Our first
weeks in Brazil we only visited places with a beach so next in our agenda was
the megapoly city of Sao Paulo. The fact that this city has 4 times more people
than in the whole Finland made us quite scared before even entering to the city
and already the first day in Sao Paulo we faced the truth what this kind of big
city means...
After
travelling 6 hours by a comfy bus we arrived to the terminal which is also
South America’s biggest bus terminal. This time being smart we had written down
the directions to the hostel beforehand and we knew which metro lines to take.
Even that we had read from our guide book that we should avoid taking the metro
during the rush hour, we still decided to give it a go – a totally wrong
choice!
When we
first arrived to the platform we thought that there has to be something wrong
with the metro because we saw thousands of people waiting for the next metro.
However, after asking some locals what’s going on and is the metro running,
they just said that this is normal rush hour time for every day! We determinedly
pushed our way to the crowd and used our bags to avoid getting squeezed by the
people. We waited about an hour and maybe 20 metros before it was our turn to
squeeze inside. Magda had been more pushy and got into metro before me and I
had to wait another 5 metros more before I could get in too. When it was my
time to get in, someone stepped on my foot and I lost my sandal but in the
crowd I didn’t even have a chance to look for it while people were pushing me
to go further inside. It was only 4 stops but it took forever because all the
lines were stuck and the metro had to wait a long time before it could even
move anywhere...
So after
this adventure, we were so happy when finally arrived to our hostel. However,
when we realized that this hostel was nothing as nice as it was described
on the website, we got so disappointed of the whole stay in Sao Paulo that we
just hoped that we would have skipped the whole place.
After all, next day we
gave a chance to the city and wanted to see what the city has to offer. As
being girls we were pretty excited especially about the shopping possibilities
in such a big city. However, we don’t know
where Brazilians get their taste of fashion but for us the choice of clothes
was just terrible! So disappointed from the shopping we concentrated to the few
sightseeing places the city is famous from. One of them is the Japanese district which is quite unique as every big city has a china town but
Sao Paulo has the biggest area of Japanese influence after Japan itself. And the sushi
we had in the Japanese town was probably the best part of our day.
Another
thing that Sao Paulo is famous from is the skyscrapers and the tourists can
also visit the tallest building in the city in one hour in the afternoon. For
our luck, it always started to rain during that time and the first day the
tower was shut but luckily on the second day we could quickly visit the tower
and see how big this gray city actually is.
So for us
Sao Paulo didn’t offer anything special and we were more shocked of certain things in the city than being amazed of. Especially the huge gap between the poor and the rich in the city was pretty noticeable and homeless people could be seen in every part of the city. Even the much spoken nightlife of the city was disappointing
when we once tried to explore the fancy bars of the city. So after two days in
Sao Paulo we thought we seen enough and were ready to leave the city.
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