Comfort Suites Stadium Alphaville Barueri

... Sau Paulo´ is not really set up for tourists... We made it to a market in a slightly rough area but the meal I had was nice. Then back on the bus and for the last 4 hours had to sit as part of a young family gathering. Which I enjoyed even more when the youngest child started vomitting...

Still now in Paraty and it is beaches and hot weather all the way...

Everybody told me "why are you going to Sao Paolo, there is nothing to see" but it is wrong. Thanks to Clarissa I have had such a great time, met lovely people, ate yummy brazilian food and saw beautiful places. The city has a very european flair and its trendy.

... Lapa. A local artist (who we met) has spent his life creating the mural and it is truly fantastic. We then caught a bus to Copacabana and took a stroll along the beach front.
Dinner, in honour of Miri and Lucy’s last night, was at a kilo restaurant, followed by a very tearful bye bye. M&L then checked into their plush hotel and rested up for their flight back to the UK, and Fi and Alice trotted back to the 3-tier bunks to slum it ahead of their 29 hour bus ride to Salvador, nice!

Friday We took a 6 hour bus ride to Sao Paulo, the capital of Brazil - an estimated 24 million people live here, making it the third largest city in the world. It´s huge!! You can definately tell a change in temperature - we now need our coats! We went our for dinner and Julie didn´t get a meal - which I was sharing already! It is very hard to complain when you don´t speak Portuguese but it saved us some money!! We all went out for drinks to ...

... going on but not knowing what was funny...I'll get over it. I'm gonna learn this language. This is just like in the beginning of Japan! And it was good to speak Japanese yesterday. Last night we just came home and went to sleep. I did mynails too, and sent emails, but we were asleep by midnight. Today Im going to the phone shop at 1pm to get a card for my phone, and fortuitously, LOST was on yesterday at exactly the episode after I left off, so Im going to watch it tonight ...

... in the end, i went up a tower and saw the whole city from the lever 52 of the building, passed in front of the theater, enteed the cathedal and wondered in the different neighbourhoods. It is kind of all divided in different ethnies, there is the arab one in one cornet, the asiatic one in another one etc... I finally walked back to the hostel which took me quite a lot of time. I met some very nice people in this hostel, really we have been talking for hours, two very interesting girls, one ...

... its numerous monuments, museums and administrative buildings it is also of great architectural and cultural interest. Just for the record, it was inaugurated in 1954 for the 400th anniversary of the city and designed by the most famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer together with landscape designer Burle Marx. The crowd around the park was what to me looked like a typical Brazilian one, probably somewhere in the range around the middle of social ladder, whether a bit lower or ...

... huge SPFC flag out the window of the bus and yell at every passing car. Entertaining. You just do not see that back home. We have a few more blogs to describe our adventures in Brazil, but we thought we would share with you a few of the things that come to our minds when we reflect on our time there: 1. Açai: the most delicious smoothie EVER that is made from a fruit found in the Brazilian rainforest. I think we had one everyday. 2. Chopp: very popular pale ...

... condoms, a plastic sheeting on the bed - and it didn`t seem particularly clean! The worst place I`ve stayed in Brasil (which is kind of saying something!), and it also happened to be the most expensive! The following morning I had a run in with a police officer in a cafe, who asked to see my passport. I took him back to my room to show him and he asked me to shut the door. I kindly told him that ...

... ich wohl am Mittwoch das Onkologietreffen in Rio de Janeiro haben werde, werde ich die beiden Tage wohl dort verbringen. Carolina meinte zu mir, dass ich unmoeglich in Brasilien gewesen sein kann, ohne Rio gesehen zu haben. Eigentlich will sie wohl auch, dass ich das gesamte verlaengerte Wochenende dort verbringe, jedoch muss ich das Hotel dort selbst bezahlen (und hier nicht) so dass ich das Wochenende schon noch gerne hier verbringen moechte, zumal São Paulo auch einige schoene ...