Te amo Brasil, saudades!
BRAZIL | Tuesday, 8 July 2008 | Views [334] | Comments [1]
After three awesome months in Peru, Ben and I bid farewell to the country at the Lima airport with a scoop of gelato from our favorite Limeño shop, Quattro D. We were ready for a new country and psyched to be heading to Brazil, but of course, it was not entirely smooth sailing. Our flight to Saõ Paulo was scheduled for a midnight departure but then delayed for 2 hours for no apparent reason. By the time we did take off, the flight attendants wanted to serve dinner and show a movie, and all we wanted was to sleep! When the sun rose, we were then informed that there was fog in Saõ Paulo and that we would be routed to Rio de Janeiro for the time being. Great. We ended up sitting on the plane in Rio for an hour, and then returned to Saõ Paulo without hitch.
First two impressions of Brazil: Shit, it's expensive, and shit, we don't understand what anyone is saying! Our cab ride from Guarulhos Intl. Airport cost $55 US alone, and despite all prior knowledge of how costly Brazil would be, we were still a bit shocked at the price tags on everything.
And the language, the language! If you can read Spanish, you can get by, but our attempt to speak Portugese is laughable. It took Ben a good three days to stop saying "Gracias" and say "Obrigado" instead. And aside from the handful of words that my college roommate Juliana taught me at ND, I was struggling as well just to get that right pronunciation and inflection. Unlike the other countries we've visited, many Brazilians, even in the tourism industry, speak no English or very little Spanish, so we've gotten by with a mixture of all three languages, plus sign language and lots of thumbs ups.
It's a great country though. It's often said that no one face can be defined as Brazilian, and that is definitely true. Brazilians are loud, gregarious, and you just get the sense that everyone is just ready to party. Not a bad place to spend our last month.
We started out in Saõ Paulo, the largest city in Brazil in which 20 million people live. During our walking tour of the city center, we went up to the 35th floor of the national bank builing to get a birds-eye view. The city is ginormous! Three times the size of Paris, and it just sprawls forever. It reminded us a bit of NYC with its fast pace, cost and the rainbow of people and culture. We were there for just three days but did see most of the city center and historical sites, the trendy neighborhoods off of Av. Paulista and Jardins, and "Little Tokyo" in Liberdade, where we had really great Asian street food.
And speaking of food, Saõ Paulo is first rate among cities, but we only splurged once on a sushi lunch. The quality and quantity were amazing. We couldn't linger for long though, as the beaches in the northeast were calling...
Tags: on the road, sightseeing
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