Sao Paolo, Brazil

Interestingly, Brazil was our least anticipated destination, but ended up being one of the best ones! Read on to find out why.

Portugese is such an alien language to my ears. It sounds sorta like Spanish and French were squished together. My rudimentary and Steph's basic Spanish did not help much at all.

Gula Gula

Fancy restaurant which was kinda average.

Japan Town

Grocery shopping was mysteriously fun.

Brazil is home to the largest Japanese community outside of Japan.

The verandah has the awesome magatama thingies.

Had some sushi finally.

Cool anime shops

Cool... anime? Shops.

Brazil has a super annoying power plug, only available in this country. We spent ages finding one, when turns out the Japan town has so many spares they make trees out of them.

Had the best ice cream ever! Black forest, and another one that was acai and condensed milk.

Genshin Impact Cafe

Farro Dance

Time to dance! There is a popular new street dance called Farro. Created in Brazil, we took a workshop to learn more.

It was pretty fun! I'm not very good at leading it at all, and the "direction of movement" is side to side instead of back and forth like swing, so I struggled a lot.

Food

We always want to try the local food when we travel. We asked for recommendations from our local friend Gilberto (mentioned below) on "Feijoada". Kind of like a rib bean stew thing. He recommends Bolinha.

It was pretty great, but very overwhelming. They'd give us random things like a alcoholic lemon drink, oranges which are meant to be mixed with the mains, and all sorts of other things.

You get like a... bean soup thing in a cup to start.

Also again, we don't speak Portuguese so we had no idea what we were ordering.

Meeting Friends

Cool thing is we met Gilberto in Buenos Aires when he was on holiday, and he actually lives in Sao Paolo! Pretty close to our AirBnB as well.

We met up for dinner at a restaurant that is representative of northeast Brazilian food.

Afterwards, some ice cream.

Thoughts and Conclusions

Sao Paolo was pretty great. Very very busy, hustle and bustling city. Good food, cool Japan-town, lots of things to do.

Of course, a large section of the city is destitute, poor and dangerous (the favelas). And on the flipside, there are wealthy neigbourhoods.

Sao Paolo is huuuuuuuge. I believe its the largest, or one of the largest cities in the southern hemisphere.

We haven't even touched on other parts of Brazil yet. Perhaps next time.