An Afternoon in Sao Paulo
By Nick Fancher
29 Sep 2007
This past August I was en route to Altamira, Para, which is a city in northeast Brazil. For whatever reason our flight itinerary had us passing through Sao Paulo which is southeast Brazil and several hours out of the way. We were only supposed to be there for one hour but my sisters luggage got lost somewhere between Miami and the Sao Paulo airport. So we missed our flight by a long shot.
They weren't able to get us another flight out for six hours and so they put us up in a nice hotel in the city and paid for lunch. I decided to take advantage of this turn of events and take a walk around the city with my friend Dan.
We had lunch and left with cameras in hand. We were up on a hill and so we began our slow decent down the steep hill to the busy city street below. We encountered many sights and smells. We saw people sleeping on the street, beautiful murals, condemned buildings and strip malls. It was quite an assortment.
After we had returned to our room, showered and left to catch our flight to Brasilia we learned about Sao Paulo's notorious violent streak and political kidnappings. That, fortunately, was one thing we did not experience.
