Day 62 - São Paulo (Part 1)

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

For so long as the medicine lasted, I slept really well. And then when the effects wore off, I had a restless night, with a runny nose, stuffed ears and aching body. When I finally got out of bed, I was still feeling sick, and I had to decide again whether to take it easy or go out anyway.

I had breakfast, and then I decided to do as much as I could today, and come back whenever I felt tired or sick. I also decided to go by taxi today because I was not in the mood to figure out the metro system with a Portuguese speaking person at the metro station counter. Not today.

So first I took a cab to Avenida Paulista, the most important avenue in São Paulo, and the financial hub of the city with many banks along the avenue, both domestic and international. It is about 3 to 4 km long. This was once a residential neighborhood lined with mansions and gardens, owned by the coffee barons of the 19th century. These palaces were demolished over the second half of the 20th century to make room for skyscrapers as the area developed into a business centre. Only a handful of these mansions remain to this day. 

I asked the cab driver to drop me off towards the end of Avenida Paulista, near a neighborhood called Bixiga. Bixiga is like an Italian town. I read that Brazil is home to the largest population of Italians outside Italy. Many Italians came to work in the coffee plantations in São Paulo in those days, and many of them settled down in the Bixiga neighborhood. Their descendants now have opened many restaurants and 'cantinas' selling all sorts of Italian food. 

From the end of Avenida Paulista I started walking along the avenue, until I came to Casa das Rosas. It was formerly a French-style mansion that belonged to a coffee baron in the 19th century, and is now made into a cultural centre. The original architecture remains, and you can almost imagine a coffee baron smoking a cigar and drinking scotch out in the porch in the evenings. Beautiful.

I kept on walking and I saw some old looking buildings along the way but they looked derelict, I guess it could have been a mansion once but it has yet to be bought over and developed by a current business magnate. I stopped at HSBC bank to withdraw some money. Finally! An ATM with English instructions.

On the way I saw an interestingly shaped building, it is a black triangle jutting out, with the initials FIESP on it. I learnt later that this was a commercial centre.