São Paulo Day 2

Happy birthday Allan! 🥳

Our first full day in São Paulo started with a walking tour. It was a big group, and at times hard to maneuver around the city with so many people. Also, because we were a large group, we couldn't go inside any of the buildings, but we did learn some interesting things.

Our walk started at the Circolo Italiano building. When São Paulo invited Italian immigrants to settle in the city, they felt that they needed somewhere for them to gather and socialize. A few architects submitted designs for the building and in the end a German won. Many people didn't agree with his because surely an Italian should design the Italian gathering place, but oh well!

We continued walking around the downtown area stopping at more buildings along the way, some were harder to see than others. The national library was a nice building and it has a mosaic out front with the word 'library' in many languages. I hadn't even noticed until the guide pointed it out.

When we stopped at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, we got a little peak inside too. The building itself is very grand with columns and a quite a few statues. Inside was a red carpet and white marble with gold accents. It was very fancy, even just peaking through the fenced doorways. We walked past the park across the street from the theater, but there were large gray barriers blocking most of it from view to protect it from Carnaval. We walked across the Tea Bridge and stopped about halfway to look through two large buildings at a smaller one with a small crown on the top. That building, which is dwarfed by the buildings around it now, was the first skyscraper in São Paulo.

We finished our walk across the bridge to the Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo, or city hall. This building has some controversial rumors. It's a tall building built by an Italian architect. There are two small balconies at the sides where you could come out and address the public. Above them are three Ms. Two of the Ms are for Italians in São Paulo, like the architect who designed the building. By the third M is rumored to be honoring Mussolini who was friendly with the architect and man who commissioned the building. There's no confirmation, but I think the rumor is damning enough.

We went to the Catedral Metropolitana de São Paulo. It's a huge church, and I was disappointed we couldn't go inside as a group. Our guide recommended we go in because you can visit the dome and the crypt inside. She also said to look out for Amazon animals like Easter eggs inside the church instead of traditional gargoyles. The cathedral has ubserfne some serious renovations over the years. During one of these, they noted a lot of water getting into the building. Apparently two of the towers on the church were accidentally left unfinished, so during the restoration they finished two of the towers which closed off the building and allowed for proper drainage.

I'm front of the cathedral is Praça de Se and Marco Zero de São Paulo. Our guide didn't do a great job of explaining what this mark was for, so we will need to investigate further when we come back to go into the cathedral. We walked quickly through the plaza because it had many homeless people and as such a big group of tourists, we were huge targets. Allan and I hung back from the group a bit to try and draw less attention to ourselves. I'm not sure if it worked, but everything was fine. São Paulo has a large homeless population and a housing issue. It reminded me a bit of Hawaii.

We walked through Pateo do Collegio where some monks set up a school
It was knocked down, turned into something else, but then a replica of the original building was out back here. There was also a large statue featuring the struggles of the indigenous people of Brazil. The guide made some comments about history being written by the victors, but didn't elaborate how it was related to the statue.

We continued from here through the financial district. We stopped at buildings like the stock market (which is an old bank), the Bank of Sãu Paulo, and a building that was modeled after the Empire State Building. Also in this area is the Condomínio do Edifício Martinelli. Martinelli wanted to create the tallest building in Sãu Paulo, but this is before buildings were tall. He kept adding and adding floors until the government told him he couldn't add any more floors. He negotiated a few more floors and ended up with a magnificent building. You can clearly see the sections where he added a little bit more each time, especially at the top which was a different color from the rest of the building and the whole floor was his living space.

Our last stop on the tour was a monastery, Mosteiro de São Bento. The building was large and dark. Inside the monks sell bread and beer that they make themselves. We quickly popped our heads in, and were surprised by how dark it was inside. There were some beautiful rainbow stained glass windows, but the panes were very small and dark colored glass, so they didn't let much light in. The features and decorations in the church were also very dark which added to the mood of the church and monastery. We didn't look very long because we planned to redo this walking tour and go into the buildings in a couple of days.

We said goodbye to our Chinese friends from Antarctica who were also on the tour and made our way to MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assisi Chateaubriand, on the metro. From the outside, you'd never know this was an illustrious art gallery. It looked like a nice office building. When we went in, the first floor we entered had a special exhibit on about LGBTQ+ art. We decided to visit the main gallery and come back to this one if we had time. We made our way to the top floor and entered a large, open room. Inside the room, the art hung in or on clear glass panels. The name of the piece and the artist was listed on the back of the artwork. The intention was that people view the artwork without expectation or prejudice based on the name of the piece or artist. It was effective, but some artists are just so iconic you immediately know who painted it. For example, Picasso, Monet, and Van Gogh were some that were easy to pick out (but they weren't the only ones). It was a really interesting concept and I enjoyed looking at all of the art in one place on level playing ground rather than going from room to room, or missing lesser known artists in favor of rooms I know have more well known artists. We did have time to pop into the temporary exhibitions. A lot of the art represented the challenges that the LGBTQ+ community faced and continues to face. It focused on expression, icons, and things like body image and confidence. It was a lot to take in!

After the art gallery, we walked back to Bebeto's and had a quick turnaround to get showered and changed before Allan's birthday dinner. A Casa do Porco was back towards Republica where we started our tour this morning so once we were ready we got back in the metro and got there just in time for our reservation. It took a while for us to get served, which was frustrating, but once the food and alcohol started coming, we let all of it go. The restaurant serves 8 courses with small dishes in each course. We also opted for the wine pairings for Allan's birthday. The first few courses were small bites. Each dish contained pork in some kind of way. I really loved the bread with pork crackling and brown butter. I never would have considered baking bread with that inside it, but it added a unique smoky flavor. There was so much food, and it was all presented beautifully. We also finally tasted cachaça, which is a liquor made from sugar cane. It was stronger than we expected and they gave us a small bottle as part of the first course! Everything tasted delicious, the only downside was the service was a bit meh (mistakes with which course to serve us, broken dishes, etc). By the end of the meal, we were full and smiling after some lovely, intentional quality time and good food and drink. It was nice to do something special like that together.

Following the meal, we got an Uber to Caixote, a bar back towards Bebeto's apartment. He was there with a friend and invited us out to have a drink with them. As it was Allan's birthday, we treated ourselves to some drinks. Bebeto picked a good place because it was 2 for 1 all night. Our first drinks were passion fruit caipirinhas which is the cocktail of Brazil. These cocktails are made with cachaça and were very delicious. We ordered another round before heading back around 1:30 in the morning. It was definitely well past our bedtime and the most we had drank since New Year's Eve.

It was an incredibly busy day, but a very special happy birthday one ❤️Leggi altro