Feeling the gravitational pull of São Paulo

I'm in Porto Alegre, after a very long bus ride from São Paulo.

It feels a little out-of-place to be back in the more developed part of the country after several months in the Northeast and North. (Brasília doesn't count. Brasília is Tomorrowland at Disneyland. My friend Bernardo has a good post on the subject, and I think he's pretty much right: Brasília is the dream of upper class Brazil and its chosen self-image: clean, ordered, hierarchical, and proper. Everything in its place, and the poor out of sight and out of mind. For the record, as the bus left Brasília, it stopped in the towns on the periphery, which were very much cities of the interior in the Centro-Oeste. Not poor, but not gleaming and ordered either. The staff who clean, serve food in, stand guard in, and bring people to the shiny Ministérios live there. Brasília is Tomorrowland - with respect to social ills here - like Alagoas is Realityland.)

In any case, I've been to Porto Alegre before, and I'm glad to be back. It's a nice, compact, walkable town with crisp, cool weather and friendly people. I don't stand out as an exceptional gringo, which means only that fewer people watch me pass.

In the land of red meat, I'm back to eating mountains of vegetables and fruits. Hooray for buffet restaurants that have mango, papaya, pineapple, bananas, caquis, and tangerines!

Two observations led me to write this post:

1. Greece right now looks like Argentina in 2000. In a previous life (read: when I was in Brazil three years ago), I was interested in currency crises, and what politicians do to speed them up or prevent them. A post on how austerity measures are just a temporary stop-gap measure without real economic recovery - which means that they usually fail - and how bondholders are trying desperately to avoid paying the consequences for their actions, is here. (Warning: poor writing.)

2. As I mentioned above, I stopped in São Paulo to go apartment hunting. I stayed almost exactly thirty-six hours in the city, but I must say that I'm excited to be moving there. Frankly, I'm excited to be finished with road trips and a new city each week. São Paulo, however, has a big city vibe, a host of things to see and do, and Korean restaurants! I'm not a terribly big fan of Korean restaurants; I just mention them to illustrate the wide variety of cuisines that await. Such a variety of cuisines is not found in other, smaller towns like, say, Rio de Janeiro.

To celebrate the impending move to São Paulo, in homage to a travel series for dumb people with more money than sense, I present


36 Hours in São Paulo

São Paulo is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way from Staten Island to the Bronx, but that's just peanuts to São Paulo.

Friday

8:00 a.m.
1) BARRA FUNDA.
Arrive at the western bus terminal in the city, after a thirteen-hour bus ride from Campo Grande. Feel glad that no one sat next to you and that making another guest appearance at an English language school in Campo Grande on Thursday afternoon didn't make you miss the bus.

Barra Funda is one of three (four?) long-distance bus terminals in the city. You can't buy a ticket for Porto Alegre because those lines are run out of another bus terminal in the city. Barra Funda mainly covers trips to areas west and northwest of São Paulo.

9:00 a.m.
2) JARDINS IS PRICEY.
Get to your hotel (Formule 1 Jardins) and have them tell you that you can't check-in until noon, and that it will cost you extra to stow your luggage for four hours. Immediately regret not booking at another hotel. Put in a text message to the real estate agent recommended by a friend, informing her that you're in São Paulo.

10:30 a.m.
3) SÃO PAULO IS BIG.
Decide to meet the real estate agent at the apartment visit by walking from Jardins to Moema. Arrive late, sweating despite the temperature around 55 F. It takes a long time to walk anywhere in this city, which may explain why few try. Note the bus lines, supermarkets, and Burger King nearby. Resolve to continue to not eat at Burger King.

Balk at how pricey short-term rentals in São Paulo are.

4:00 p.m.
4) WORLD CUP.
Watch the World Cup in your room, after a late R$9.90 all-you-can-eat lunch. Be glad that São Paulo restaurants seem to be cheaper than restaurants in Rio de Janeiro.

Do laundry in the hotel sink. Think about how you have a well-developed, if not perfect, system for hotel room laundry. Buy dinner at Carrefour next door, along with a chip for a São Paulo cell phone number.

Saturday

6:30 a.m.
5) IBIRAPUERA.
Thankfully, the apartment will be near the large Parque de Ibirapuera in São Paulo that has a 6 km dirt trail loop. It feels like an escape from the city in the same way that Central Park does. In both cases, some parts of the park run right along busy streets while other parts are quietly hidden behind trees and next to lakes. Both parks also have museums inside their boundaries.

Go running there.

3:00 p.m.
6) USA-ENGLAND.
Watch the World Cup match in the hotel restaurant with another hotel guest from Ghana who once lived in London. Chat about how cold this part of the country is.

6:00 p.m.
7) TIETÊ.
São Paulo's main long-distance bus terminal is the largest in Latin America. It is remarked that you can get from Tietê to any other city in Brazil by a more-or-less direct route. Buy a ticket for the eighteen-hour ride to Porto Alegre.

8:00 p.m.
8) POA.
Chat with a teacher from Porto Alegre and his family. Board the bus, where there's a copy of Estado de São Paulo in every seat, and remember how much nicer bus rides are in the Southeast than they are in other parts of the country.

Arrive in Porto Alegre at 3 PM on Sunday. The bus had delays because the anti-lock brakes were causing problems. The Serra Gaúcha is winding, green and looks like central California in the springtime, after the rains.

Oh, and that image at top is a planetarium at the Centro Cultural Dragão do Mar in Fortaleza.

UPDATE: Or if you like over-paying for shit in order to feel like an insider, there's always the original guide.

Eurocentrism

From the New York Times, the official newspaper of upper-class white people:

Why We Travel: Submit Your Photos

Share your best travel photos from Europe, then tell us the backstory. Where did you go and why? What's happening in your photo? What does it mean to you? We'll publish a selection of the top images this fall.

Why restrict entries to Europe? Who wants to go there? (As a disclaimer, the example photos they publish are not all restricted to Europe.)

Another piece of the puzzle

I've long known that I work best in the evening. Before I met Bethany, I was convinced that I was most productive between the hours of 10 PM and 2 AM. I hope an explanation appears in the New York Times soon as to why some people are more productive at night. (They specialize in medical articles on topics like that - the series What Ails the Upper Class generates many pageviews. It's true - this article is historically the most emailed.)

However, I have no explanation for why my most productive work hours have come on the weekend (particularly Friday and Saturday) while in Brazil.

Tonight, another (big) piece of the puzzle fell into place. It turns out that the World Bank conditioned state fiscal reform loans on the creation of a regulatory system in place to deal with privatization. The original documents are all here. One day I'll explain why this is so important to my dissertation. Non-academic readers might find it dull. Academics might also find it dull.

Unfortunately - depending on your point of view - I'm energized for another five hours of work this Saturday night.

Instead, for my own sake, I should instead go find a bar for the Argentina-Brazil World Cup qualifying match.

Some other brief highlights from the past week:

1. I sent off interview requests, and heard one response. Interviews start next week.

2. I tried to swat and kill a mosquito, and put my palm through the glass window. Shards of glass fell nine stories. No injuries, but the window won't be fixed until Tuesday. (Nothing is open on the weekends. Monday is Independence Day, the day Dom Pedro I declared that he wouldn't go back to Portugal on the orders of his father, and that Brazil would be independent. He declared this in between Sao Paulo and Santos, from the banks of the Ipiranga River. This act is mentioned in the national anthem, and every city has an Avenida Sete de Setembro.)

3. I have a cellular phone and, more importantly, it works. Unless the situation is dire, please don't call it - receiving and sending calls here is terribly expensive.


And to add one thousand words, the view out the living room window on a cloudy day. The day was sufficiently cloudy to block out the view of Jesus, which you can normally see by sticking your head out the window and looking right. This is my normal office view. It looks over the Modern Art Museum and Gloria Marina in the foreground, and the Morro da Urca and Sugarloaf in the background.




UPDATE: Brazil qualify for the 2010 World Cup with a 3-1 win over Argentina. My roommate was cheering for Argentina; as the game came to a close, even the waiters (at Amarelinho, a mildly famous bar in Cinelandia) started razzing him. And boy, do Brazilians dislike Diego Maradona. Do they ever. They also know several ugly epithets in Spanish for him.

On the NY Times

Could the Times op-ed page just have either Tom Friedman or Roger Cohen write one column three or four times each week? Or pay them both each half-salary?

Having two white male liberal international hawks who see a technological fix to everything but don't really understand politics as columnists doesn't make much sense. They have the same epiphanies and thoughts, with the only noticeable difference being that Tom travels more and Roger doesn't speak in terribly mashed-up metaphors.