Day 1-2: Beco do Batman and Ibirapuera Park

Bom dia! So far, São Paulo has been as amazing as I’d hoped. The weather is low/mid eighties and sunny during the day, and 50s at night. There’s been a pretty bad outbreak of dengue fever in Brazil recently and I was expecting to be coated in bug spray 24/7 even in the city, but so far I haven’t seen a single mosquito, gnat, or anything else.

Traveling here was a breeze, especially compared to our Portugal debacle of waiting forever on the tarmac while they discovered and tried to fix a last-minute equipment malfunction, then taking off and then returning to the airport because it was still malfunctioning, then waiting 6 hours at the gate until they found us an entirely new plane. Needless to say, the flight bar was set pretty low this time around, but everything was perfectly on time and pleasant.

After a layover in Dallas, we left for São Paulo at 7:30pm to arrive at 7:30am (ten hours). In theory, I love overnight flights because we’re not wasting precious daytime vacation time, but the reality is I can’t sleep on planes at all so I’m only fooling myself. I got maybe two hours this time, which is a new record. Hotel check-in wasn’t until 3pm, so we dropped off our luggage and wandered the city until then and I didn’t sleep until 10 that night. But who needs sleep? We’re in freaking Brazil and there's an entire street of Batman murals to see!

For me, the first day of vacation (especially lacking sleep or a shower for over 36 hours) is always set to pure survival mode where I’m trying to adapt to my new environment while avoiding dying in the stupidest way possible. Evan is a reliably patient and skilled guide through this stage, administering emergency granola bars when necessary and making sure I’m not stepping into traffic or forgetting my bag on a park bench. Thanks babe! I appreciate you.

Anyway… food. The first night here, we went to a French Brazilian restaurant that had vines hanging from the ceiling and a super cool tree outside, and last night we went to a Lebanese restaurant that had the most amazing baba ganoush with pomegranate seeds. But we’re also finding space for traditional Brazilian, like caipirinhas (a Brazilian rum drink that's like a margarita but not as sweet), coxinhas (chicken croquettes shaped like little chicken wings, and pão de queijo (bread with cheese inside). And tonight, we’re going to DOM, a 2-star Michelin restaurant with a chef who was featured in an episode of Chef’s Table on Netflix. He uses unusual ingredients found in the Amazon rainforest (including giant ants that reportedly taste like ginger and lemongrass), so I’m super excited and also a little scared. Stay tuned for how that turns out!

Our major activity yesterday was Ibirapuera Park, which has a big pond with black swans, a ton of cool trees and sculptures, an art museum, an Afro Brazil Museum where we saw a group playing music and doing capoeira, and also a planetarium that for some reason has been turned into a Hot Wheels Go Carts arena (which we did not go to, sadly). You can rent bikes in various styles (singles, doubles, quads, and one with a child seat in front that would have been super convenient for me if Evan wouldn't have shot down that idea), but we opted to walk instead.

At the entrance to the park is the giant Monument to the Bandeiras (commissioned by the city in 1921 and completed in 1954), which commemorates the various foreign “settlers” to Brazil (aka the Portuguese colonizers who promptly enslaved and decimated the indigenous population). So… it didn’t exactly age well. Same with the huge statue of Pedro Alvares Cabral, Brazil’s version of Christopher Columbus.

That’s it for now. Today we’re moving to an Airbnb to another part of the city for more adventures before flying to Rio on Monday. Ciao ciao!