Sao Paulo

After a few more days in Rio, we headed down to Sao Paulo to witness the 4th biggest city in the world. On entering Sao Paulo, from the suburbs to the actual centre of the city takes about 2 hours driving, constantly surrounded by skyscrapers. The enormity of the place is difficult to put into words because it´s just off the scale.

Our time in Sao Paulo, albeit shortlived, was excellent. Our quaint little hostel was the first place that we stayed with a bit of a family vibe. The whole place was run by a family and as it was quite small, we soon got to know everyone staying and working there and made friends very quickly.

Our first night out consisted of us going to a ´rock´club. Now, having been to many a ´rock/indie´clubs in London, we were all a bit miffed as to what the actual genre of the music was. On requesting songs, and literally, EVERY song we requested the dj laughed at us. We couldn´t even make out what it was he was playing, all we noticed that there was air guitar being played close by and none of us knew why. The place was interesting though, small enough, outdoor bar full of twenty something emos, alternatives, a few punks and some indies. A small bar outdoors at the back of the club reeked of weed and beer-a common stench in South America.

The next day we wandered the parts of the city we could reach by foot, wandered down the massive Av Paulista ambling into bookshops along the way. Being in a city that huge and it being 32 degrees eventually took it´s toll and we hopped in a cab back to the hostel for another night on the tiles.

This time, taken along to another Rock bar, this time there was a white supremacist screamo band playing upstairs, which although aroused the interest of some of us, I wasn´t hanging around for the encore. Downstairs was a much more disco based affair and we spent the night dancing away till the wee hours. There was even an 87 year old man giving it absolute socks on the dancefloor.

Due to bus times to Argentina we had to leave earlier than we would have liked, also due to the fact that Sao Paulo is quite expensive we decided to move on. We left Sao Paulo about 10.30pm on the friday night and didn´t arrive in Buenos Aires until 4pm on Sunday. This bus journey was, as you can imagine, hellish. I won´t go into details but take my word for it that it was rubbish.