After a quiet few weekends we went full-tourist on Saturday, with a guided bus tour round the city. God knows I needed some distraction after a disastrous first attempt to pass my driving test on Friday; having been crammed into a tiny car with five other students, lurched northwards through midday traffic and positioned on the outskirts of some kind of driving-school shanty town by the side of the road for hours on end, I was failed after about ten seconds for clipping the cone I was supposed to parallel-park behind, so now I have to wait another two weeks and go through the whole ordeal again.
Anyway, the tour was most fun, taking place on the top of a hollowed-out double-decker with trilingual commentary. It started, inauspiciously enough, next to the shell of the Portuguese Language Museum, which burnt down in December, and continued on to a particularly smelly main road nearby, but soon gathered steam and passed the Mercado Municipal, Praça da Republica and Pacaembu Stadium at a brisk pace. I would have liked a bit more time at each stop, but there was so much to see in so little time...
We alighted at the latter stop to have a pastel and visit the Museum of Football, located under the main stands of the stadium and full of interactive gizmos, an animatronic Pelé, plenty of background on how football came to Brazil, and of course lots of slang terms for my growing collection ("o goleiro engoliu frango", or "the goalie swallowed a chicken", refers to a particularly bad goalkeeping howler under no pressure...). I had a bit of a smirk in the room covering all the World Cups to date, as the 1998 section was conveniently "out of order", although to their credit the 7-1 defeat to Germany was on display, glitch-free.
We concluded our trip by slotting a penalty past a virtual-reality keeper and hopping on to the next bus, which went down the Avenida Paulista to Ibirapuera Park, and back up past Liberdade (São Paulo's Chinatown), the Teatro Municipal, a replica of the city's first building, and back to the start and the Jardim da Luz. Then in the evening we ended up at a great jazz bar in Vila Madalena for pizza and caipirinhas, before heading back to bed.
Meanwhile work continues apace, and I've churned out another playlist for your aural delight - I would recommend the Africaine 808 album in its entirety, as it happens. Very groovy.
Until the weather turns inclement in Volgograd, I bid you farewell, and speak soon 'n that.
Fred
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