Historic Sao Paulo

Once out of the Policia Federale we headed to the financial district (the picture is of one of the tallest buildings in the city - Edifice Italiano) which is also the historical center of Sao Paulo and spent about 3-4 hours walking between different tourist attractions. It was a really interesting Brenna-guided tour, and I have posted some pics here.

A few of the general things we have noticed:

- Despite the fact that we are constantly running into communication barriers, most Sau Paulitanos are very friendly and don't get irritated by it. There is a lot of smiling and weird hand gestures but we eventually figure it out and people go out of their way to be helpful. Part of this is probably that Sao Paulo is really NOT a tourist town - we almost never hear languages other than Portuguese being spoken - so I think most of the locals find foreigners interesting rather than irritating.

- The place is remarkably clean. This might be something to do with the areas that we have been frequenting, but there are a lot of trash cans and people seem to use them pretty diligently. You get weird smells coming up out of sewers from time to time, but that is no different to what you experience in a place like Manhattan.

- Exception to the note about the city being clean - graffiti! The stuff is everywhere, and I mean in really crazy places where you just wonder how the heck anyone managed to put it there. Sometimes it is just tags, but there are also a lot of really impressive murals around the place.

- There are quite a lot of homeless people visible on the streets. Definitely more so than in Canada, but actually less than in some parts of the USA that I have visited. During the day while there are lots of people around there is absolutely no problem, but I can understand why people are warned not to roam around alone after dark.

There's no social security system here, so you can imagine some people are pretty desperate. That said - I've been reading that crime rates in Sao Paulo have dropped dramatically over the last 5-10 years. You get the impression that this city is just exploding economically (in a good way) and so of course you would expect crime rates to drop as the wealth starts to get shared around. There is obviously still some wealth stratification to deal with though!