Sao Paulo
Trip Start
Mar 31, 2010
1
108
109
Trip End
Mar 31, 2011
Sao Paulo, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Monday, March 28, 2011
We visited the municipal market, which was very clean and civilised. Very different to the crazy first market we visited at the beginning of the trip in Malaysia, but it shared an incredible selection of fruits. We stopped at one stall where the owner kept plying us with free tastings of some very exotic specimens, like an Amazonian honey-pear called Sapoto. We kept adding more to our shopping basket and were shocked to find that the bill came to over £50, which at least meant we didn't feel guilty for all the freebies. We had also been enjoying fruit juices from the small cafes and snack bars offering them everywhere. There was always a hugre list of different fruits we hadn't heard of, but we particularly liked Acai, which was served freezing cold blended with ice. It was also eaten out of a bowl with granola and banana.
We went to the bar at the 'Unique hotel', another very interesting building (no pictures but you can find it on the internet). This was full of expense account business groups and very glamorous people wearing some amazing outfits. After that we had a brilliant meal at a Brazilian restaurant with modern food using traditional Amazonian ingredients. Brazil had the most varied dining of anywhere we visited in South America, and Sao Paulo in particular had some excellent, but expensive food.
In general, the city was so big, and the sights so spread out, that we found it rather hard to get to grips with in the day and a half we had there. But our short trip through Brazil was enough to whet our appetite to go again, it was a varied, vibrant and attractive place.
