Woke up after 9; breakfast goes until 10. Got up and showered, but not fast enough. We left the hotel at about 10:30.
We had breakfast near the Praça da República. We had suco de acerola e de maracujá (passion fruit) com leite (with milk), também dez pães de queijo (also 10 cheese-bread rolls). Yum! We tried to make conversation with the nice barista woman, but we weren’t successful. People seemed nervous for some other reason, and reticent to talk with us.
Our goal: to visit the Muséu Brasileira da Escultura (Brazilian Museum of Culture), which was supposed to have exhibits of modern Brazilian artists. The museu was not convenient to the subway. We were going to take 3 subways to get almost 1/2-way there, but decided to instead just walk the whole way there. We had an interaction with a nice young Brasileiro, who stopped when we were looking at a map in Praça da República, to help us figure out our directions.
Before leaving, we walked around Praça da República, which was nice. We saw some birds and saw some vendors, who seemed to not really be set up, but hanging out and chatting with each other. We saw some homeless people.
We walked along a big street – Avenida da Consolação – for a long time. Crossing intersections was exciting. You always need to keep one eye on the traffic, so that you can avoid the turning cars – they won’t slow down for you.
We passed um cemetério (a cemetary). We stopped in to look around. There was a poster for avoiding the disease dengue, with tips like pouring extra water out of bromeliads. We walked around and looked at the graves. They were mausoleum style, mixed with ground burial style. The ground ones were raised-beds, presumably to avoid flooding. These were planted with succulents and flowers, usually in a nice pattern. The mausoleums were pretty ornate, and each had pretty decorations. Dates on tombs ranged from mid-late 19th century (3-digit years) to modern. Some tombs were too worn to read the inscriptions. It was quite nice in the cemetério, very pretty, crowded with unique and pretty graves, lots of birds, and very peaceful. We didn’t see any other visitors, only groundspeople. It was interesting that many graves had gardens planted all over them. Some newer graves had a sign with the name and phone number of the constructor.
Soon, we realized that we were in a much richer area of town. The piss smell was absent, people wore fancier clothes, cafes looked much nicer. We saw lots of clothes shops and CD/music stores.
After getting off the main street, we entered an Italian neighborhood. We stopped and got cafes, stopped in a CD store, wishing someone would tell us which music to get, and stopped and got more cafes. We stopped and got lunch at a little shop, advertizing a pastel de shitake (shitake pastry), but instead ordered saladas com quiche (salads with quiche). A nice woman explained all of the salads and quiches to us. The salads had fresh cheese in them and were really good. The quiches were kind of dry. The cafe was crowded, and it was fun to watch people walk by on the busy street.
We walked and walked, mostly on huge streets. When we got close to the museu, there was another museu, Museu da Imagem e do Som (Museum of Images and Sound). There was an area downstairs that you could look at for free, and we wandered around there. It was cool – old photographic and recording equipment. A cool portable record player, old movie projectors, rádio de plástico branco (white plastic radio). We could have seen the upstairs for R$10, but we were having trouble figuring out what was going on. It seemed like it was a surfboarding exhibit or something (filmes de surf (surf movies)). We moved on.
Museu Brasileira da Escultura had a big fence around it, and it was hard to tell if it was open. We went around, from the main street to Rua Alemanha (German Street). There was an entrance with a man in the booth. CM asked “Está museu?” (It is museum?) Xie asked “O museu está aberto?” (Is the museum open?) He waved us on. It was a strange concrete park designed by Burle Marx, mostly empty and kind of barren-feeling, with a couple of sparse sculptures. We went down a hall toward an entrance – a sign pointed to Sala de Exposição (Exhibition Room). A nice young woman asked us to sign in and asked us where we were from. She explained that two artists were being shown, one on each side of the room. The first was paintings with shaded lines and triangular shapes. Most of them were abstract. The other was color blobs, some with stenciled letters. We were about to leave, when 2 women asked us if we were brasileiros. No? Português? No… americanos. They spoke english pretty well. After a moment, they told us that they were the artists! They asked us where we were going, and after Xie said the Pantanal, they asked us if we would stay in Bonito. They were excited when we said yes. Then they wanted to tell us about an island in the north that we should visit next time. One of them took Xie’s email address, so that she could write and tell us about the island (which she later did). CM told the other artist which was his favorite painting, which made her laugh. She explained that the curator had tried to talk her out of displaying that particular painting, but she had insisted, saying that she really like it, and so it should go in the display. The artists names were Ana Zanetti & Bia Black.
After visiting the sanitário (bathroom) (In the sanitário, CM saw a sign that said “lixo no lixo”, meaning literally “trash in the trash”. This was a popular phrase in Brazil to tell people to throw away their trash), we moved on to another part of the museu. This part had an exhibit for posters of architectural designs for different parts of buildings – condos, hospitals, businesses, etc.. It was a huge display. We looked at a few of them.
Next, we decided to head to this big park that had several museums within it. The park was called Parque do Ibirapuera.
On the way, we ran into an art school that had an extensive exhibit on “the modern Dom Quixote of South America” or something. The art was very diverse and really good. It was also cool to look in on the art classes. The layout of the building and of the classrooms was very open. Interestingly, all of the computers were blue iMac G3s.
We were very tired by the time we made it to the parque, as we had walked a great distance. It was a large park with lots of paved paths and a central lake system. We saw pigeons, crazy geese, the largish yellow bird, thrushes, and birds that looked like black swans. We stopped twice for agua de côco (coconut water). We stopped a lot to rest.
The park had a nice view of São Paulo from the lake:
We finally got to one of the museus for which we were aiming (the first one was almost closed by the time we made it, so we skipped it). The museum we stopped at was MAC (Museu de Arte Contemporânea) (Contemporary Art Museum). It was a big building, with about 5 stories. The bottom several stories were completely empty, and apparently unused. We walked up a long ramp, with one switchback per story. At the top of the ramp was the entrance to the museu. The exhibit was drawings and paintings from Japanese who had witnessed the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Drawings depicted things like many, many bodies in the river, destroyed buildings, people with clothes and flesh burned from them, piles of bodies being burnt afterwards, maggots in the wounds of survivors.
There was a cartoon (feature-length) of kids and a family during wartime in Hiroshima. People practically starving, pregnant mother, sick from malnutrition. Eventually, the bomb dropped, and the cartoon went from cute (I know it’s hard to believe, but the first part was really really cute) to horrifying. Depictions of people dying in various ways… Afterwards, the survivors struggling, still dying like crazy.
It was really interesting seeing an exhibit about Hiroshima that was neither American nor Japanese. None of the exhibit was couched in guilt or pride. It was all just a 3rd-parties expression of the horror of the humanity. It was hard to see.
On the way out of the museu, we stopped at the banheiros, 2nd public restroom we had seen with showers, decently clean. The museum had closed while we watched the movie, so the guard had to let us out.
We headed out of the park toward the nearest metro stop, walking along a huge, super-busy street. We got back to the first lake, and the fountain was lit up with pastel colors. It was a pretty neat show with the colors and water patterns changing. We realized that we had gone the wrong way, so we plotted a new course to a metro stop. We headed for smaller streets to be away from the traffic.
Along the way, we passed through an Italian neighborhood with a few restaurants. We decided to try Brazilian Italian food, for fun. We picked a fancy restaurant, quite a bit more expensive than typical São Paulo fare. The waiter sat us, Xie ordered a caipirinha (popular lime and sugar Brazilian drink, kind of like a mojito without the mint), and CM got a Bohemia beer. Menu had lots of choices. Finally we settled on Risotto de Funghi with a Chilean fungus and a “small” house salad. While waiting for food, we continued our conversation from the night before about differing incomes, privileges, standards of living, socialism, etc. The small salad came, and it was huge and had palm hearts in it. We both felt guilty, knowing that we wouldn’t finish the food, couldn’t practically take it with us, and that there were many, many hungry people in the city around us. The Risotto came. It was fairly yummy, but the Chilean mushrooms weren’t reconstituted well enough. They were definitely in the Boletaceae, but they were not porcini – we could tell from the flavor. We ate as much as we could, and then settled the bill, which came to R$100 (a little less than $50, and more than our 2-night stay in a 3-star hotel, and more than 6 times our dinner the night before, which was much tastier).
After dinner, we again made our way to the metro stop. We finally got to the stop, only to find it closed. We checked a 2nd entrance to be sure. We sighed and planned for the long walk back. CM lobbied for walking on the big streets this time, so that we could people-watch. Just as we had started, we noticed a 3rd entrance to the metro, and someone heading down the stairs. Huh? We looked, and a bunch more people headed down. We followed and found the train station to be pretty busy. At the bilheteria (ticket) window, we purchased 4 tickets for R$9. The turnstiles were typical – put the ticket in, and pass through. Down on the platform, we got a little confused. There was a map to the trains, which was easy enough to read, but it was hard to decide which side of the platform to board the train from. All of the signs seemed to be only about which exit to take to get to which street. Finally, Xie saw the signs that designated the train destinations.
The trains were nice and clean, and the only ones ever in the whole world on which could be understood the stop announcements. We had to transfer twice to get to the República stop. As soon as we were on the street, some woman started accosting us, asking for help, with many words spoken quickly. We pretended not to understand, at which point she said “mony, mony, mony” (money) repeatedly. She was dressed in decent clothes. We had to just turn our backs and walk away.
On the way back, we stopped to buy a couple of small bottles of water. One guy said R$1 each, but just as he was selling them to us, some other guy rushed up and insisted R$1.50 each. We felt ripped off and frustrated (not that it was too much money, but it’s annoying to have people try to take advantage of you), though the next day at the bus stop, we had to pay R$1.60.
