Brazil : 1 São Paulo
Brazil Travelogue 1: São Paulo
(This text originally written on Feb. 19, 2003.)
We left Japan on Jan. 24, and were very lucky to have great friends there who took great care of us. It was one of the coldest winters there (made even colder by the fact that we were in Thailand before arriving.) The cold had taken me quite by surprise, and had devastated Si utterly. Whenever she went out in Tokyo, Si bulked up like an American football player (e.g. two sweaters under a winter coat) , and she would still yak about the cold. And she complained so much that I was starting to get stressed, and on Jan. 24 when the plane landed in sunny LA (with daytime highs of 28C), I breathed signs of relief.
A brief two-week stop in LA allowed Si to get warm, and also gave us some time to visit some friends there: I am delighted to report that Huy and Hanh are doing fine in Irvine, all but settled in a nice one bedroom apartment that is about a ten-minute ride from the great Vietnamese food of Little Saigon (and the excellent Lee’s Sandwich store.) Delio and Cris haven’t changed much at all, still enchanted by their California dream and pursuing it all the same, in the Japanese neighborhood of Gardena.
Besides visiting friends in LA, Si and I were busy preparing for our trip to Brasil by replenishing supplies. I bought 65 rolls of film: 20 Kodak black and whites, 45 Fuji Provias and Superia for the two month trip. 65 rolls seem like a lot, but when you calculate about one roll a day, then it is really not that much. (When I travel, I usually end up taking two rolls a day so I have actually under-estimated my demand). In any case, I know I will be kicking myself in the foot when I look at the processing bill for all those rolls of film, and will give me a good reason to convince Si to go digital, as in DSLR. But that is another story.
We arrived at 7am at São Paulo on Feb. 6th after a ten hour flight from LA. The first thing I checked to make sure I was actually in southern hemisphere - sorry, it’s only my second time - is to verify that water actually is drained in a clockwise fashion when I flush the toilet. (And it did.) This is some theory that I have heard from somewhere, and being quite ignorant of physics of course I had forgotten to check in Los Angeles before departure whether water there was drained in the counter-clockwise way. Maybe some helpful readers living in the northern hemisphere can flush the toilets a couple time for me and verify the results.
A week in São Paulo - the biggest city in South America, the third largest in the world - initially reminded me of New York. Sure, the weather is not the same at all because SP (São Paulo) winters are quite mild, relatively speaking.
Laid out on a grid, Manhattan is much easier to figure out than the maze-like “St. Paul.” However, walking around São Paulo Centro district, I see people hurrying through streets lined with the old office buildings around Sé and Ipiranga (not unlike the financial district of NYC), the corner lanchetes reminding me of a NY neighborhood diner or pizza parlor, and like NYC, the lack of parking spaces render SP a metropolis where most people rely on buses or the subway, also known as the “Metro”.
Furthermore, SP is the cultural and financial center of Brasil, just like NYC for the US. Both cities are more or less built by immigrants, each with its Italian[pic], Jewish and Chinese quarters. (I was told by my mother-in-law that the well-known Little Tokyo district in SP - Liberdade - these days have been taken over by Taiwanese and Chinese immigrants[pic]. She should know… she lives there.) Many of SP’s immigrants had come from Europe during the latter half of the 19th century as the São Paulo area experienced a coffee boom, and Japanese people started immigrating there in droves starting in 1908. Only until recently were most Asian immigrants Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese, many of whom control retail shops and channels in Liberdade as well as in other parts of SP. From watching its people on the streets I could feel São Paulo´s vibrancy, and again, I couldn’t help comparing it with the equally energetic NYC.
So it is in São Paulo I found much joy taking street photographs, hoping to capture the looks of its people. I snapped about seven rolls of black and white there (trying to keep to a roll a day) but we will have to wait for the end of the trip to see how it turns out.
Other random notes about São Paulo:
1. There are no Starbucks here. After a couple days it is easy to understand why: restaurants normally give out free coffee at the end of the meal, and it is damn good coffee that comes in little cups (cafezinho).
2. There is a big road called May 23rd (23 de Maio), but I never figured out what so important happened on that day in Brasilian history. If you know, please tell me.
3. Brasil is the only country in the world I know where you’d find men drinking beers before noon at the corner bars, and after a while I found myself doing the same thing.
4. We have been watching NHK (Japanese National TV channel) every day at my mother-in-law’s. NHK has a live feed to Brasil. So every day around 6pm here in São Paulo we can see what it is like in Shibuya crossing in Tokyo at 6am. Weird.
After leaving São Paulo, we are now in Manaus visiting Si’s sister Akemi and her family. In a couple days we will go visit the region called Minas Gerais “General Mines” that became famous well before the coffee boom made São Paulo the dominant city in Brasil. Can you guess which mineral started the madness state of Minas Gerais? (Hint: it is the same mineral that sprang San Francisco into greatness. ) The answer and our travelogue will be continued next time.
