Riding the Metro in Sao Paulo

When I landed in Sao Paulo I was scared. I was in a huge city in a new country, with new money, a new exchange rate, and a new language. My flight got me there at 9 pm, and I knew the airport was a good long way away from downtown, where my hostel was. Oh, and it was Christmas.

I ran into trouble immediately. I was trying to take a bus to the metro center, at which point I planned to give up on public transportation and call an Uber. Uber is huge in Brazil. The woman at the bus kiosk understood that I wanted to buy a bus ticket, but she kept saying "no," and trying to explain something to me.

Portuguese is a weird language, similar to Spanish sure, but it's like Spanish with a the spelling garbled and the pronunciation is totally different. People who speak Portuguese often understand Spanish, but they speak back in Portuguese, which I do not understand. My Spanish, while undoubtedly much better than when I started, is very limited. I know almost no grammar rules, but I have memorized entire sentences about ordering food and buying bus tickets and talking about where I've been and where I'm going. I know a lot of vocabulary. I've been getting by. But I really struggle to understand Spanish. I usually get about one word in three and divine meaning via context clues. Shake up the pronunciation, and I'm lost.

I am utterly baffled by Portuguese, and it is particularly frustrating to be able to speak to them, but not understand what they say back. It's like being back at step one in Argentina when I passed my phone back and forth to people so we could use Google translate app.

Anyway, someone who spoke English intervened with the bus lady. She wanted to put me on a coach for $5 more that would get me much closer to my hostel. I said yes. The kind English speaker took me all the way to the bus, and told the driver to point me in the direction of the metro. On the bus I met a Brazilian backpacker on her way home from Africa, who told me the Metro was very safe, and she was going the same way, so she babysat me onto the metro. From there I took an Uber. Sao Paulo really is huge.

This was the first hostel I really hated. It's hot in Brazil, and this place had no ac. Additionally, there were about 5 mosquitoes flying around the room. I really can't sleep in a hot room, and to make things worse, I knew I had to put on leggings and long sleeves to protect myself from the mosquitoes. Zika, y'all. I sat in bed sweating and occasionally swatting at a mosquito buzzing in my ear. I don't think I slept much the whole night. The bed shook when the guy on the bottom bunk swatted mosquitos. I couldn't get comfortable because of the heat. When I woke up, I was shivering in sweat soaked clothes with little lines of mosquito bites on my feet, hands, and face. And I had a fever again. This cold will probably hang around until I can get myself a lot of water and a lot of rest. Neither is forthcoming.

Sao Paulo does not have a good reputation among travelers. Almost everyone told me to do one day there and move on, even though it has a lot of famous art museums and hosts some of the best restaurants in the world. I had a plan for Christmas day. I would walk around their central park and a couple other famous places, I would go to church, and if I could, I would try to find an open restaurant and buy myself a nice meal. I'd leave the 26th.

None of that happened. I looked online for a bus ticket and found that the only bus not totally sold out to Parati left at 3pm. But the website was an English tourist version, so I decided to go to the train station and check things out.

It didn't work out. The only bus was 3pm, or on the 28th, and I had no intention of staying in Sao Paulo in that shitty hostel for 3 days. I rushed back to the hostel to grab my stuff. When I did, they had made a lovely Christmas lunch for us. It was free and I was starving, so I scarfed some down.

I planned to take an Uber all the way to the train station instead of the metro to save time. when I tried to order one, it kept telling me it couldn't use the card I gave it to pay for my last Uber. I had to pay in cash for both trips in order to book any future ubers and the estimate for the cost of last night's Uber plus the train station was *just* over the amount of cash I had. No worries, the hostel told me there was an atm in the metro station.

I Ubered to the metro station. No atm. There was a bank across the street. It was closed for Christmas. The guy at the Bodega next to the bank was trying to give me directions to a third atm, but I didn't understand the Portuguese at all. It was so, so frustrating.

I looked at my watch and realized that by the time I untangled the Portuguese, found the third atm, got money out, and called an Uber, I would miss the bus. I was dead in the water.

Depressed, I took my third metro ride of the day to the train station, wondering what to do. Maybe I would go somewhere completely new. I could just take the next bus that left and not look at the destination. Or maybe I would just skip Parati and go straight to Rio.

"I missed the 3pm bus, could I please get a refund?" I told the guy at the bus kiosk in Spanish.

"Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese," he replied. Then he waved his magic wand and showed me there was also a 3:30 bus to Paraty. Why on earth he didn't sell me that ticket originally, I don't know, but I pushed away my annoyance and told him I wanted it. It was 3:20.

I ran and this time I made it, so now I'm on the bus to Paraty, where I hear the primary tourist activity is cruising around in a boat drinking. Sao Paulo can go fuck itself.Read more