We were feeling pretty overwhelmed by São Paulo. The analogy we’ve been making is imagine visiting New York city (about the same size as São Paulo – wikipedia) without knowing anybody in it or speaking the language very well. Imagine that it’s the first place you go in the United States, and you just picked some random cheap hotel from the guidebook and are trying to find your way around. At this point, we were pretty glad to be leaving the big city for Brasília.
We woke later than we had hoped (around nine?). We didn’t know where café de manhã (breakfast) was, so Xie had to go down and ask. It is one of the hardest things to understand, when people are giving directions, and the desk person kept saying “desligado”. We didn’t understand what he meant, until later, when we discovered that the elevator wasn’t working, and that we had to drag our bags downstairs. It didn’t make sense in the context of breakfast, but in the context of the elevator, it immediately dawned on Xie that it meant “disconnected”/”out of order”.
We eventually found café de manhã in a back corner of the second story. It was basically classic Brazilian breakfast with café com leite (coffee with milk), bread, cheese, ham, butter and juice.
After eating, we checked out. R$90 (about $45), not bad for two nights at a hotel.
Right when we were getting ready to go, it started winding and raining. Vendors right outside the door started pulling out plastic coverings over their wares. We were just about to step out of the hotel, when it really started dumping. We stepped back inside, and waited. It poured pretty hard, but only for a few minutes. When it stopped a bit, we stepped out, and got lucky enough to hit a window long enough to make it to the metro station dryly. Taking the metro is pretty easy, but it is harder with luggage. We had to transfer once, and the first train that we got on tried to close its doors on Xie’s backpack (which was hanging off of CM’s pull-luggage). Everybody jumped in to help us, and we managed to pull it out of the doors together. Those doors were closed pretty tightly, though! It was way more crowded that the day before, and it was hard to find places to stand, and for our luggage. People stared a little, but were overall nice to us.
At the rodoviário (bus station), we had a hard time finding the bus company that the information person had recommended. Eventually we split up, to cover more ground, and CM tracked it down — Rápido Federal (Fast Federal). It was a little confusing getting our tickets, but not too bad. The next bus was at treze horas (1pm), and it was dez horas (10am), so we had a while.
(Over our prep and our trip, we kept getting confused and having arguments about whether the right term for bus station was “rodoviária” or “rodoviário”. We just couldn’t figure it out and kept changing our minds about it. Finally, and this might have been when, e saw both spellings in short succession and realized that they were synonymous. I think we even figured out why they both made sense with slightly different meanings, but I don’t remember that level of detail now. Maybe if there is anybody Brazilian or anybody who knows anybody Brazilian reading this, they can help out with this ;).)
We found a nice cafezinho ((little) coffee) stand, and spent the time there, getting cafés, cafezinhos and aguas sem gas (non-bubbly water), while we wrote in our journal. CM got a dumb Linux magazine, which contained a large glossy insert about Windows software. The time didn’t take long to pass. The sanitário (bathroom) there was R$1.
Thirty minutes before our bus, we went down to the gate. There was a funny sign saying not to wander around the platform area, but to just look at the signs to find your gate, and go directly to it. Xie ran back upstairs, to use the bathroom one more time, and bought some pão de queijo (cheese bread, her favorite), which we ate while waiting. Getting on the bus was slightly confusing, because there was a form that we had to fill out, and we were having trouble communicating with the workers.
Then, we were on the bus for a very long time. It was a very, very long time. Longer, por exemplo (for example), than the whole plane trips + layovers to get to Brasil. We left SP at 13:00, and got to Brasília at around 6:30 — almost sixteen hours.
At first there weren’t many people on board, so Xie sat up in her own seat. That was nice for looking out the window, and taking pictures, and having room, and sleeping. Later it got more crowded though, and at night there were enough people that there were no double seats free for lying down.
We saw some cool stuff out the windows. São Paulo villages, fields of unknown crops (some of it was probably maracujá (passion fruit)). Some of the villages were clearly favelas (slums). There was this interesting phenomenon of people sitting by the side of the highway. We couldn’t tell what they were doing there. They’d just be sitting, looking down, with a bag or two. Were they just hanging out? waiting for a ride from a friend? Was this the Brasilian way of hitchhiking? Não sabemos (we don’t know). We saw some Walmart signs along the road at one point.
We didn’t know whether the bus was going to stop between SP and Brasília, but in fact there were many stops. Rodoviária stops were funny — sometimes the name of the stop would be posted, sometimes the driver would announce it, but lots of times we just didn’t know where we were.
Twice, we stopped at a gas station / rest stop sort of thing, both times a place called Graal, which was a bit like the Autogrill in Italy. The first stop was ten minutes, and we got these funky scan cards with barcodes on them. When you bought something, they’d register it on the card. We got two pães de queijo (cheese breads) and some water. The second time we had twenty minutes, and got some of the buffet. The self service places had really good food, even this gas station. We were really glad to have a real plate of food.
Some of the things you can get at a self service are: rice, farofa (pan fried manioc flour with bits of garlic, egg, pork, or onion), feijão (meat and bean stew), stewed pork, stewed chicken, fried banans, squashy- zuchini like vegetables, salad mixtures (like onions and tomatoes, or coleslaw with sauerkraut), stewed carrots, fried meats, fried condiment greens, feijo (beans), fried manioc chunks, french fries (batata frita), stewed okra.
Through the night, the ride was long and uncomfortable. There were off and on thunder showers, and we saw lots of lightning (usually in the clouds, though some bolts went downwards), but we only sometimes could hear the thunder over the rumble of the bus. Some passengers talked loudly, laughing and joking through the night. At one bigger stop, one woman had to get her bag out of the under-bus storage, so that she’d have it ready for quick exiting at her stop, a little while later. Xie kept waking up when the bus would accelerate to pass someone, with the didactic feeling that the bus driver had fallen asleep, and that we were plunging off the road.
