Mega Metropolis

1 December 2012

Our visit to Sao Paolo in Brazil a couple of days ago was a bit of a disappointment not due to the city or its lack of delights but due to an exceptionally poor tour guide and an inappropriate itinerary on our 8 hour tour. We took this extended tour so that we could have a good look around. The good news was that our coach was super comfortable with lots of legroom and comfy deep foam headrests.

Sao Paolo is a city of around 12 million people with a population of 20 odd million if you include the surrounding areas. Our tour was entitled  "The Best of Sao Paolo", if what we saw was the best then it is a sad state of affairs in that city.

Our guide totally lacked passion or enthusiasm for her city or the sights she was showing us. She let us loose in two museums that only had information about the exhibits in the Brazilian language while she sat in the foyer and waited for us to look around. Good guides give some guidance in this sort of situation. When we drove past important buildings she simply said "Here is the University" etc.  It would have been nice to know when it was established, how many students it had, what courses it offered etc. Her commentary on all the sights we saw was similarly dismissive. The most disturbing thing was that she did not count the members of her group or announce when we were moving on. It's lucky that some of our group didn't get left behind in Sao Paolo.

The guide made a decision to defer our lunch to a later time of 2:30 pm. As we had breakfasted at 7:00 am and had not had a break for a snack this decision was not popular with our ravenous tour group. When we finally got fed it was a great meal at a typical Brazilian Churasco restaurant

In spite of the poor itinerary and lack of guiding we had a fun day and took lots of photos in this city that seems to just go on and on and on. Following are some snaps of a few of the 12 million people on Sao Paolo.