Category: General

We are sorry for the lack of updates this week, we have been locked out of the universities system for some unknown reason, but we are obviously now back on.

This is just a quick update to let everyone know that we are back at home in England safe and sound.

We were very lucky to return on Sunday 27th October just before the storms hit, other wise we don’t know where we would have ended up or even if we would have made it home!

Suffolk has been in darkness for a day or so at the beginning of the week; when lots of trees in rural Suffolk were brought down by the wind and also took the power lines with them! But everything is back to normal now, apart from the main village is without phone lines! The North has not been affected as badly as the South of the country, much to their delight as they normally suffer the worst of the storms.

We have started to write up our final report about the Pinacoteca and our week in Buenos Aries and Rio, we will post these soon before we return back to Lincoln to start our 3rd and final year at The University of Lincoln.

Hello everyone,
Just a short message to say that we will not be blogging over the weekend as we are going away out of Sao Paulo. Tune back in on Tuesday for more exciting updates!!
We hope everyone has a good weekend!!

Yes, it took us three weeks but we finally had a Saturday where are plans didn’t go wrong! After last Saturday of trudging around SP in 30 degree heat with all of our dirty washing, we were determined not to let this day slip through our fingers!

We had a quiet couple of Capirinhas in our favourite bar round the corner on Friday night and then woke up early with lots to do!

We went to Liberdade to get a few special people some nice treats. First bit of present shopping over!

After Liberdade we walked towards the Martinelli building on the same route that Rafa had taken us on the Walking Tour. It was interesting going back with more time and we stopped in at a couple of sites he had said to visit.

The first of these was the Cathedral.

The space outside the Cathedral is always very busy- an odd mix of people who have created rough houses, policeman, preachers, food venders and buskers. One busker was performing to a group of people who looked like they were either drunk or on drugs. They all looked quite dazed but were dancing and having a good time. The amount of homeless people here is difficult to comprehend. Its a horrible thing to say but, like I said before, the point of this is to be honest, you can forget that they’re all people. It can happen in England but I’ve never felt the same isolation from people because you can see how things could go wrong and they could end up in that state. You also know that there are things you can do to improve their situation and that each town might get better as people try and help.  The scale of the homeless problem here is so enormous that its easier to get caught up in doing nice things because you feel so helpless and far from them. The language barrier and the drug problems here make it more difficult and to be honest, make me more reluctant to talk to anyone on the street, like I wouldn’t have a problem doing in England. In all of their different ways, for all of their different causes my family and friends have always shown me that if you feel like something is unjust then you should try and do what you can to change it and this is one of the first times that something has felt too big to fix. I suppose Brazil is just a much bigger place with larger problems.

Sorry if that brought the tone down. Issy’s words when I told her that I was writing that were “Oh God. I might skip that bit” so no worries if you did too.

The second was the Caixa Cultural. An old bank converted into a contemporary art gallery and museum. We saw a really interesting exhibition of Dali’s watercolour sketches that were influenced by Dante’s writings. It was a little difficult to follow without a translation and we would have liked to learn more about the works but we were still really impressed at the sheer amount of work he created and his technical skill. He was much more than a fine-moustached eccentric who painted clocks.

We were also pretty impressed by “Desmanches”, an exhibition by Lucas Simones that combined photography and sculpture in really innovative ways.

We wandered the upstairs of the Caixa Cultural to see the museum of banking in Sao Paulo. A lot of the rooms had been restored to how they were in the early 1900s when they were offices for the financial directors. We considered whether or not we would change careers to banking if we could be guaranteed the  same big offices filled with Art Deco furniture and beautiful views looking out onto Sao Paulo.

After all of our little detours we made it to the Martinelli building!

We wondered what view Martinelli originally had before all of the skyscrapers and how incredible the view would have been in the early 1900s when people were not as used to seeing huge panoramic and photo realistic views from the cinema and artworks and 3D films. It was a pretty overwhelming sight for us so it must have been even more incredible for them.

We were pretty hungry after our fill of history and culture so we decided to make the pilgrimage to a vegetarian restaurant called “Alternativa Casa do Natural” in Vila Madalena. Lots of people at the hostel had recommended us to visit this place and we weren’t disappointed. The area was very colourful and arty, full of people eating and drinking at tables in the sun, playing music and lots of plants and flowers.

It was a buffet restaurant so we had several portions of veggie goodness, including lots of beans and fried cabbage, which are two of our favourite dishes here, and papaya and watermelon for dessert!

Afterwards we wandered through Vila Madelena and saw all of the graffiti in the streets for which it is very famous.

At this point in our day we had a couple of hours left before we were going to meet our friend, Diego from the museum who was going to take us out samba. We scrutinized our map and realised that we’ve seen nearly everything we wanted to see in Sao Paulo that we could visit in under two hours. We remembered Rafa suggesting a visit to the Araca Cemetery next to Clinicas station so decided to go. The cemetery is famous for its ostentatious tombs, mainly created in the early 1900s. The tombs were enormous, covered in life size sculptures of Christ and the Virgin or with doors leading to flowers and photos on the inside. Many displayed photos of family members from the earliest to latest deceased, some of whom passed away this year. The tombs were also tightly packed into the cemetery, giving the place a strange overcrowded feeling. The layout of the cemetery was so strange to us that we did not feel the usual feelings of sadness or unease that one normally has in a graveyard.

We weren’t allowed to take photos but the images on this link should give you an idea of the vastness and extravagance of the tombs: http://totalspguide.com/post/1979/Araca-Cemetery-%28Cemit%C3%A9rio-do-Ara%C3%A7%C3%A1%29/

After the cemetery we left to meet Diego, only to discover he had left us five texts saying that the samba had been cancelled for rain. We returned to the hostel for a cup of tea and a rest then headed out for a drink and a dance with our French friend, Emmanuel. He took us to a very famous area of Sao Paulo called Rua Augusta, where people fill the streets all night, drinking and chatting.

I hope you’re all well back home!