We arrived to the madness of Sao Paulo late evening, and completely underestimated the size of the city. After a tiring trek around the `cheap hostel district` to find somewhere to stay, we ended up in a dodgy looking hotel and dumped our bags. Our hunger had made us pretty much crazy, so we dashed on the metro to the area full of Japanese restaurants. There is a massive Japanese community in Sao Paulo, and the food was literally calling us, so we had sushi and noodles, a welcome change from the usual!

Sao Paulo is massive, and unfortunately the public transport doesnt cover the city that well, so things are much, much farther than they seem to be. It has a population of over 17million, and is the most multi-cultural city in Brazil, but apart from being such a cosmopolitan city, walking around we found that it is just high-rise buildings and banks- pretty much a concrete playground. However, there are a few things that the city is renowned for- fashion, art, galleries, museums and clubs.

We managed to experience Sao Paulo the ´Paulista´ way- We visited the Parque do Ibirapuera, a large park containing museum and galleries, children flying kites, fitness fanatics, speakers, skaters and families on picnics, all in the name of summer! It was a beautiful park full of monuments and lakes, and really a cultural heart of the city. We went to the Museu de Arte Moderna, a small collection of local artists work. Another gallery we went to was the Musea de Arte de Sao Paulo (MASP), a lovely collection of European and Brazilian art, housing some Picasso, Manet, Monet and Candido Portinari. The influence of art on the city was apparent in the market in Praca da Republica, where there were lots of paintings, precious stones and carvings on sale. Being on a tight budget meant that shopping in Sao Paulo was definitly a torturous event! They have so many shops and some great fashions in massive american-like malls.

One of the more interesting things we visited was the Instituto Butanta at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), a snake farm with over 1000 snakes, from which venom was used to make anti-venom and vaccines and monkeys that had once been used to test drugs on. Whilst we were watching the monkeys, one of the baby monkeys had managed to escape the main cage and got into the caged walk-way. The baby managed to crawl up the chicken wire to the top of the cage where the mother was struggling to try and pull the baby through a tiny hole on the other side of the cage. The keeper started to walk into the precinct to try and get the baby back into the main cage. As he did so, all the monkeys (about 40 of them) started screaming at him, thinking he was about to harm the little baby. They were trying to take a slash out of him through the wire and were going crazy. The Keeper managed to pry the baby away from the top of the cage and put him back into the main cage. As he did so, the mother ran quickly to grab her baby, and the whole pack started to scream at the keeper. It was sad to watch as the monkeys must be really afraid of humans after having been exposed to harsh testing in previous years.

As you can tell by this blog entry, we were not too enthused by Sao Paulo, so after three days of city, concrete and rain, we were ready to move on...