Olinda : No Stress / Sao Paulo : No Fear

Oh! Linda. Oh! Linda. As the famous song goes... No Stress! Caiprihinias! Olinda is a nice place - it has more churches than streets. It's a living Volkswagen museum. It has nice steep roads, good for the thighs. It has a great Italian restaurant with homemade limoncelo. It has loads of artists with lots of studios, galleries and stalls to look at. Every house is a different colour. It's very nice.

After a couple of nice days, we headed to Sao Paulo for some not so nice days (or so we thought). It's very easy to stroll around in holiday mode without paying any attention to the local news. Especially when it's all in Portuguese. On the motorway into the city from the airport we passed a convoy of about 30 blacked-out military style cars - which turned out to be our friend George. I didn't realise quite how unpopular he was around here.

The Sao Paulo Skyline (it actually does look like this for a full 360degrees)

Sao Paulo is a pretty cool city. We managed to meet up with Cris, an old friend of mine from Hong Kong, who lives here. It´s been really cool driving around with her and having her take us out. I´m sure we´ve been to heaps of places we wouldn´t have otherwise... (including a Brazillian version of the Golden Arcade in Mong Kok to get a little speaker system so we can have some music).

Actually Sao Paulo is , in a funny way, like Hong Kong. I think maybe I said this about Rio too...if you combined them both, they probably would be Hong Kong. But with Brazilian people instead of Chinese...not quite, but they have the same shopping system - if you want a pair of converse, go to the converse street, or a new hammer, or a new pair of sunglasses. Si got some new sunnies (check out flickr) after 4 years of looking so he´s pretty happy about this. It´s also pretty crowded. 17million people live here...and the city just sprawls on until you can´t see any further. the only difference here is that when you stay in a hotel in Tsim Sha Tsu, people don´t tell you that you´re brave or mad. little did we know - it was the cheapest place we found. there´s a lot of sex shops and porn, and bingo halls (they love it over here), juice bars, historic buildings, a really good metro and as well as little kids sleeping on the streets, theres little kids in proper clothes running around with their parents too. It´s a crazy mixture of so much stuff and everyone we´ve met is really nice, which makes it hard to understand how violent it can be.

We´ve had a really cool few days here, but have to get another bus tonight (16hours apparently). We´ll be in Foz do Iguacu tomorrow lunchtime for a few days, then back to the coast. We´ll get some more photos up after then.

hope everyone is amazing.
miss you all.
x