Sao Paulo - March 6th

As yesterday was a Monday, all the museums and galleries in Sao Paulo were closed.  But today they are not so we start our day (again slightly late due to TV watching) by walking to the big park in the city, Parque do Ihirapuera.  It wasn’t that far from our hostel, so we were able to walk easily.  The park is sort of like Central Park in New York, with joggers, cyclists, rollerbladers and so on all keeping fit (in this heat I can’t figure out why they are doing it at midday instead of early evening, unless it is a safety issue).  It is also the home of a couple of modern art museums, which we visit, but it has to be said that they were not very good.  Our mood was not helped by the fact that the signage to find them wasn’t very good due to massive renovations going on.

After we were finished with the park we walked to Jardins, the upper class part of town.  Here we saw a lot of high end cafes and shops, as well as an Irish Pub.  But as it didn’t open until the evening we skipped it and instead ate lunch in a Polish café, and it as very good if a little pricey.  After the shopping was done, we then saw a café called “The Best Chocolate Cake in the World” (or its Portuguese equivalent) so we had to go in and give it a try.  I have to say it might well be, I can’t remember a better chocolate cake.

Luckily all this good food is walked off pretty quickly as we then walk back to Avenue Paulista, up some steep hills, and through a park with preserved rain forest.  This gets us to MASP, the main art museum in Sao Paulo.  It is far better than the modern art museums from earlier, with a floor full of impressionist paintings, a good photography exhibition, and for me the best bit, a visiting exhibition of roman artefacts from Italy.  What made it good was that it was free on Tuesdays.

In the evening we get the metro out to a suburb called Vila Madalena which is a trendy part of town.  Its trendiness is probably because even though it has a metro stop, it is about 8 blocks from the main part of town and there are no signs, so nobody can find their way there.  OK after a bit of confusion we did find our way there, and here we ended up in a very nice French restaurant.  Because of all the ethnic groups in Sao Paulo we have gotten some very good non-Brazilian food here, and this was no exception.  After this it is a metro back to our hostel (which we have realised may not be located in a great area, but as it is at a metro interchange station it is pretty well located for getting anywhere else) and an early night for an early start tomorrow.