| Mar 20, 2006 - Sao Paolo, Brazil
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 | | show all 37 | | Dad and I in the hotel room | | Praca da Republica, from our walking tour | | Sao Paolo skyline from Edificio Italia | | |
| Sao Paolo is the sprawling overpopulated notorious metropolitan center of Brazil. At about 17 million people it is the third largest city in the world. It was also the next stop for my parents and I.
On March 20th after a nice breakfast in our hotel in Foz do Iguacu we boarded a plane, flew back to Sao Paolo, and were greeted with some torrential rains. Therefore the evening did not consist of much else besides eating at an Italian restaurant, where we all got a slight variation of what we thought we had asked for, and relaxing in the hotel room. We stayed in the city center in a very "interesting" neighborhood right near the Plaza Of The Republic. For your first stay in any new location you look to the locals for a sense of what this place has to offer and a taste of the regional flavor. And like any major city in the world these unknowing ambassadors and welcoming committee can vary greatly depending on where you are within that city. For us, I think the drag queens and transvestites did a fabulous job.
The next day the weather cleared so we set out on a walking tour of the city using the Lonely Planet's suggested stops and routes as a guide. We walked all over the city center, ate some Acai, and saw the sights. Two prominent and controversial statues were interesting. In front of the School of Law is a statue of a Frenchman kissing an indigenous woman, and in front of a church painted mustard-yellow is the Monumento a Mae Preta (Monument to the Black Mother). It is of an African slave woman nursing a white child, with a poem lamenting the fact that she must feed this child while her own go hungry.
After some more down time at the hotel we went over to our cousin's place for dinner. In addition to visiting me, this was another major motivating factor for my parent's visit. There is a whole branch of our distant family (on my mother's side) living in Brazil, which until recently we did not know about. This night we were getting together with a large number of these cousins and their families to meet them all for the first time. So we went over to Salo's apartment, and were immediately greeted by about 15 inviting and loving family members. For the next few hours we all chatted away and traded stories, with me sticking mostly to the younger generation, and my parents getting a lot of research done for their geneology projects. It was a really great experience, and just a pity that we didn't have more time to really get to know all these new relatives.
Wednesday the 22nd was already our last in Sao Paolo. After a big breakfast we decided to check out the city's largest park, Parque do Ibirapuera. We walked around a bit, but soon came upon a new museum in the park dedicated to Afro-Brazilian culture and the country's African roots and heritage. We spent a while walking around watching videos and looking at different paintings, drawings, and sculptures, most of it coming from the northern state of Bahia where I had just spent the last month. After the museum and the park we went to visit the bookstore of one of the cousin's we had met the night before, Samuca. We sat and chatted some more, and got to meet his son Rafael, yet another cousin of ours who was not able to go to the dinner. Taht night the new family member meetings just continued. We had dinner at the apartment of Sergio and his wife Maria-Lucia, and thier amazingly friendly dog. Once again time easily rolled away sharing stories and retracing history.
The next morning we woke up and it was time to head to Rio. |
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