Sushi wushi in Sao Paulo.

Unfortunately our only photo of Sao Paulo is some kind of carnival cow in the bus station when we were leaving. We decided to walk around with as little as possible which meant no camera and only loose change. It was a nice feeling actually walking around without being worried as much about something being stolen.

We hadn't really expected to much in Sao Paulo other than wander around the Japanese area and each as much Asian food as we could. We did manage that on the first day but ended up doing much more on the second day than we could have hoped for. The japanese area really was very nice and had a real feel of Asia about it (I imagined, I've never been) but, to try and save on the remaining funds, we stumped for some sushi from a supermarket. It was ermmm ok, not great and unfortunately reminded me of those packets of sushi you get in Sainsbury's and thelike. Sounding like the complete food snob, it just doesn't compare to the real deal.

So the next day, on the tip of the hostel owner Mr Wong, we headed to the tallest building in Sao Paulo where you're allowed 5 minutes at the top to admire the view. What happened the rest of the day ended up being a complete surprise in the nicest way. Having got a bit lost we were asking the local Police for directions when a nice lady came up to us out of nowhere and said she'd take us there just after she'd taken her shoes back to a shop. So off we went following our new tour guide. Inbetween Kat's Spanish and her tiny bit of English we managed to communicate well enough and talked about this and that on the way. The building is now owned by Santander bank and basically looks like a small version of the empire state building, by which it was apparently inspired. At reception we showed some identification and up we went. The view at the top really was impressive and the sheer size of the city quickly became apparent. The sprawling mess of buildings and roads just carries on far into the horizon and actually at one point carries on through a mountain valley until you cannot see any further. This place is huge!!

Our 5 minutes were up and back down we went. It was lunchtime and our new friend said she'd take us to her friend's restaraunt/cafe in what was the Arabic area. So what followed over the next few hours was a nice little tour of the centre of Sao Paulo, including an amazing food market filled with the most colourful and lucious looking fruits I've seen. There were fishmongers with huge salmon and butchers with little piglets (dead of course). Basically any kind of food you'd want, I'm sure you could have found it.

Our time came to say goodbye and both me and Kat were a bit stumped when the lady started crying as we were saying our farewells. We're still not sure exactly why but hopefully it was for the right reasons! We were incredibly lucky to be able to have a Sao Paulo citizen show us around and there was no way that we would have seen so much without her.

Also, this week the rugby game between Wales and France actually was on. So after our day out we returned to the hostel to watch the game, this time with Brasilian portugese commentary. This made it a bit to watch Wales play so dismally in the first half as I couldn't understand what they were saying. I'm also not sure that they understood what they were watching as one thing I did understand them mentioning was the Football world cup sometime in the 2nd half. Either they were bored, or thought that the competition would be an absolute walk over for the South American teams considering this weird version of football that France had started playing.

A 6hour bus journey from Sao Paulo and now we're in a nice place called Parati which reminds us a lot of Jericoacoara where we stayed in the north back in November. It's kind of like Jeri but a bit bigger and with paved roads. The unfortunate thing is that it's been raining for basically the last 5 days, or whenever we left Iguazu. It's been non stop! We've even bought an umbrella!

We're staying here until Wednesday before heading to Rio for our final week. We have 2 objectives for our remaining time in Brasil

1. Get a tan (we're getting worried with all this rain though).
2. Not to get mugged (we've been really either very lucky or very careful so far and still have everything we started off with).