SAO PAULO, 16 de Março -- It actually all started in New York, where a Paulistano and I were smoking cigarettes in the lounge and waiting for the flight, and within ten minutes i had a ride to the hotel and an offer to teach me how to order coffee once we arrived. She didn´t come through with the ride, but she did teach me how to order the coffee, and for what it was worth, she set my mind at rest, calming the nervous energy that i´d been drowning in ever since I decided to make the trip. The flight was almost too short -- i had been sleeping for two hours, and the lights come on and it´s breakfast and fifty minutes until landing. Not bad, not bad. Finally, somewhere worth going that you can get to in under ten hours!

The airport is dingy and smelly, it´s miserably humid, but relatively temperate, and folks are less aggressive than i´d been told. The taxi to the hotel took an hour in hellish SP traffic, and the driver didn´t know where my street was (Avenida Jandira) -- I was like, yes, turn onto Av Ibirapuera then left on Jandira, it´s right on the corner -- proving once again, that I spend way too much time looking at maps.

Hotel is excellent, a boutique property on a quiet side street in the mostly middle class Moema neighborhood, surf shops and drogerias (one memorably named Farto) and little cafes. And a few blocks away, the Shopping Ibirapuera, one of the dozen gigantic megamalls dotting the skyscraper park, sucking in hordes of Paulistanos daily. Everyone is here, including me. My perch in the Saraiva Mega Store (think Barnes and Noble, spitting image) is comfortable, although nobody believes in airconditioning. I have to go now, but more later. I´m meeting someone for drinks, and it looks as if i´m hiring a guide and a car for tommorrow´s tour of the city center -- no one here seems to think it´s appropriate for me to go alone.

Having been through there this morning, I can´t say I disagree. But good news -- for the day, a private car and driver and english speaking guide -- $70. Now that´s what I call a deal. Excuse me, I need more coffee now.

Tschau!

SAO PAULO, 18 de Março -- The problem with Sao Paulo is not that it is uninteresting, the fact of the matter is, without a car, one is helpless. True true, the Metro has a great reputation, but as someone who dislikes patronizing the New York City Subway after midnight on a good day, taking the underground in a foreign city with a skyrocketing violent crime rate somehow just doesn´t sit right, especially with my hotel so desperately nervous at the fact that I like to leave the neighborhood on my own. For some reason, I can´t help but want to listen to their concerns, but at the same time, I can´t afford an armored car.

Essentially, getting to know this place is a bitch. Imagine Los Angeles, spread out and evil towards pedestrians, except with New York congestion -- everything built up, up, up, endless, towering above the crowded streets, crowded with cars. It´s fitting that it should be so -- this town is somewhat the Detroit of Latin America, with something like 80% of car production taking place in outer parts of the city. The love affair with the automobile is longstanding and deep rooted, and therefore, one has a city centered around drivers.

Yesterday began bright and early at the Mercado Municipal, one of the singlemost exhilerating of public markets i´ve ever encountered, in an elaborate 1930´s grey complex on the northern edge of the center city. Aisles and aisles of everything you can imagine, and then on to Luz, where the old trainstations and good museums and a park prettier than Ibirapuera (the main game in town), called Jardims de Luz.

Yet with all the lively behavior, life and energy of the Centro, Paulistanos of means want nothing to do with it. It´s too crowded, too old, too dirty, too dangerous.

Pity, that -- it´s the only place in Sao Paulo that feels like I expected the city to, a city of 17 or 18 million (everyone has a different number for you). The remainder of town has some very nice neighborhoods indeed, few of which a tourist will ever see, not because they shouldn´t, but because it´s simply not worth making the effort to bust ass in expensive cabs to get there, when all there really is to do is go to a shopping mall. One of which I happen to be sitting in right now.

Few neighborhoods have one main drag -- every side street is clogged with shops, but only one or two on a three block stretch have any use to the visitor. But that´s okay, there are places like the Liberdade, which is somewhat of a Little Tokyo to the nth degree, with faux lantern streetlamps hanging over its streets, japanese food and trinket shops, groceries and all the things one expects in an asian neighborhood.

What am I getting at? I don´t really know. Blame it on the disjointed city, but my feelings are scattered, I can´t find focus, because it seems there is simply no focus to be had. As I said, the center of the city means nothing to anyone in town that has any kind of money, those with muito reais spend their time in the mall or in the Jardins, shopping at La Perla and Louis Vuitton in the tiny boutiques on Rua Oscar Freire and environs. There are restaurants galore, in fact, it´s what you do when you come here. Eat. Eating, shopping and some culture -- there is no comprehensive district, theatres and cultural venues are all spread out, albeit some interesting ones, such as the Teatro Municipal which is in the best neighborhood in the city, perched above the lush Vale do Anhangabau, a park built over a freeway tunnel, a sweeping, kilometer long greenspace dividing the center city into two parts. The Sala Sao Paulo is one of the little preservation victories in this city bent on destroying it´s history.

Which reminds us, the current center of business life in the city will soon no more be along the Avenida Paulista, the spitting image of Park Avenue, but with the tatters of Latin America at street level. Twenty years ago or more, the scores of coffee baron mansions were decimated in favor of striking glass towers, along this wide avenue that runs the ridge that is the highest within city limits. But time takes its course, and architecture gets dated, and now, these days, business is seeking newer, cleaner, swanker environs, along the Brigadeiro Faria Lima, in places like Vila Olympia and a neighborhood near the river called Brooklin.

And so the story goes...this altogether, irreparably scattered, hopelessly disjointed city keeps dispersing, further and further away from itself, and all the while, the real Brazil, the good two thirds of the nation that makes almost nothing for a living and struggles to pay the bus fare in the mornings, will still have the city itself, the Centro, exciting and wonderful and full of beautiful architecture in buildings such as Oscar Niemayer´s Edificio Copan, the Edificio Martinelli that looks like the Waldorf in New York, except that it faces a narrow pedestrian street and requires one stretching one´s neck to actually get a good view. There will always be the Praca de Se with the Catedral Metropolitana looking down on a busy square, there will always be pedestrian bridges named after Tea and Coffee (Viaduto do Cha, Viaduto de Cafe´) and yet, most Paulistanos will be too busy hanging out at Shopping Morumbi or Shopping Iguatemi to notice that it´s still there.

They must have torn a page from the Los Angeles story, because damn it, it seems as if i´m reading the exact same book down here. Which just goes to show, that wherever you go, nothing really changes. The color and language and customs may be the same, but when people get a little money on their hands, they tend to want to protect it, and they tend to lose their taste for adventure.

What a shame. So is Sao Paulo boring? Depends on whose version you´re getting. Mine? Absolutely not. I love it. I just wish I had a car.

Alas, Rio comes quickly -- one more day of this, and i´m on to the land of Cariocas and frivolous sex, something which i´m sure i´ll get nowhere close to.

I really should get out more. Although I discovered that you don´t necessarily have to go looking for the party -- with a Capirinha in your hand, the party comes to you, whether you´re looking for it or not. God bless Pinga.

No, you dirty-minded spanish speakers -- in Portuguese, its what they call sugar-cane liquor. Dirty people. And to think you thought I meant something else.

Tchau for now!

19 de Março -- Today, on a side street in Brooklin, I saw my second crime in three days -- an old man lying in the street, a bloody gash in his stomach. There were about forty people clustered around, waiting for the ambulance.

The first was an almost-crime, strolling along the Viaduto do Cha on Saturday, my camera dangling from my right hand, i was looking at the architecture, when suddenly my guide, who was walking about two steps behind me, lurched forward with a yell, clutching his left pocket. Fortunately, his cellphone was still there, but a split second before, the grubby hand of a ten year old abandonista had been reaching in to extract whatever he could grab at.

By the time we turned around, the child was twenty yards away, heading off into the crowds. Just like that, it was over. Strange.

So, we´ve established this much -- Sao Paulo is a big city, and hard to get to know. But let´s get honest here -- the most interesting part is the old downtown, which is the only place in town that has the color and street traffic that one would hope for in a megalopolis such as this.

Tomorrow comes Rio, which will be better, simply because i have made arrangements in advance for a guide. SP was such a pain in the ass without a car. Right now, i´m sitting in an internet cafe in a shopping mall near my hotel, because there´s really nothing else to do, besides eating.

You can eat anything and everything here. Good pizza, good sushi, good middle eastern food, good hamburgers, any kind of meat -- it´s hard to find a bad steak -- thai, chinese -- everything you hope for in a city of immigrants. Problem is, once you´ve eaten your three squares, you find that the majority of the busy (and safe) neighborhoods have all the character of 3rd Avenue in high 60´s. Come to think of it, at least it´s safe to take the bus the hell out of there.

This was a good trip, more of a personal journey than anything else, I had always wanted to see the three largest cities in the Americas, and with New York, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, I have completed the circle, and have gained more of an understanding of the urban side of the western hemisphere. But that´s it -- normally I don´t travel purely to put another tickmark on the checklist, but with this city, well, let´s just say, I was ready to leave two days ago. The rest of the visit has been interesting purely for sociological reasons, nothing remotely useful for a travel story.

I wish it Sao Paulo had been different, but it wasn´t. The problem is, it could be. It has the culture, the shopping, the restaurants, etc -- a local I queried says that there´s a sentiment among brazilians that the government planned the scattered nature of everything to keep the public and their quality of life in check. Even Rio is so spread out and really is a series of separate towns maurauding as neighborhoods.

Could it be true? Perhaps -- take all the amazing concert halls, interesting museums and put them within walking distance of each other, tear down the shopping malls (over 20 of them, each with 400-500 stores!) and put the commerce back on the streets, and this absolutely could be a New York.

But at the end of the day, it´s nothing like New York. It´s about as thrilling as Kansas City, which is a damn shame.

Even so, for the lover of the urban experience, this is not a city to miss. However, it is a city to make a brief visit to, if one wants to understand the true division between first and third world Brazil. Then head for Montevideo, which I hear is one of the coolest and most untouristed South American cities.

With the lack of infrastructure for tourism here, one could say the same about SP.

So that closes this chapter. Muito apologies for the lack of coherence in this account, but hey -- it reflects how i´m feeling right now. Rather than give some rose-colored account when I return, perhaps this is the best way to do it. This way, there are no lies between us.

It´s like that friend you have, where every once in a while, they drive you crazy.

Cities can do that too. This one, especially.

Ate mais!

Email: davidr@lifeingotham.com

Next Update: 22 March