Bemvindo a Brasil...Sao Paolo...

I had brought a Lonely Planet Brazilian Portuegese mini dictionary. I placed it into my little backpack. Our flight was in the afternoon, so we took the Manuel Tienda Leon bus to Ezeiza International Airport. TAM (reads TINNN) received our bags quickly, we did the last shoppings, spent all our Argentinian pesos and boarded the airplane. We liked the service, the plane took off right on time, they gave us a nice dinner and it arrived on the right time. During the day, we coincidentally had found a great deal at Novotel, which is a French Accor Group hotel, so when we arrived in Sao Paolo, we just took a taxi to Novotel. We paid 75 Reais for the cab, which was a sign of an expensive country after the other Spanish speaking cheaper brothers. (75 reais is about 42 USD). We arrived in our great hotel, opened our bags in our room which was on 24th floor(!) and called our friend Evandro, whom we met in Uyuni Salt Flat Safari. Evandro came to pick us up for going to a nice bar in an hour time, the place was packed with young people...We had caipirinha and caipirinska there, which were both excellent drinks (second one is made with vodka which was our favorite). Evandro had brought a friend, so we chatted all the evening. Portuegese and Spanish are very similar, but the Portugese pronunciation is much more different, so it is hard to understand Portugese for me...However, Evandro´s friend spoke Spanish...At the end of the night, we had a great sleep in our great room...I felt like I would love this country, though I only saw a little bit of it...

The next day, we went out to do our city tour. However, we needed some fuel for this. Therefore, we went out of the hotel and decided to find a nice place to have a breakfast. We saw a place which was selling ¨salgados¨ with ´suco´...Salgados is sort of flaky pastry, made of dough and filled with ham and cheese. Piril had some pizza, juice and salgado where I chose some pan con queso (cheesy bread) and decided to have some omelette. They brought me an omelette which is well enough for two persons with a huge ham-rice mountain as garnish... It was horrifying, so had a litlle bit of it and just took a picture!!! After feeding me with some coffee, we walked around the important parts of Sao Paulo. The favorite part of the city was Mercado Municipal, where you can have the legendary huge sandwich ´mortadella´. It is huge, dough filled with tens of layers of ham and cheese inside...We had a slice, I saw funny tropical fruits and great breads. We had a great fruit salad with some mortadella, got our dinner as mozzarella sandwich and some mortadella and finished the city tour by going to a nice museum of art. The city looked ugly, it is a giant city with its 17 million population, mainly industry and business...There were lots of homeless people sleeping on the streets, the city was grey and lacked a character unlike Buenos Aires or Santiago. Every city has its charm, though Sao Paulo gave us a feeling of loneliness, sorrow and a sense of being lost. We had a nice cup of coffee at a nice area of the town, given some cheerful hats for the carnaval and spent the evening quietly in our hotel room. We had only one day in Sao Paulo, the next day was our journey to Amazon!!!

In the morning, we woke up, had some breakfast and took the hotel cab to the Guarulhos Airport for 85 Reais (10 Reais extra when taking the cab from the hotel!). Everything went smoothly, we took our flight to Manaus, which arrived at noon in Manaus. A guy from the travel agency (Gero´s Amazon Tours) called David came to pick us up and took us to our hotel...We were sooo excited to go to Amazons, even though our tour was going to be a touristy, easy going familiarization tour...

Next chapter: Our conquest of the Amazons...