SAO PAULO - Tudo bem

Ola! Before we begin, a quick mention must go to the wonderful people at American Airways who, desperate to make sure none of their passengersm are ever inconvinienced by their incompetence, go out of their way toi ensuure that no flight connection is ever missed. Having been delayed two hours flying from New York to Miami and fearing the woirst for my Brazil connection, I settled down to several episiodes of Two and a Half Men safe in the knowledge that I had missed my flight and could spend the next few hours hurridely trying to rearrange my entire Brazil placement. Until I got to Miami and found that American Airways who´d handily delayed my connection by a peachy four hours. Gotta love ém.


Me and the third biggest city in the world. In this picture you can see the city from thirty two floors up. What you can´t see is me getting more and more paniced as the minutes at such a height progess...

Now according to Davina, the tirelessly wonderful co-ordinator of cultural exchange gurus Experimento Brazil, this should have been good training for a country which doesn´t do schedules like the rest of the world and where things are a little less hurried than anywhere else... Except Sao Paulo, which is a mad house of the highest order. And an awesome one at that. Spirits took a little while to raise upon arrival when Sarah (of Wednesday Shopping in New York fame and who, poor girl, isn´t getting away from me for the rest of the year) and I arrived to grey skys and tactile cold. This was Brazil: south of the Equator glamour and here I am searching for my fleece. However, a few days of intensive Brazilian living training soon warmed everyone up.


The Global Adventures volunteers at the end of our gruelling ´Learn Conversational Portuguese in Three Days course. Tamara (far right) put up with many pomegranite and poached egg related diversions to turn us into the crack conversational team we are now.

There were language lessons; a truly scary three days of flashing back to my sixteen year old French days. With the added surprise that I actually knew some of the langauge and that some of it was actually *right.* And then there was Salsa. An hour´s lesson, in Portuguese obviously, followed by all night live music and exhaustive foot movements. Nobody seems to go out in this town until about eleven, and then they spend the whole night systematically working their way through every partner in the room before heading back to work in the morning via the coffee shop. Special mentions must go to the old guy with the flat cap, and the crazy red shirted moustache guy who took a special liking to us.


Salsa at Club Buena Vista. Smoky atmosphere provided for by time lapse camera setting and, uh, smoking.

And then there was football. South America does not make sense without it and, after three months becoming more and more obsessed with some mysterious game called soccer it felt time to get reaquanited. Sadly, our hosts for the evening, the reserve team for the Sao Paulo Corinthians, felt that their cup match with the hilariously named Argentinian side River Plain wasn´t worth their effort and proceeded to put all and sundry to sleep with a thoroughly un South American like style of play. In fact, it was pretty much Vauxhall Conference stuff (or whatever we call it nowadays) But the experience of being in the massive Sao Paulo station and aquring many exciting Portuguese expletives was worth the ninety minutes of lukewarm entertainment.


Sao Paulo by night. And, yes, now I´ve got it working I´m getting the value from this particular photographic setting.

Of course, the real reason for this Brazilian adventure is the volunteer work Sarah, I and five others are doing down in Florianopolis for the next three months (the other volunteers head north to Natal) working in a project in the middle of the favellas (that´s slums to the uninitiated) Sao Paulo, though, has been a worthy introduction to the work. You don´t have to drive too far from the bright lights and helipads to see the city´s own favellas. And, if you´ve seen City of God, you´ll know what sort of a life some there experience. It´s going to be tough but, then, the same rules that apply on summer camps apply here: if you don´t try to do anything, don´t expect anything to happen back. Brazilians are relaxed in some ways, but they never stop doing anything.