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Other entries in São Paulo II

Sao Paulo

Sao Paulo is one HUGE city--35 million people or so, the largest in South America.  Contrary to our expectations, it was sunny and warm when we landed.  From the plane the city extended in every direction with no boundary in sight.  The domestic airport is somewhat reminiscent of Hong Kong--skimming between and over the tops of tall apartment buildings before dropping suddenly to the runway.  We are staying at the Blue Tree Towers Paulista in one of the downtown districts, near the modern art museum.  Our reason for being here? Jerry and his colleague, John Danner, are teaching a two-day seminar to business professors on Entrepreneurship Education: Theory to Practice (For any readers who don't know, this is part of international program sponsored by Intel and implemented through the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at UC Berkeley, which Jerry directs).  Most of the professors are from Brazil (this is the session for Portuguese speakers--the Latin American session for Spanish speakers will be in Mexico in September). One of the side benefits of this program is that Jerry has had a chance to sample some fine international restaurants.  Shirley and Jesse joined him and John for dinner at Figueira Rubaiyat, a Brazilian barbecue restaurant--think mega-meats and fishes (including fresh water fish from the Amazon), exquisitely prepared, and one of the biggest and most spectacular dessert buffets ever--sorry we were too busy eating to take pictures of that!  Another interesting thing about this restaurant is that it is built under and around what is reportedly the largest fig tree in the world.  They could be right!

While Jerry and John toiled away, Jesse and Shirley took an automobile tour of Sao Paulo, which started at the Instituto Butanta, which studies and produces antivenoms for the several hundred poisonous snakes, spiders, and scorpions in South America.  The Instituto was closed on Monday, but we got a peek at some of the dangerous denizens in the outside cages.  Our guide, Elias, added a chilling note: one of his friends had died a few months before when bitten in a cornfield by the type of snake we saw hiding under some leaves in the pen.  Ah, a critical difference between Brazil and Hawaii.  Our tour also included stops at a huge stone monument to the immigrants in the 1600's gold rush, Japantown (.5 million Japanese Brazilians in Sao Paolo and the same number of Jews, outdone by 1 million Portuguese and 1 million Italians), and the central Cathedral, literally in the middle of a busy traffic circle.  While sunlight filtered through the high stained glass windows and bathed the stone columns in colored lights, the sound of buses, jackhammers, and street chatter filtered through the open doorways and gave the Cathedral a feeling of life.  The rest of the tour consisted of Jesse snapping photos out the car window and we past other landmarks and some less notable neighborhoods (easily distinguished by how nervous our guide got while driving through).  Security is a way of life and big business here--from the omnipresent building guards to the taxis which Paulistas take to go even two blocks to the cars on the auto lots marked "blindados"--they look like regular cars but have bullet-proof windows.  After three days, we were more than ready to move on to a less urban environment.

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