Discovering Sao Paulo

Our first walking tour of the day was a tour of the central district. Google said it was a 30 minute walk or 11 minutes by car from our hotel. The Uber took 30 mins to get there. When we told our guide her response was 'welcome to Sao Paulo traffic'.

We were the only 3 on the tour which made it really relaxed. To me the area looked a little rundown in parts and in general there didn't seem to be much of interest there. But the guide took us, through little alleys, into buildings, to vantage points with interesting views. Places we'd never have found on our own.

Lunch was a case in point, on the 4th floor of some none descript building was a buffet restaurant, which was very popular with the locals. There were around 20 different dishes, salads, vegetables, rices, meats, fish, all Brazilian fare. But rather than paying a set price or things being individually priced you paid by the weight of food on your plate. A 100g of meat was the same price as 100g of salad. I tried a little bit of about 10 different things, almost all good. Though while we were eating our guide said that most savvy locals would avoid rice, potatoes, dishes with sauces, because they were all too heavy! They would focus on meat, fish and salad.

By the time the 4 hour tour ended we only had an hour to get to our 4pm tour. This was in Vila
Madalena, a street art tour with a couple of bars thrown in along the way. The street art was very colourful, sometimes funny, sometimes thought provoking and some very clever and original. A few of the artists who started painting walls now had small galleries in the area showcasing their and others work. Again we were the only ones on the tour and it was around 8pm by the time we finished up eating Pastels and drinking our cashew fruit capriahinas. The lime capriahinas tasted really strong, I had a passion fruit one that tasted more like an alcopop. Easy to drink but I reckon after 3 or 4 of those your head would explode.Read more