Channelling the Cane Spirits

Monday 13.08.07

From our suburb in the city's southwest, we caught a bus into the centre. São Paulo is a gigantic metropolis, and with over 18 million people living in one of the world's largest metropolitan areas, it has an equally huge car-culture. There are bus-only lanes on the trunk roads, meaning this mode of transport is often faster than driving. Motorbikes are also popular with their obvious advantages, though with roads best described as 'Sydney streets on crack' - a maze of appearing and disappearing lanes and tunnels, unsignalled merging and erratic driving, all done only a reflector's distance from oncoming traffic, it would help one not to be too precious about the fragility of life.

From Avenida Paulista, a huge road lined with tall buildings which could be said is the pulmonary artery of the city, we went underground to catch the metro to the centre. Two lines and six or seven stations later, we had finally arrived, and emerging from beneath the city, we found ourselves in the plaza of an enormous church, Catedral Metropolitana. Able to hold several thousand people within, the cathedral's concrete pillars stretched skyward like gigantic grey trees, and there was enough stained glass high on the walls to start a Jesus-themed vegetable farm.

We now walked through the city's centre, a maze of pedestrian-only streets. In amongst the crowds of people we weaved, past street vendors, charlatans and police, business people and the homeless. Street preachers could be found everywhere, letting loose with barrages of rhetoric, working themselves into a righteous lather, surround by people (at a safe distance) who were nodding or observing with a little amusement.

São Paulo is the most multi-cultural city in Latin America, and among the most diverse cities in the whole world. Boasting immigrant populations from many countries world-wide, São Paulo has the world's largest group of Japanese living outside Japan, and a sizable Italian population as well. Immigrants are not the sole reason for São Paulo's incredible expansion, for people from the drought-prone northeast of Brasil (the country's poorest region) have been flocking here to set up slums and shanty towns for more than 40 years. As a result, there is no 'typical' Paulistan, a testament to the city's incredible diversity.

On Wednesday, after being in Brasil for almost 3 months, I finally had a chance to try one of its most famous dishes - Feijoada. It is prepared as a black bean soup, with various pork products floating around in it, and comes accompanied with collared greens and a Brasilian favourite, farofa (Cassava flour)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava

The weather in São Paulo was perfect, so i went to Edificio Altino Arantes, a 35-storey building standing atop a rise in the centre of the city. The tower on top, reached by two lifts, a set of narrow steps and finally a spiral staircase, offers a 360º view of the huge metropolis. The city stretches into infinity in all directions, and the thousands of tall buildings remind one of bleached white coral outcrops left high and dry from a vanished sea. During my time up there, the tower was buzzed by one of the city's many private helicopters, used by the very rich to get from meeting to meeting without having to endure the terrible traffic below.

Thursday 09.08.07

Everyone who has flown before knows the layout of airports - ground floor is for Arrivals, first floor for Departures. But what is on the second floor? In most airports in Brasil it is a great place to hang out or pass out on the floor amongst your baggage during the inevitable delays. This particular moment I was 'Doing Time on the 2nd' waiting for a bus to take me to meet my friend Kyle, who I had previously met in Rio de Janeiro. After an unknown amount of sleeping time, i was approached by a cluster of curious teenage Evangelical Christians, in São Paulo for a religious seminar of some sort. Their opening line, interestingly enough was, "Do you believe in Jesus?" This of course was followed by a lengthy (and somewhat broken) explanation of my views on the whole saga, which I'm not sure they fully comprehended. In conformity with expectations, the whole thing ended in an awkward stalemate and I ran off with my baggage trolley to catch a bus.

Kyle met me at Hotel Renaissance, where I couldn't have traded the cost of my entire holiday for one night in the Presidential Suite even if I had wanted to. We boarded the bus toward Morumbi, in the city's middle-southwest. Apartment blocks stood in every direction, standing in groups like couples schmoozing their way around an immense concrete benefit ball. The air was thick, not with expensive cigar smoke, but of smog - a perpetual haze over the city.

I visited another Terreiro of Candomblé on Friday night, with a friend I had just made, Elaine and her family. I was surprised to discover that this particular branch of Candomblé was different than the one practised in Bahia. The Orixás here, standing watch over the room, looked extremely similar to certain characters from the Bible. It is true that the African slaves of old incorporated the figures from the Bible as counterparts to their Orixás so they could continue their worship, but here it seemed they were paying more than just lip service to these icons. So how does one invoke the spirit of a character in the Bible? I may never know...

São Paulo's mayor at the start of this year, disgusted at the sight of billboards and advertising everywhere, decided to ban all of it. Excepting for signs on the front of shops (allowable only on a ratio of 1.5m per 10m of frontage), everything else had to be taken down or painted over in grey. The fruit of the radical behaviour is a gigantic city turning monotone. Look up, and instead of being informed of the latest sunglasses, prestige car or that essential pharmaceutical, one now sees rusting metal skeletons of billboards, fluorescent light innards now laid bare to the open air. Shop fronts are similarly empty - just blank spaces (left by logos removed) or the same metallic skeletons are all that remain. Ironically, the companies that can afford to replace the sign are often the same ones that were responsible for the majority of billboard pollution. São Paulo now is a multitude of greys, from roads to footpaths, power poles to fences, concrete houses and apartment blocks, smog, fog and the banks of the two fairly-polluted rivers that run through the city.

Grey paint is being used to paint over graffiti as well. São Paulo probably has the best street art in the world, and even has its own style, Pixação - almost looking like a form of hieroglyphics, but readable to Portuguese speakers who recognise the letter shapes. The style itself is generally quite ugly, but impressive for the prominent places where it has been scribbled. One can find the giant form of lettering simply by looking up, to overpasses, the tops of apartment blocks and other near-impossible to reach areas. Pixação differs greatly from the street art in the city due to its nature as a ‘tag’ for the local gangs, and as such, is practised far more by these groups than by regular artists. There are a certain amount of deaths per year attributed to enthusiastic (and often shoeless) Pixadores taking their art a little too far.

We arrived in a working-class suburb in the northeast of the city on Saturday with several graffiti and street artists for an afternoon of painting the walls in the street. Like a working bee of sorts, it was a family affair, and while all the painting was going on, i busied myself with the Churrasco (barbecue). In contrast to the government's grey politics, here was a group of people lovingly painting the walls in all kinds of colours and designs, making this corner of São Paulo a little brighter, both in colour and spirit.