Sao Paulo - March 5th

Our first full day in Sao Paulo gets off to a slightly late start as we finally had cable TV last night for the first time in Brazil so we stayed up later than normal catching up on some US TV shows.  But we are still on the subway into the centre of Sao Paulo by 11:00 for a self-guided walking tour around all the sights.


The centre of Sao Paulo is unlike most others we have been to before in that it has no grid pattern.  This irregular placement of roads makes it much more familiar to a Dublin/London native.  It is a much nicer place than I was expecting.  The buildings are tall, and the streets are narrow, but with the sun almost overhead it doesn’t feel dark and cramped.  And there are always plazas around to give an illusion of space.  We saw all the main sights, the municipal theatre, the library, the cathedral and all the main squares.  The only one which felt anyway dodgy to us was the main square outside the cathedral.  There are many unsavoury characters hanging around here, not least the money changers and the cash for gold guys.  Needless to say this is one place on the tour we didn’t hang around in despite the impressiveness of the cathedral.  

The one deviation we took from the suggested tour was to walk down into the Japanese section of town.  Sao Paulo has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan, and it felt like it.  Most of what the shops were selling was junk, but we did get a nice lunch there.


After our walking tour finished (with lunch stops it did take 5 hours, it would have taken longer had the viewing platform on the city’s tallest building not been closed for renovations) we got back on the metro and took three lines to get to Avenue Paulista, the city’s version of a Manhattan street.  It is a long street with tall buildings on both sides, mostly financial offices, and shops at ground level.  We finish the day in a large shopping centre at the end of the avenue where Dorota gets to do a bit of shopping.   Finally we eat in a Lebanese fast food place (there being mainly fast food around the shopping centre) because like with the Japanese, Sao Paulo has the biggest Lebanese population outside of Lebanon.