"DELAY IN BRAZIL IS A CLIMATE"

Despite the title, this post will not concern Brazil that much. Rather it's a quote from  a book I'm reading, but more on that later. This post is about Mexico City, which was showed to me by the able guiding of Kaylea.  The city is excellent. It's full of food, art, culture, traffic, buses, and people. It also has a castle. So basically, it's pretty cool. You'll see some Aztec ruins, Leon Trotsky's final home, the house that Frieda Kahlo occupied for the entirety of her life, and so much more!

 So, if you've made it all the way down here, you get some book reviews. I've been lucky to have read several excellent books (and one less excellent one). I highly recommend Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett, which  is basically a guy telling all about how he hunted man-eating tigers in India as a career. Needless to say, it's full of excitement. And leopards and tigers. I then read two books by Anne Murrow Lindbergh. North to the Orient  was fascinating non-fiction; The Steep Ascent  was pretty frustrating fiction. Now I'm on to Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure. Yes, Peter Fleming is Ian Fleming's brother. And it's hilarious. His descriptions of Brazil are spot on, including the title of this post.

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

In my goal to emulate Patrick Lowe, (with the exception of the peanut allergy), I decided to do some walking on Saturday. This began innocently enough with a cab ride, moving in from the bird section of Moema (the streets are all named after birds . . . my particular street means 'Goldfinch') towards the center of the city. My cab driver had worked the same taxi station for 19 years. When he first started, my neighborhood was full of single-family homes (I live on the eighth floor of a 24 story building).

After a brief stop at the Mercado Municipal, which is like Union Market (for DCites) or a very low-end version of the Ferry Building (for Bay Areaers), it was off through the streets of old Sao Paulo. Except that the streets aren't really charming, or old. Crowded, yes, even for Saturday morning, but this was not the quaint early city architecture, or even the boom years buildings, that I expected. For every gem like this Banco de Sao Paulo (see below) there were 4 concrete blocks that looked nearly abandoned.

Part of this vacancy comes from history. Sao Paulo grew up very fast. In 1872 it had 26,000 inhabitants (Rio had 275,000), a tiny and forgettable town. But with industrialization the city exploded; by 1920 the city had 500,000, and by 1930 nearly 1 million. It now has 20 times that. Basically, like a star which burns too big and too bright, it seems to have exploded, giving birth to dozens of individual neighborhoods with separate charm, leaving the original center more or less vacant. But, as Brazil often showcases, there's a colorful life that comes out on any blank canvas:

 

So instead of taking a taxi back, I chose to walk home, which ended up being a very long walk. But I got to walk through several neighborhoods with more life to them, including the heavily Japanese Liberdade area. There are now only 85 more neighborhoods to see . . .