My trip report #1

My first week in Brazil is a wrap! It brought me more understanding about the country and social habits of the locals and my Portuguese graduated from “Bom Dia” to “Com Carta Credito Por Favor”. I mostly speak “Portuñol” with the locals, a mix between Portuguese and Español. 
Upon arrival, Brazil embraced me in a way that I didn’t expect. It feels like I effortlessly glide with the flow of daily life here. Contrary to other counties I’ve visited, Brazilians are incredibly open to meeting and starting friendships with foreigners. It feels like the place hasn’t yet been destroyed by the mass tourism we know in Europe, but I know that this statement is probably wrong. There are plenty of tourists and I run into them everywhere. 

The journey to Sao Paulo was long and uncomfortable. The highlight of my travel day was my lay-over in Madrid, where I chatted with an Ecuadorian waiter whilst drinking a glass of Vermut. In a true Latino fashion, he tried to flirt with me in approximentally 5 minutes. Off to an interesting start!
Sao Paulo was surprisingly cold. I arrived at 7AM and the temperature read about 6 degrees celsius. The 9 million city is situated in the hills, which can make it cold in the winters. Other than our European winters, the concept of heaters and closed windows isn’t exactly common here yet. Instead, everybody wears puffer jackets, or like my parents like to call them, Michellin guy jackets. I’m staying in a nice and social hostel and join for a walking tour in the afternoon. I talk to a couple of British girls and we quickly form a hostel friendship. That night, the hostel takes us to a salsa club after some caipirinha’s for some extra liquid courage. At 1AM (read: 6AM for my body) I’m wrecked. I fall asleep shivering in my bunk bet whilst the wind is blowing through the tiny window in our room. Another concept that isn’t yet common at the hostels is a duvet. We all got a fleece blanket, the kind you’d throw over your couch at home. So, I put on all of my warm layers I brought with me for my treks in the Andes. Around 6 in the morning I reluctantly make my way to the reception to ask for another blanket. From then on, I’m no longer cold.

On my second day I explore the historic city centre on a tour with my hostel. There’s a large Japanese community which means that you can have some amazing Japanese street food here! We walk past the cathedral, which came as a surprise to me. For years this place was the epicentre of the drugs epidemic in Sao Paulo, the locals called it “crackolandia”. Users would camp out on the square in front of the church, the neighbourhood was ridden by crime and taxis would take a detour to avoid the city centre. Through razzia’s, the square was broken up and users spread throughout the city. Since a year, the Paulista government has allocated a place in the North of the city behind iron bars and away from the street view, where addicts could use without being disturbed. This is close to the metro station “Luz”. How crazy, until last years the streets that I walked were definitely a no-go zone. We watch the sunset from the rooftop of the local ‘sesc’. This is a multipurpose building maintained with taxes built for the local community. It’s a mix of a gym, cultural centre, cheap cantina and over-all gathering place for the community and working Paulistas. They’ve been built all over Brazil. This sesc is a high rise and the lay-out including a rooftop pool reminds me of a building by Le Corbusier in Marseille. Sao Paulo is a sea of high rises, as far as the eye can reach. The city is enormous and is known as a city where you work hard and make a lot of money. In the buffet restaurants where you pay per weight, you’ll see plenty of freshly shaven Paulistas with brown leather shoes, chino’s and puffer bodywarmers. The universal uniform for business.

I spent my final day in the MASP, the largest art museum in Sao Paulo. The museum has a big collection of European art that it acquired after the second world war when Europe was ridden with poverty. For me it feels like such a missed opportunity that there’s such a lack of Brazilian art in the museum, given that it is the most well-known one in the city. The architecture is a famous example of the modern Brazilian architectural style that has its roots in brutalism and modernism, but has been adjusted to fit the needs of a tropical climate. The architect was an Italian woman who immigrated to Brazil in the sixties and found success in the city. Unfortunately the zeitgeist was riddled with meritocracy and the classist character of the maker is still noticeable in the museum to this day. She believed that only good people amounted to something, and that if you didn’t, you were inherently not a ‘good person’. A view on difficult subjects such as inequality of opportunity, sexism and racism. The next time when I’ll go to Sao Paulo, I’ll skip the MASP and will go to the Pinacoteca instead, a museum full of Brazilian from the 19th and 20th century.

I get up early and take the bus to Paraty, a beautiful old colonial town. The city got its fame from her importance during the gold mining during colonisation. The gold was mined in the mines of Minas Gerais and transported for 90 km over land by slaves to Paraty, where it was shipped to Rio de Janeiro and eventually would end up in Portugal. After the construction of a railway system between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the city lost its relative importance. The old city centre is beautiful, with white houses adorned in wall paintings and cooled by orange roof tiles, sreets filled with huge cobblestones that are waiting for people to sprain their ankles on. At spring tide the streets flood, so the locals built their houses a little higher than the street. In the background you can see round hills rolling, in the typical round porous stone that you can find in this region. You probably know them from the postcards from Rio de Janeiro!
This weekend there’s a literature festival in the city named FLIP. It’s the absolute busiest weekend in the city and the prices three to five double from a normal day. The streets are filled with visitors and you can’t walk more than 2 miles per hour. I drink a few beers in a local bar and talk to some locals from Paraty. The city has a pull for creative souls and within an hour I’ve met an architect, journalist, photographer, circus artist and dancer. We say goodbye and tell each other we’ll meet later in the week, sure. These words don’t mean that much here, because I won’t see them again later. It’s more of a Brazilian polite figure of speech to show that they enjoyed the conversation.

The following day I avoid the FLIP and book myself onto a boat tour to the islands surrounding Paraty. I meet a few Brazilian girls from Sao Paulo and Curitiba. We talk about life in Brazil and about our personal histories. The conversations are mainly in English, but also in Portuñol. We visit beautiful beaches with blue water and have a photo stop at Ilha do Matrimonio, where some of the Twilight movie was shot. We crack a few jokes about it. After the boat tour we take some cans of beer and watch the sunset on Praia do Jabaquara, a beach at the edge of the city.

On Monday, FLIP is over. The streets are quiet, with only some workers that are taking down the stages. I take a bus to Trindade, another beautiful beach town in the region. Paraty has a long and shallow bay that makes it difficult for intruders to come into the city. That gave them the chance to build upon their richness and they built streets in the historic city centre that resemble a maze with blind corners. Trindade has a deep bay and more rough sea. The gold couldn’t be transported via this bay because there were Dutch pirates lurking around. The city of Trindade consists of one street filled with overpriced restaurants. The bus there is a traditional city bus, but has a fence that you need to enter in order to take a seat. This way, it isn’t possible to ride for free. Halfway through our journey, the bus stops and we’re crammed into a small mini van. Apparently there are roadworks going on and we can’t continue on the big bus. I’m standing next to a young man that clearly looks too sporty for Brazilian beach norms. Fancy running shoes, high socks, a sport short and shirt, fanny pack and earbuds that connect at the back of his head. He looks like he was going to run a marathon, whilst the other people on the bus were going to the beach in havaianas and old shorts. He was an American from New York. We talk with our backs slamming to the sides of the bus whilst the bus driver flies through the winding roads with a type of confidence only someone who knows the road would have, or someone with a lot of trust in ‘mano do céu (bro in the sky, or also called, God). We walk on the stunning beach but the waves are too strong and we know better than to test our luck. We decide to go to a beach bar, where we see two white men walking past.
The American thinks they’re Dutch, but I know better. You can spot a Dutchie from a mile away, definitely with their height, and these weren’t ones. No no, I said. I look at their shoes: one is wearing Salomon hiking shoes and the other is wearing Teva sandals. I think they’re Germans. We make a bet where the loser has to buy the other a beer and I make my way to the guys to introduce myself. They’re PhD students from Frankfurt. Yes, a free beer for me! We sit together and hang out for the rest of the day. They’re in Brazil for a conference and decided to take an extra week off to explore the coast, how amazing! Like true Germans, they’d made a hike to the end of the beach trail before having a drink at the bar. They walked past the Piscina Natural, a rock formation that breaks the waves and makes a natural pool within the sea. It looks stunning. If I ever get proposed to, please do it there!

Whilst swimming at Coconut Island the day before, one of the most beautiful islands in Brazil, I accidentally cut my foot open. The Germans convince me to go to the pharmacy and get some disinfectant spray. Not a hard quest, given that there seems to be a pharmacy every 4 buildings in Brazil. (What are these people buying in the pharmacy that keeps all of these businesses afloat?) My beach excursion at Trindade was too haughty and walking becomes more and more difficult. I try giving my foot a break by spending a morning on the beach in the city and doing some writing, but after having a quick call home the diagnosis came in: the wound is infected. Shit! I make my way to a local hospital, which is free, and get prescribed a bunch of antibiotics. One every 6 hours, another one every 6 hours, one every 12 hours, and a creme every 8 hours. I’ve never had to take this many pills in my entire life. I hope this will work!