Sao Paulo, Brazil

August 21st, 2015

I was rattled awake at 5 am by two wasted Brits who were screaming over who owed who 12 Argentinian pesos from a meal they had eaten a week ago. Normally this would infuriate me, but today it was a convenient wake up call. I had to catch my transfer to the Rodoviaria station to grab my long-distance bus to Sao Paulo. I walked down to the hostel lobby and was greeted by a portly Brazilian man chain smoking Marlboro reds. The hostel security guard said he was the best driver in Rio… whatever that meant. I threw my bag into his car and we were off…. AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT! I swear this guy thought that if he didn’t get me to the bus station as fast as possible, a bomb was going to go off somewhere in the city! I had no idea a Fiat could do 200 mph.

I also learned that at night, hardly anyone stops at red lights to prevent car jackings. While it seemed everyone else slowed to a crawl through the intersections, my driver continued to barrel through unabated. In addition, he had an entire 30-minute conversation with me in Portuguese; the only thing I think I understood is when he asked if I was German (“alemão” which sounds like “allemand” in French, hence my understanding him… maybe?) to which I replied “American”, and the several dozen Flamengo fight songs he kept screaming. Then we almost witnessed a massive collision between a bus and a potable water truck. He insisted I roll down my window so he could scream at the two drivers. WTF is going on in my life?! It’s not even 6 am yet!

The bus station is in the scariest place I’ve ever seen. This neighborhood is worse than the favela! It looks like an apocalyptic film set. I grabbed some coffee and croissants in the station and went about searching for my bus. The Brazilian Biochemistry Society agreed to refund all of my travel expenses up to $1000 USD for the trip. Well since I had found such a cheap flight, I was still a few hundred dollars short of hitting this amount. Therefore, I sprang for the absolute most expensive bus ticket possible. A “leito” (luxury sleeper) on a double-decker Executivo bus. The top portion of the bus is regular coach seating, but the bottom is a private, first class room with the most awesome, fully-reclining bed chairs! A full180 degrees! What was even more hilarious was I was the only one who booked this ticket, so I had the room to myself for the entire trip.

I was exhausted at first, so I caught a quick nap. When I woke up, I was about halfway between Rio and Sao Paulo on a highway. Once you get out of the big city, Brazil is quite beautiful. It looks a lot like Northern California or the Spanish countryside with rolling grass fields and towering mountains off in the distance. For miles you won’t see anything but cow farms, and then you pass through the occasional small town. At one point I even saw a guy riding a horse down the highway.

We stopped at a really nice truck stop and I ate a plate of mystery Brazilian food and some awful dessert treats which I thought were little cakes, but turned out to be some jelly filled candies that were disgusting. Besides their voracious appetite for beef, the Brazilians have odd tastes in food. They fucking love cookies apparently, because there are stores everywhere dedicated to just cookies, crackers, and wafers.

I read some more of my guidebook and dozed off in my super awesome sleeper seat. When I woke up, the behemoth Sao Paulo laid off in the distance. I’ve never seen anything like it. The skyline extended from one end of the horizon to the other. I had read that Sao Paulo is the third largest metropolis on earth, but this is just absurd. It is positively massive! Tampa has maybe a dozen buildings taller than 50 stories… Sao Paulo has hundreds.

I disembarked my bus and headed down into the metro. I’ll give Sao Paulo (aka Sampa) credit… Its metro is a wonderful delight after having to take cabs and buses everywhere in Rio. It is fast, clean, extensive, and modern… very similar to Paris and Berlin. However, once I wandered out of my metro stop, I got my first sight of Sampa, and it wasn’t very good. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but on the 30-minute walk from the metro to my hostel, I was met with subfuscous and uninviting skyscrapers, crumbling sidewalks, trash piled everywhere, choking pollution and smog so bad it was hard to breathe. It couldn’t be more different than Rio.

I arrived at the Vila Madalena neighborhood where my hostel was located. It is supposed to be one of the nicest, most hip hoods in all of Sampa, but I wasn’t all that impressed. It’s a bit like the bohemian Haight street district of San Francisco. I wandered into my hostel, LimeTime, and checked in. I have two things to say about this hostel: the staff is one of the coolest I’ve ever met, but the hostel is bad. Like really, really bad. I have no idea how it’s rated so high on HostelWorld. I’m assuming that it’s because it becomes super social at night at the bar, but that hardly makes up for facilities that are worse than a back-alley bathroom in Tijuana. I guess you can’t expect much for $8 a night. Nevertheless, I took a seat at the bar and shot the shit with some of the Brazilian hippie hostel employees. One of which stated he loves America, especially Philly. I laughed heartily and spun my Eagles hat around. He pointed and laughed and screamed WTF! He told me how he visits once a year and loves Manayunk, then exclaimed how I look like a Manayunk guy. Oh, here we go again….

I met a really cool British guy named James and he informed me there was a much better hostel two blocks away, and that he would be partying there that night. I wandered off to find dinner, and settled on a tasty grilled chicken dish with fried sweet potatoes croquets and a caprese salad. The restaurant had tables outside on the street, so I took a seat and people watched in the gorgeous weather (about 20 degrees colder than Rio, hovering just above 50 degrees). All sorts of hippie types wandered by me, from girls in flowing sun dresses and bell bottoms and guys with mop tops and dreads.

After I gorged, I headed over to the hostel James had mentioned and was pleased to see a packed bar. He introduced me to his friend Matthieu from Paris, and the three of us traded backpacking stories while relaxing with beers on the hostel roof. We all belted out some karaoke, and mine was easily the worst in the hostel (wtf I always sound so good singing in my car!)

We started to recruit other people to head to the bar with us… Yasmine and Eya from Tunisia, Ben and Leo from Australia, this crazy Russian guy Ivan, and Timon from the Netherlands. Throw in the American, Brit, and Frenchman, and we had one of the best multicultural pub crawl crews ever assembled!

We went to a cool bar in Villa Madalena called Nola, and had a great time pounding shots until one the Aussies pointed out that the locals seemed moody with us. Sure enough, I looked around and saw several groups of dudes giving us death stares. I wasn’t sure if we had wandered into a locals-only bar or they just hated gringos, but we decided 2 am was a good enough time to head home. I didn’t need to mix it up with some Brazilian kid that night over some turf pride on a continent I don’t live on.

The next morning James and I grabbed breakfast, and he gave me shit for being another “American who puts ketchup on everything!” We spent hours just talking about Brazil and travel and aspirations in the early sunlight. I really appreciated his outlook on life. After a bro fist, we parted ways and I headed off to the hotel that the Brazilian Biochemistry Society had put me up in for the rest of the week. Of course, I was ungodly hungover. Yet after the hostel the day before, I had never seen anything so beautiful as my own room and a clean bathroom.

I cleaned up and went to the luncheon to meet the other 50 biochemists and molecular biologists who had been awarded fellowships to attend the Young Scientist Program at the University of Sao Paulo. After lunch, we all attended the first symposium, but I was having a ridiculously hard time getting my head wrapped around the science being presented. You have to be in the right mindset to absorb this kind of information, and a backpacking mindset is on the complete opposite end of this spectrum. I did my best to follow along, until something else caught my attention…

During the last presenter’s talk, I started hearing screaming, drums, and horns off in the distance. These sounds continued to grow in noise, until it was deafening. The poor chemist was screaming his data at us! Outside, a 20,000 strong demonstration had taken over the highway outside our hotel and stopped all traffic on this side of town to protest the anti-government movement. Apparently, that camp had assembled earlier in the week (like 100,000 of them), and were calling for the impeachment of the Brazilian president. I guess the economy here is in the toilet right now (hence the great conversion rate from dollars at current), and most of the citizens blame the government. It has been an incredibly polarizing topic with every Brazilian I have talked to. Nevertheless, this demonstration was bananas! I ran outside to join them. Some woman was screaming her lungs out into a PA system mounted on a carnival float; I have no idea what she was stressing to the masses, but she was PISSED. It would be several hours later that they finally dispersed and traffic commenced. It was fascinating to see how passionate the people of Brazil are about their politics, and this was the minority group!

Later that night, the society was having a cocktail party for all the scientists on the hotel rooftop terrace, but I was feeling really uneasy about my lecture. I had given it a few times before, but this was a whole different animal. A hundred esteemed scientists analyzing me and my work. My nerves were wracked to the point that I opted to skip the party and study my presentation in my room. Please let that sink in… BATTY SKIPPED A PARTY WITH FREE ALCOHOL TO STUDY. Yea, I was shocked too.

I hardly slept that night. I kept waking up with butterflies at the thought of my talk. I gave up on sleeping around 5 am and practiced it over and over again while eating breakfast alone. I put on the single nice outfit I brought with me and headed off to grab the bus to Sao Paolo University. This campus is incredible! It is beautiful… very similar to UF with red brick buildings and tropical plants everywhere. But it is HUGE… like everything else in Sao Paulo. We drove in one direction for 15 minutes across the campus and hadn’t even reached the middle of it! We headed into the chemistry building (which was also quite impressive), but now my jitters were almost debilitating. I never get nervous like this… ever! But this was unprecedented; sweaty palms, dizziness, no voice. I was freaking out watching all the other researchers before me.

And then it was my turn… in the 15 steps from my seat to the podium, all the fear melted away, and I felt overwhelming confidence. I rolled right into it, and killed the talk. I engaged the whole crowd, and even had them laughing at my three corny science jokes! I fielded questions, and sat down relieved to a round of applause. This was the most daunting talk I have ever had to deliver in my career, and it could not have gone better. It’s all downhill from here! Now that I had come back down to earth, I could finally sit back and enjoy the other talks. It was such a fantastic experience, hearing cutting edge research from my peers from Ukraine, Poland, Greece, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Bangladesh, Italy, Israel, Australia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Spain, and Canada!

After a dozen or so talks, it was time for the group to tour some facilities on campus. We checked out the particle accelerators at the physics department, the mass spectrometry and NMR facilities (I got to see an 800 MHz for the first time!) and a bunch of random labs.

It was nice, but I was ready to chill and relax. The program organizers brought us to this wonderful restaurant on the side of a mountain on the edge of a jungle, and now I can say with certitude that I have gained 20 pounds on this trip. I just got back to my hotel so now it’s time to celebrate my successful talk, and have some fun! Tomorrow we finally get to explore Sao Paulo, and then Sunday I fly to Foz do Iguacu for the IUBMB conference!

-Batty

[2020 update] Shortly upon my return home from Brazil, I later found out that James had passed away about 8 months after I had met him. When I saw the news on Facebook, I was positively heartbroken. James was one of those backpackers that I only spent 24 hours with, but someone who I would never forget. His infectious smile, constant positivity, and warm heart were all so genuine. I was honored to have met him on my travels, and I know I am not alone in stating that he brought untold happiness to those he met in his final months in Brazil. Thanks for memories James. I still cover my eggs in ketchup.