for some reason the hotel staff got the reservation a bit wrong and though that monica, vishwas and me are all called monica. at least they started addressing us like this when we checked in yesterday night. this already reminded me of the penguins in madagascar, but things got even more madagascar like a bit […]
right now i am at the submidialogia event in Campinas organized as part of the Waag Sarai Exchange Platform on the campus of the local university Unicamp. It is a pretty impressive gathering of all sorts of brazilian media / open access practitioners ranging from free radio activists to government officials involved in the digital […]
i have mentioned it before, but the thing that impressed me the most so far is the facts that people actually travel by helicopter within the city. there are lots of heli-pads on buildings in the city and if you find yourself placed high enough to oversee a bit of the city you actually see […]
i guess the bigger a city becomes the harder the kids are forced to develop some kind of group identity. São Paulo with it’s 18 million inhabitants seems to be a pretty good example. the kids seem to be much more devoted to individual youth cultures than in most european cities. this is pretty much […]
both time & distance seem to have rather flexible meanings over here. now after 5 days i think i have found the formular for calculating the total length of a trip T(total) = T(waiting) + (T(travel) x 3) + T(travel) + T(stay) where: T(waiting) => 20min AND =< 90min T(travel) = the actual travel time […]
we went on top of the Edificio Italia building yesterday afternoon. it is one of the tallest buildings in the city and located smack in the middle of it. they have a ridiculously overpriced executive bar on the 41st floor with the worst piano player i ever had to listen to. the whole thing feels […]
did ii mention that the people over here are paranoid (or to put it more mildly: security obsessed)? i have never seen so many armed security guards in my life. and then there are the (electrical) fences around apartment buildings in the better-off neighborhoods and zillions of police agents who drive around in their cars […]
yesterday i seriously thought i would not like são paulo. it seemed empty for a city with 16 million-or-so inhabitants. and the people who where on the streets where either selling incense, crystals and other hippie-shit (on the Praça Republica next to my hotel) or the seemed to be a bit too fond of tattoos […]
seems that not only the people on the Sao Paulo Metro like strange combinations, but so do the vending machines (Vending machines for books on public transport systems have been covered elsewhere). In any case the book vending machine at the Barra Funda metro station offers an interesting combination of titles for R$ 4.99 (€2.20) […]
it is my first day in Sao Paulo and as it is raining (how did that happen?) i spend quite some time on the subway, which is always a good place to find out about local customs anyway. for some reasons high heels seem to be very important here. in fact so important that people […]