So last we spoke I left you with the cliffhanger that not all was quite well with this bus, but as it would happen my memory is s*** and I´ve realised its the next bus that was the cliffhanger related bus and it was this bus that had the daft shop with the barcode system and this bus that chose to play a french film to a bus full of english and portuguese speaking people. By all accounts it was a very uneventful bus journey (and one of our shortest at a mere 6 hours) so I appologise for leaving you all in yet more suspense.

Anyways we arrived to Sao Paulo Tiete bus station and managed to navigate ourselves on to their metro system where there appeared to be some kind of large student white party going on. We did manage to successfully communicate with the Sao Pauloian metro people unlike Rio so that was a relief as there was a very large queue for the ticket office (none of the metro systems in South America appear to have thought of the idea of using electronic machines for dispensing tickets) getting off at Se, which frankly looked a bit scary at this time of evening (8ish) we hopped into a taxi and headed towards the first hostel in the guide book. After the taxi driver got a bit lost we found our way at the hostel and booked in with a nice receptionist who spent the entire duration of our stay saying he spoke really bad english whilst speaking perfect english - better than mine - to the extent you sometimes forgot it was his second language he frequently asked me to slow down.

So it transpires all the dorms here are single sex something the Lonely Planet guide quite neglects to mention as I have increasingly come to believe because the writer has had no idea or not actually asked (or indeed stayed in the place) over the course of our trip in South America you will see an increasing disregard for the opinions of the Lonely Planet Guidebook. The Hostel (Sao Paulo Hostel) is actually a very nice hostel good sized rooms AWESOME private bathrooms for each dorm, friendly staff and pretty decent location. We did venture out to the shop to buy something to eat at 9pm tho and it was rather scary - little gangs of teens and 20s out and about with a smattering of homeless people, we were glad we´d only brought out the money we needed (just in case). Safely back in the hostel, fed and tucked up in bed, we had ann early night.

We got up at 9am the next day and had a very filling brekfast before having a meander around town to the Praca Republica where a lively but entirely unlocatable Sunday market was supposed to be found. We passed the Teatro Municipal - nicely art nouveau, a very nice park just down from it, Cathedral Se (which Lucy preferred to Rio´s as it was more traditional and gothic than contemporary and modern).

We then made our way to Liberdade, which is the areas little Japan, which had a very funky street market with asian and oriental stuff for sale and a few street market stalls we were tempted to try, but were like ridiculously busy and loud (making bad communication hard) and so opted for a chinese restaurant instead (I know! A chinese restaurant in Little Japan, but Lucy wasn´t much up for sushi and with the exception of sushi I´m not big on fish, which made up the majority of their menus obviously) Here the woman was after numerous attempts trying to explain to us that what we had ordered was enough for about 5 people (each dish being large enough for 2 adults) we thought we had agreed on half a portion of everything in that case, but being presented with the food we were still not too sure.

Next we headed towards Bella Vista the "Italian" quarter of town, but it began bucketing with rain and the map was somewhat confusing and so we only just caught a corner of it, before deciding to hail a taxi to MASP (Art Gallery of Sao Paulo) and cheacked out some cool paintings that together were supposed to really document the progression of art from reigious paintings to portraits, self prortraits, landscapes and contemporary art. I particularly liked an artist from Buenos Aires called Leon Ferrari.

After a night of a few drinks and a burger in the hostel bar whilst watching Finding Nemo in spanish (surprisingly entertaining still) we went to bed for our early start to catch the bus the next day.

We stuffed ourselves on breakfast once again and managed to get oursleves to Sao Paulo Bus Station, which is utterly massive (it is as we would later discover probably larger than Buenos Aires international airport) alas the bookshops still had not a thing in english (damn them!) but managed to enjoy a Bobs Burger that had been reccommended to us on nunmerous occassions. Once again there was a bit of a lanuage barrier one I am sure this time was entirely of their own creation and boarded the ill fated bus you have finally been waiting to hear about ... and shall in the next blog entry.