Winter travels: São Paulo and Manaus

For four weeks, we lived at the center of it all. The expensive, expansive, hectic, maddening and refreshing center of Brazil, São Paulo.

Specifically, I splurged and rented an apartment in an apart-hotel in Moema, a neighborhood on the south side of the center, only a few blocks from Parque Ibirapuera. I had limited time to find and reserve a place, and many places to be. The apartment ended up sheltering Bethany and my cousin Christian as well, so maybe it wasn't a terrible expense.

In reserve order, the ugly, the bad and the good of São Paulo.

The Ugly

Moema is, after Jardins and whichever neighborhood is currently trendy, the third-nicest neighborhood in São Paulo. Or at least it should be; it's certainly expensive enough. (Note: Due to circumstances, it was once necessary to search for lunch in Jardins. I consider myself lucky to have escaped after losing less than R$20.)

We lived five blocks from an Applebee's, and six blocks from a Starbucks. This combination might exist in Barra da Tijuca (and maybe in Brasilia), but otherwise nowhere else in Brazil. (Perhaps nowhere else in South America.)

On every corner, and in front of every decent restaurant, stood valets willing to park your car for around R$10-R$15 for the duration of lunch or dinner. Even the gym up the hill had valet parking. Admittedly, there wasn't much open street parking, but this is true in San Francisco as well. I can proudly say that I ate lunch regularly in most towns for less than it costs to park one's car in Moema.

Bethany and I went to a local joint to eat burgers, fries and Cokes for the 4th of July, in our best ironic manner. We chose a place called America Pasta & Burgers instead of Applebee's. The bill totaled R$88, and we never ate there again.

The above examples illustrate the ugliest part of São Paulo's wealth and inequality. In the finest neighborhood, the rich spend large amounts of money to enjoy a standard of living on par with that of the United States. For the quality of products and services, prices are outrageous. And the streets are stale and soulless. There's very little public space, because everything has to be held behind gates or under vigilant watch or hidden. (Granted, there is more public space downtown.)

Last December, while we walked around Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas in Rio, I commented to friends that I wouldn't mind retiring to a high-rise apartment in Lagoa. Valmore questioned this, noting that he envied the United States, where everyone has a small single-family house with a yard and a fence; why would I want to move to an apartment? His point was taken, though I did later see upper-class single-family homes (most memorably, near the park in Campo Grande) in Brazil. The major distinction between single-family homes in Brazil and the States is that the former are almost always behind guarded walls.

In short, the rich of São Paulo can indeed lived charmed lives, but they pay exorbitant amounts to do so, and to keep that world protected. (This is already widely known; I'm just relating my encounter with it.)


The Bad

In many cities, I've met people who say "Oh, the traffic here in [my city] is getting to be as bad as São Paulo." It's an interesting point of reference, because I didn't find traffic to be too much of a problem in SP. (See above point: this may be due to the fact that I lived in Moema. I admit that traffic did once make us late to the SPFC-Avaí game, but we didn't miss much.) The bus system is not too bad, the metro is speedy, and I don't own a car. (Really bad traffic is in Salvador. F--- you, Rótula do Abacaxí.)

But if the traffic isn't bad, the air pollution is. My eyes stung from time to time, in the same manner that they always sting when we crest the hill up near the new Getty Museum and enter the LA Basin.

And every driver was, of course, sitting in his or her own car, most without passengers. As my mother asked in Salvador (not rhetorically), "Has the government done much to encourage carpooling?" Ha! Crazy lady. The current government is trying to put more cars on the road as fast as they can, with special tax incentives and discounts.

There are some kinks of developed world life not worth imitating, as São Paulo develops.


The Good

But the integrated bus and metro system was great! And two museums, the MASP and the Museu da Língua Portuguesa were lots of fun! And Rua Augusta is a good bohemian/alternative break from the blandness of Zona Sul. Chris especially liked Augusta, aside from the very disappointing Mexican restaurant at its peak.

And yes, one does get the feeling of being in the center of the world. You can take a bus in São Paulo and pass the corporate headquarters for, say, the maker of a brand of urinals that's all over the country. Or the headquarters of a beverages company whose juice you drank long ago at a dark bus station in Goiânia. You can go to the Tietê bus terminal and literally find a bus for anywhere in Brazil. Every touring show or band or exhibition will pass through. (50 Cent played while we were in town, and the Bodies exhibit was open at the MAM. Tickets for Mr. Cent's concert started at R$200, which seemed steep for a hip hop artist who hasn't been relevant for five years.)

And oh, the park. Parque do Ibirapuera, as previously mentioned, has a 6000 meter dirt trail around its perimeter, with three water stations and two bathroom stops, varied terrain, and plenty of shade. There are running routes in Brazil that are more scenic (Aterro do Flamengo, Rio), longer and with more bathrooms (Parque da Cidade, Brasília), shadier (Parque Mãe Bonifácia, Cuiabá), with cleaner air (Praia do Calhau, São Luís), or with more fun wildlife (Parque das Indígenas, Campo Grande), but Ibirapuera wins the all-around prize.

It took two tries to figure out how to manage the course while running clockwise (the direction without signs), but two or three loops could be combined and cut into almost any distance. I think I topped out at 18 km. I don't remember.

Sadly, the park is a slight break, but not a complete break, from the smog and exhaust of the streets.

There was also a fruit market on Saturday up the hill in Vila Nova Conceição. And tofu and yakisoba noodles in local supermarkets. (And peanut butter, but only the Peter Pan sugary type.) We never had very good Japanese food, but did find some good pizza after a search.

Finally, interviewees in São Paulo were just as friendly and helpful as those in other states were. I picked up a little of the paulista r in my accent, which I've retained to the present, but I still find José Serra's accent a little over-the-top. (In a funny coincidence, only after a visit to the Museu da República in Rio did I realize that one of my interviewees was the spokesman who announced Tancredo Neves's death in 1985.)


The Uncategorizable

São Paulo is not soulless. It is just too splintered and diverse to be categorized. I'm sure that if I traveled for the sake of experiencing specifically art, fashion, food, music, architecture, history, or any interest, I could really dig deep into one part of the city and be richly rewarded.

However, in taking a little bit of everything at once, I must admit that I found São Paulo to be bland. Sure, it's the most populous city in the Americas, but it lacks the romantic feeling of "here I am!" that one gets in Manhattan. Even on Avenida Paulista, or in the park, or at the monuments or at Praça da Sé or Praça da República, there's little romance or style in the city. I blame this on the car. In Manhattan, one sees (and gets bumped and shoved by) the multitudes on the streets and the subway. Here, there are crowds on the subway, and people on the street for lunch, but it's all just so mind-bogglingly spread out that it doesn't feel dense. (Disclaimer: Anhangbaú metro station did feel dense at Tuesday, 8 AM.) Many people just get in their cars and pass you by.

There's also no center. The city is too big to concentrate on any one plaza. Not all roads lead to Praça da Sé or da República, or to Terminal Bandeirantes. Corporate office parks are in Chácara Santo Antônio, a good 15 km from where their daily occupants and masters (probably) live in Jardins. Hence the helicopters.

For that reason, with apologies to all readers, I never took a photo in São Paulo. Of anything. It never dawned on me to do so, even when visiting monuments and museums. I don't have a good explanation why.

Will I be back? Rapáz, seria quase impossível continuar estudando o Brasil sem voltar pra Sampa. Of course. And I'll give it another go. (But not that Mexican place, Tollocos. That stunk.)

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It occurs to me that my reports on places always include complaints about one thing or another. I'll never be satisfied. So let me refrain from detailing my thoughts about Manaus.

It will suffice to say that I prefer Belém to Manaus, and that Manaus will need a lot of work to become an adequate host city in 2014.

It was nice, however, to get back to the familiar signs, sights, and smells of regular Brazil. And we ran into Alceu and his family (visiting from Fortaleza) on the plaza of Teatro Amazonas. The plaza is a lovely public space.

And while I met more than one paulista who explained to me (in SP) how Brazil feeds almost parasitically off the wealth that São Paulo produces, I also met two Amazonenses who explained that the industrialization (and coffee boom) of the Southeast was financed by tariff duties on rubber, and so the rest of Brazil owes Amazonas a debt.

As two small momentos of Manaus, here's a picture of Albert in front of Teatro Amazonas, and a stuck turtle at the Bosque da Ciência.





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I have a flight for San Francisco in four days.