Parques e Museus de São Paulo

It´s hard to believe that I arrived to Brazil exactly one month ago from today! It doesn´t feel like I´ve been down here for that long, but I´ve definitely learned a lot about the culture and hopefully the language too! But, to continue catching up on my backpacking travels...

Day 4: São Paulo
June 11, 2010

Today marked the first official game of the World Cup! So, of course, we had to watch a little bit to commemorate the opening. Around late morning, we made our way to Estação de Luz to visit o Museum de Língua Portuguesa (Portuguese Language Museum). Like the Museu de Futebol I visited the day before, it was a super high-tech and interactive museum. Not only was it an awesome museum, but I also learned a ton of new things because, well, obviously it was all about Portuguese - the historical roots of words, common mistakes native speakers make, differences in accents, famous literature, etc. It was legal! (slang for cool in Brazil, pronouced lay-gall)

Estação de Luz - Metro/Train station

Museu de Língua Potuguesa


I could have spent the entire day there, but we we were off to our next destination: Parque da Luz (Park of Light), right across the street. I'm obviously a huge fan of parks, but this one was especially cool because they had a bunch of modern art sculptures throughout the park, which we had fun taking pictures with.

After stopping at a lanchonette (typical small restuarant, usually with simple foods and drinks to eat) for a lunch of different salgados (common Brasilian snack, generally fried pastry filled with meats or cheeses), we made our way to Parque Ibirapuera, which is this absolutely massive park in the middle of the city. I guess it's kind of like the Central Park of São Paulo, but with a bunch of awesome musuems. We went into the Museu Afro-Brasil, which is a huge museum dedicated to the history, culture, and art of Afro-Brasilians. Since the sun was setting, we decided it was time to head back to the hostel, but it turned into a 2 1/2 hour adventure to arrive there....lesson learned: when asking Brazilians in large cities for directions, ask at least 5 different people before making a decision, because they WILL give you complete opposite directions and you'll probably do way more backtracking than you would like.

O Obelisco de São Paulo in Parque Ibirapuera

View of sunset in Parque IbirapueraSão Paulo at Night, from a lake in Parque Ibirapuera

And that marked the end of our São Paulo adventure. The lack of beach and colder weather (I think it got down to the 40s at night) made me appreciate the fact that I would be heading back to Rio de Janeiro for my program. Even though São Paulo isn't really my kind of city, I would have loved to spend more time there just for all the elaborate and modern museums - I think I could literally spend at least a day in each one and there were several I never got to visit...I guess I'll just have to make it back there someday. But, we were off on another overnight bus to Curitiba - until the next post!

Até logo, Coli