Sao Paulo

Our start in Brazil was not easy: it was really hard to book a hotel in Sao Paulo, first me and then Amélie had a nice stomach bug, the weather was not too warm and it was raining cats and dogs in the afternoons.
This an the TV in our hotel room made it the optimal place to chill out for four days. We have seen countless episodes of Law & Order spiced up with Jurassic Park III and Godzilla. But there was a bit more of course:

The first main task was to buy some smart casual clothes, because we were meeting our investment banker friend in the night and did not want to be kicked out of places because of our hiking shoes. Based purely on the price we managed to get me some leather shoes and a shirt and Amélie got a top and flip-flops with glittery plastic (aka. diamonds). Edwyn is a very busy man as you would expect from somebody, who is in the rank of partner in Brazil's biggest investment bank. Also we were pleased to hear, that the crisis helped him a lot, as they founded this bank with 15 people and took everybody else over, who was struggling to get to a 1000+ employees company. Before anybody starts to denounce wild capitalism, Edwin told us, that the first thing they do with a company they buy is to make them pay taxes and employ people in a legal way, so not the tipical cut and sell operations of american investment banks. Unfortunately Edwin is working until ten on calm evenings and much later when under pressure, so he has no time to spend his fortune, but we were assured that a penthouse flat with pool and an armoured car are on the way.
For the rest of Sao Paulo we only saw the Sé cathedral and the excellent MASP. This also marked our first encounter with Oscar Niemeyer, but more to that later. Exhibitions in the MASP were great from Rodin to the Brasilian street artists, who honoured us with being present. Otherwise we were looking at people, fighting the floods in the streets, wondering how people can be so calm in the always stuffed metro and finally taking a bus to Curitiba.