If you can't sao anything nice, Sao Paulo

Lilly has done a pretty full write-up on Sao Paulo so consider this an addendum, or my side of the coin. We were going to skip the city entirely - people we know don't have too many good things to say about it - but since it was en route we decided to stop off briefly. And yes, there are a few fun things to do. But I wouldn't really recommend it for a longer stay - with the disclaimers that (a) we didn't see much of it, but (b) we did try to see the best bits, and (c) there are things to like and Lilly enjoyed it more than I did.

And frankly, a lot of SP looks poor and run-down - a victim of demolition and rebuilding, and the to-be-expected problems of a huge city in a country that isn't the richest. Centro, or downtown, which allegedly holds most of the few historic buildings not to have been pulled down, is a frankly depressing place (apart from the odd highlight like the Se cathedral and the Mercado Municipal - which is lovely inside, but feels like a different world, and is priced accordingly with some of the world's most pampered and expensive fruit). The streets are busy but nobody looks happy to be here. I really couldn't wait to get away.

Vila Madalena is a bit better, more affluent and low-rise, but mainly residential so not the most interesting (and a complete maze if you're coming from the metro - as a hint, the main concentration of activity seems to be at the west end of Rua Aspicuelta). Av Paulista is also more appealing, in a business-district-with-occasional-mall sense. But there's little or nothing here you couldn't get in any city of any size.

It's a shame because there are highlights - as Lilly noted, MASP in pacrticular was a really well-curated gallery, with nicely arranged and annotated exhibitions on the themes of portaits (yawn!) and
romanticism. But MASP is also a great example of being constrained by your surroundings - in this case, a building with no ground floor, but floors above and below accessed only by lift, and you could very easily go just down, or just up, and not realise there was another half.

Also, we do like to wander around on foot, and getting around is not so easy. A lot of the city is a maze - not many simple grid patterns here. And I don't think there are many neighbourhoods where you'd want to wander after dark: you want to know where you're going.
But a lot of the roads are very long, so it's difficult to work out a location from an address - the taxi drivers' solution to this seems to be to drive out of your way to the far end of a street and work their way down it, which (combined with one way systems) is particularly galling when you do know where you want to go but the taxi driver doesn't and takes you several kilometres out of your way to get there.

You might enjoy yourself here with someone who knows the city, or even if you speak enough Portuguese to get recommendations. Otherwise, maybe worth a quick look in passing, but certainly not a destination. I'm going to be really interested to see how Rio compares. Everyone loves Rio. Sao Paulo is not so loveable. (PS if you should decide to visit a swanky, expensive restaurant here, don't expect it to take Mastercard, like most of the cheap restaurants do - be prepared to ferret around in the various pockets into which you have divided your cash reserves, and hope you don't have to resort to taking your shoes off to extract those last emergency reserves...)