Hello, Olá, Hola: A Week in São Paulo

This post originally appeared on Frontier Psychiatrist on April 12th, 2013. 

Driving into São Paulo from Guarulhos International Airport, the countryside quickly develops into a sprawling maze of skyscrapers that nearly all look identical, our cab zooming past favelas, under-bridge encampments, and stop-sign absent intersections. I can’t resist biting from Anthony Bourdain’s crass, albeit not entirely inaccurate appraisal that the city feels like L.A. threw up on New York. Yet dazed and buzzed after a ten hour flight, I’m ready to give São Paulo a second go.

Six months ago, a good friend, fellow travel companion, and incidental tour guide who has moved to São Paulo, suggested I visit the city again, exactly three years after my first visit, and go to Lollapalooza, which I wrote about last week. That was the main impetus for the timing of this trip, off-peak tourist season as the Southern Hemisphere is getting cooler by the minute, and the weather turns unpredictable, with multiple scattered showers throughout the day. In my two weeks in South America (São Paulo and Buenos Aires), I experienced a chaotic ride of ups and downs, of being positively surprised by exploring, of feeling underwhelmed and disappointed by expectations, to feeling physically ill to the point of deliriously craving my bed back in Chicago, to being put totally at ease with the hospitality and openness of locals.

The traffic in São Paulo is intense. You may remember my love of biking from past articles, especially for getting around in foreign cities, so it’s a shame to find out how impossible of a mode of transportation cycling is here. To help reduce traffic, the city has implemented a rodizio (meaning rotation, and also the name of the internationally popular format of meat on a sword tableside steakhouse service) during weekday rush hours: for both residents and visitors, the last digit of your license plate dictates the one day each week you cannot drive at morning or evening rush hours. A solution to congestion that seems not only a pain-in-the-ass and arbitrary, but one wonders if it’s even enforced at all (although this blogger argues never to risk it).

Ironically, Brazil’s national motto is “Ordem e Progresso” (Order and Progress). While the country has certainly seen its share of the latter, due in no small part to the strengthened economic policies and international relationships by president Fernando Cardoso in the 90s and early 2000s, it seems to have built its foundation with less of the former. In a word, another American expat who has been living in Brazil for five years summarized the country as “lawless” and “like the Wild West without the vigilantes.” This characterization seems bizarre, because certainly a country playing host to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, should more or less have its act together. But as my friend saw firsthand the other week, even something as seemingly simple as a music festival is not without logistical screw ups, to the point where even Brazilians are not reluctant to criticize the lack of ordem.

Of course, there isn’t a city in the world without its flaws, and while those of São Paulo may seem obvious and easy to pick on (e.g. telephone and electrical wires just hang wherever they please), it’s not a city devoid of advantages and cultural individuality. While exploring the plush and stylish Jardim neighborhoods, my friend and I stumbled upon the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS), currently hosting an exhibit of photography and videos by Ai Weiwei, one of FP’s favorite contemporary artists, presented for the first time outside of Europe. Further, there’s the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) and the Museum of Modern Art in Ibirapuera Park, not to mention the excessive amount of street art around the city, particularly in the alleys of Vila Madalena. Combine this with the stipend the city gives its citizens to spend solely on the arts and São Paulo unexpectedly becomes a city that knows how to cultivate artists and interest in their works. If only as much thought were put into architectural creativity.

While the traffic is awful, bike rental kiosks can be found all over the city, sometimes just blocks apart from each other. The city does block off one lane of major streets every Sunday (ciclofaixa) for the sole use for cyclists, an event I had hoped to join until I was treated with the greater honor of being invited for lunch on Easter Sunday with a Brazilian acquaintance and his family. It was a casual gathering, and while I had only just met a lot of these people and know zero Portuguese, felt very welcomed and non-intrusive for the afternoon. The absolute highlight of the lunch was a dish called camarão na moranga, essentially a baked pumpkin stuffed with shrimp and cream cheese. The culinary delights of Brazil I remember from my previous trip were meat, sandwiches, and sushi, so this unique and almost contradictive dish was a shock to my taste buds by how good it was; I look forward to attempting (and most likely failing) how fantastic this dish was at home for my gringo friends.

But of course, every amazingly brilliant and surprising twist São Paulo threw my way was matched by something equally disappointing. While no meals I had were entirely awful, many were underwhelming, and apparently inconsistent with my friend’s past experiences at these restaurants. The goat cheese and walnut bruschetta at Chez Lorena was a great starter, but the entrees weren’t entirely satisfying. The Peruvian restaurant Suri, while certainly creative with the variety of seafood and ceviche options, just didn’t stand out in flavor as it should have. The 24-hour sandwich joint Bar e Lanches Estadao was busy as ever for the late hours, but the unexpectedly dry sandwich didn’t help the drunk munchies. However, the scene at nearby Alberta #3 (the place responsible for said drunk munchies) is a nightlife must. It’s hard enough to hear Richard Hell, X-Ray Spex, and the Smiths at bars in Chicago, so it was quite enjoyable to know that Paulistas get down with the same jams I dig.

The little things between cultures are always the most interesting and where from nearly opposite sides of the world can combine the two, mostly stemming from simple conversations: The creation of a bi-lingual pun (“frenemigo”), getting the waiter to cheer on the samba group between songs with us when no one else would, proving to a bartender that no matter how much I shouldn’t, I most certainly can shoot cachaça. Growing up in the States, and especially near an urban area, I’ve always been exposed to the idea that we are the total sum of the rest of the parts of the world. But the advantage of traveling continues to confirm how global and cross-cultural the world outside the US is, and how simplistic, condescending, and just flat-out untrue the thought is that the US is unique in its cultural integration. The act of sitting in a Chinese restaurant, drinking Brazilian beer in Liberdade, the Japanese neighborhood of São Paulo, is no stranger than finding good Mexican food in Beijing or eating bacon in Tel Aviv.

São Paulo is a huge city, and as Lollapalooza ate up two of my days there, I had less than a week to take it all in. I actually managed not to repeat a thing I did on my first visit (save for walking underneath the MASP and not actually into it…next time), and there’s still plenty I still have unchecked on my to-do list. Next up is the beautiful city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Check back next week where I fight every ounce of sickness calling me to stay in bed to explore as much of the city as I could in just a short time, including a weekend of street fairs, delicious meals, not getting stabbed, and more of the good and bad that makes any city a city worth visiting.