which was 30 minutes late anyway. Interior flights here seem a very casual affair where you almost amble onto an aeroplane, once everyone is more or less ready to depart.

A and I are having fun with the Portuguese language, having worked out the patterning that allows one to replace the ending of a word with its Portuguese equivalent. So for example, a word that in English ends in ‘ty’ will generally end in ‘dade’ in Portuguese (because the ‘d’ sound in Portuguese is pronounced like our ‘dg’ sound, this sounds like dargy, as in to rhyme with argy-bargy). So we have liberdade, equalidade, our favourite, celebridade. I must admit we have been throwing the dades round willy nilly to make each other laugh. I asked A if she knew what a flight was in portuguese. Flidade? she replied. It is still making me laugh days later.