In São Paulo, our health luck finally started to run out. Pretty much as soon as we got to our apartment, I got hit with a nasty head cold that pretty much went from zero to a hundred real quick. Normally, head colds for me start with a tickle in my throat that I recognize immediately, and then I spend 2 days nursing myself with the hope of heading it off ahead of time. This one just walked up, kicked in the door, and made itself at home.

Between that, the fact that we only had three days in the city, and the fact that São Paulo is paralyzingly massive, we didn’t really do much while there. Flying into the city is a stunning sight, with the city stretching out endlessly in all directions, filled with seemingly infinite high-rises. Wikipedia lists it at the largest city in the western and southern hemispheres, and it was difficult to figure out how to adequately explore such an expanse.

With those three things working against us, we opted to mostly lay low and enjoy the neighborhood we were staying in, sort of a small city within the larger city. We stayed in the district of Pinheiros, an upper class area of this very wealthy city. The neighborhood is full of cafés, interesting restaurants, and oh my god hills. Holy hell, the hills. We had about a 10 minute walk to get us to the main area with all the restaurants, and the hills we had to climb to do so were brutal. We were a sad state: Erika limping around on her hurt knee, and me shambling along slowly from my head cold.

Our first night (and again on our last night, for that matter) we went to a restaurant called Carlos which had fantastic pizza. This is where I also put together a realization that I’d been slowly having: I’d developed a deep appreciation for Heineken. The beer situation in South America is, generally, not good. Almost every country has a national beer, and it’s usually okay. A lot of cities will also have their own local beer, which is also okay. And a few places we’ve been are clearly inspired by the American-style beer culture, and trying to develop one of their own—Bogotá is one city that comes to mind. But, generally, if you want a beer, your choices are the national beer or the local beer.

Or Heineken.

Heineken is available pretty much everywhere, and is pretty much always cheap (in Brazil, for instance, you could get 750ml bottles at a restaurant for usually $2-3 USD). And it’s reliable: it’s good, and every bottle will taste exactly the same—which you can’t always say about the local stuff. So, don’t feel like risking the local pilsner tonight?

“Heineken, por favor.”

Beco do Batman

Near our apartment, between us and the main restaurant area we walked to, is a weird tourist attraction called the Beco do Batman, or “Batman’s alley”. The Beco do Batman is a few narrow pedestrian streets with walls filled with exquisite street art. Just stunning, beautiful street art. Apparently the area got its nickname in the 80s when someone had painted Batman on one of the walls. You can still find Batman, or Batman logos, in a lot of the art.

We’ve seen a lot of great street art in South America—it’s really been one of my favorite things—but wow, the art here was just incredible.

Sushi Night

São Paulo has a large Japanese population—in fact, it’s the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. Thus, we thought São Paulo might be our best shot at sushi for a while.

(We haven’t really wanted to risk eating raw fish in South America… except for ceviche… we eat that every time it’s available. It’s drowned in huge amounts of lime juice, I’m sure that kills everything)

The neighborhood of Liberdade is basically a Japan-town. Erika found us a well-reviewed restaurant over there, so we got all dolled up and headed for the subway!

The São Paulo subway was super easy to use… but you wouldn’t know that from reading about it online. I certainly didn’t! In looking into it, I found five different web pages that listed five different prices (I’m honestly amazed that one of them turned out to be correct). There were discussions of various different multi-use cards you could get (this one’s for tourists, and this one’s for senior citizens, and this one is for Tuesdays, and this one is for when it’s sunny…) and none of it was very clear.

Anyway, it turned out to be quite easy, and thankfully the per-ride cost was a nice even number ($4 reais), which was a nice change from the subway in Rio and the bus in Foz do Igaucu. (No, I don’t have 10 cents I’m sorry, nobody ever gives me change, they just look at me nastily and roll their eyes and wave us through. Just like you’re doing right now! Why the hell is the bus ride $3.10 reais?!?!).

I’m sorry… anyway, we had a lovely sushi night! The restaurant was small, simple, and superb. The staff was incredibly friendly, and the food was great. And the Heineken was just as good as it always is.

Portuguese

After two and a half months of living daily Spanish lessons, I was happy about getting a break from it by coming to Brazil. Now that we were doing Portuguese, I’ll admit, it was also pretty nice when Erika would complain about not understanding, or not having the words to put together a response. Welcome to my 2018 honey!

We both had a lot of fun learning Portuguese, and were sad to be coming toward the end of our time in Brazil, as we were just now starting to get decently comfortable. As in, we were finally getting to the point that we could put together simple sentences. Very simple.

We had a couple Uber drivers while we were in town that wanted to be very chatty. Were they deterred by our insistence that nós não falamos portugues? They were not! But we made the most of it, and it was fun. They were incredibly nice, and it was great to work on the language not in a restaurant setting.

But as I said, we’d finally gotten to the point we could piece together some simple thoughts, and Erika and I have had a lot of fun laughing about this ever since. Behold some of the incredible things we’ve said to our drivers in conversation!

“Sushi… for dinner!”

“The city… is big!”

“No rain!” Or, when the situation calls for it, “Rain!”

Seriously, I can’t recommend more strongly that everyone should put themselves in these kinds of situations sometimes. It’s incredibly humbling and makes you feel so much more sympathy and understanding for people who don’t speak your language well.

These taxi conversations also made me further realize just how much Spanish I’d learned. I kept finding myself saying, “I could answer you in Spanish!” It gave me a lot of new confidence for returning to Spanish in Bolivia.

I did get complimented on my Portuguese by a Brazilian woman at Starbucks at the airport leaving São Paulo. Obviously, she could tell we were making do with very limited language capabilities. The barista told me they couldn’t make a caramel macchiato because they were out of caramel drizzle. So I asked, in perfect Portuguese, can you make it without the caramel?

Nailed it!

Erika and I are enjoying continuing to learn Portuguese in our free-time, and are looking forward to getting to practice it again when we make it to Portugal this summer. It’ll be great not being able to understand anything again, since we only know Brazilian accents.

What’s Next?

I wish we could have spent more time in São Paulo. It’s a fascinating, daunting city, that we just barely grazed. We’ll definitely have to return the next time we drop everything and travel the world!

But, unfortunately, our time in São Paulo—and, with it, our time in Brazil—came to an end. We both really loved our time in Brazil, and want to spend a lot more time there.

We took an Uber out to the airport, which took almost an hour, and was stunning because the entire drive was through dense, massive city. Seriously, this city goes on forever.

Oh, fun São Paulo airport note. São Paulo has three airports: one close-ish to the city center, one way outside, and a third one way the fuck outside. We visited them all! We had a layover at the way-the-fuck-outside one on our way to Florianopolis, we flew to the close-ish one when we came in from Rio, and then we left thru the way-outside one. The trifecta!

Anyway, there we had a flight waiting to take us to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where we’d start inching our way to the silly-high Bolivian elevations we’d been spending the next several weeks at. See you in Bolivia!