Campinas life

Ok, so I have finally, finally started to do some work. I’m working with Roberto Luiz do Carmo and will be looking at popular participation in regards to water resources in Campinas. I found a bunch of articles that I need to read and I’m developing my workplan. But in the few days that I’ve been in town I did some wandering and thought I’d show you a few points of interest. Though UNICAMP is in Campinas, its located in a part of town called Barrão Geraldo which is located about 15 minutes from the center of Campinas. Here the McDonalds functions as the main point of reference, so I just look for the golden arches to orient myself.



There also seems to be a few types of establishments that dominate this part of town, Pet shops/Veterinarian offices, bars, and real estate offices.





There is a clear difference between life in Campinas and São Paulo. Some times while walking around I have to do a double take and ask myself, where am I? Here cars are the primary form of transportation, which is a bit tough for me since I don’t have one. There are busses that circulate, though not as frequently, and many establishments here seem to follow the same suburban planning as in the states complete with parking lots and drive-thrus. This mainly applies to life in Barrao Geraldo, as the center of Campinas looks like it could be another section of Sao Paulo. I'll post some pics for center Campinas in a future post.

Weekend Getaway—Ouro Preto

Belo Horizonte is the third largest city in Brazil, and though I am sure there are plenty of points of interest, we didn’t find many. But one of the biggest claims to fame for Belo Horizonte is that it’s the gateway to some very cool old mining towns. Maren and I got a chance to visit Ouro Preto, which means black gold. The UN has named the city a World Heritage Site. This designation basically means that everything in the city must be frozen in time, or at least their façades have to. Maren and I toured more churches than I can remember and it seemed that every few feet we stopped to snap some photos. It’s hard to resist when the entire town can be made into a postcard. Well I would try to describe all the sites that we saw, but I can’t remember them all, so I’ll just post the pics that best captured our visit. Though unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take any pictures of the churches from the inside, which is a shame since some of them were exquisite with gold leaf baroque adornments and walls and ceiling paintings depicting biblical scenes. Of course I should also mention the various statues that were made with real human hair, well lonely planet thought it was interesting.
















A cool bit of Ouro Preto history is that there was a guy named Chico Rey who was an African king that had been captured along with his whole tribe and sold to work in the mines in Ouro Preto. Apparently he managed to earn enough money to buy his freedom and worked to free his entire tribe. The Church of Santa Efigenia is one of the last bits that remain of this history. Unfortunately we got there when it was closed.



One last bit of trivia, apparently Ouro Preto had a bought with phantom robbers. So the townspeople built this shrines that were intended to scare away these ghosts. I have to say I was sadly disappointed when I came across one of these few remaining shrines. Maybe they were more impressive at one time….maybe.

Weekend Getaway – Belo Horzonte

Just a short 8 hour bus ride away from Sao Paulo you arrive in the first planned city in Brazil, Belo Horizonte. Well from looking at the map you can easily see that the city has easily outgrown it’s humble origins and the planned portion encompasses barely a fraction of the current extent of the city.



After arriving in Belo Horizonte, Maren and I attempted to find the bus that would take us to our hostel. You’d think it would be easy making our way around the well laid out grid pattern, but with the diagonal streets that transverse the grid we were soon disoriented and ended up meandering about the town. Luckily our meandering lead us to some cool spots, include the Parque Municipal, which has a small lake where you can rent rowboats. How could we pass that up?



We eventually made it to our hostel and met these two Brazilian guys that joined us in our daylong wandering. With few points of interest mentioned in the Lonely Planet Brazil guidebook we opted to head for the Mercadao, the municipal market for Belo Horizonte. There you can pick up everything including leather goods, cachaça candies or a new puppy. I opted for the candies.

The Mercadao also serves as a gathering spot for people to socialize with friends over beer, so of course we had to join in the fun.




To round off our time in Belo Horizonte, we headed out to Pumpulha. We walked through this cool ecological reserve. Maren had a bit of a mistep and nearly lost her shoe to the receding lake.





This part of town also boasts a museum designed by famed Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Though we weren’t able to get to the museum we were able to see a cool looking church. But I am still not sure if Oscar Niemeyer designed it.

Campinas nightlife

Campinas definitely has a college town feel to it. There aren’t a lot of options for going out here, which in some way makes your choice fairly easy. Last night Marcel and I hung out with Stefan and Maren, two University of Texas students who are part of the same program that brought Marcel and I to Brazil. They have been doing research in Campinas for the last couple of months so they’ve been kind enough to show us around town and give us the scoop on life in Campinas. We started off with drinks at Star Clean, which is a car wash/ bar/luncheonette. It was packed with students from UNICAMP since its sits just outside of the campus and there aren’t many other options in the vicinity aside from the McDonalds. Later in the evening it was off to this very cool restaurant where the waiters were dressed in 1920’s garb complete with bow tie and cuffley caps . The food was excellent and the prices are substantially lower here than in Sao Paolo. I’ll leave you with a bit of Campinas trivia that I learned. Apparently Campinas was larger than Sao Paulo at one time in its history and was poised to become the capital of Sao Paulo state, if it weren’t for an unfortunate outbreak of the plague that decimated the population. I guess some things just weren’t meant to be.

Campinas….Finally

I arrived in Campinas on August 7 for the conference on municipal governance. I had originally thought this would be a large regional conference with people from various agencies and organizations, but it turned out to be a gathering of academics from UNICAMP and the University of Texas. This was not bad; I just had a very different set of expectations. Many of the presentations focused on comparisons between the greater Austin municipal region and the greater Campinas municipal region. Campinas is very different from Sao Paulo. There is a suburban feel to the city. Plus the campus is located on the outskirts of Campinas, which gives you a further sense that you are in a rural setting. But I do like the change of pace here. I spoke with a researcher here and it looks like I’ll be helping him out with some research on public participation around water issues. He even gave me a book and a CD-Rom to look to familiarize myself with the work he is doing. So it looks like I’ll be back on Monday to start working. But in the meantime one of the UT students who is also doing exchange work in Campinas asked if I wanted to join her on a trip to Belo Horizonte. How could I pass that up?

Sao Paulo Gastronomic Adventure

Some time ago I heard that Sao Paulo is the gastronomic capital of the world. After spending my Sunday exploring the city with Marcel I would have to absolutely concur with that statement. Our day started off with a stop at the Mercadao, it’s a large enclosed market that dates back from the 1920’s. In there you can find a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables, meats, fish, spices and of course lots of delicious prepared foods. One of the big draws here is the Mortadella Sandwich. I’m not exactly sure what mortadella is in English, but its incredibly delicious. Fortunately I’ve got some pictures for you. After gorging on this sandwich, it was time for dessert. With some baklava, then more desert with the chocolate covered strawberries. Topped that off with some diced watermelon and of course the ever present sucos (freshly made fruit juices).















The other motive for our Sunday wandering was to check out the section of the city where a proposed BRT (bus rapid transit) line is slated to go through. Marcel is working on this project so I tagged along, as he wanted to get a feel for what sorts of impacts the project will have on the community. Marcel has informed me there is a large Bolivian population here, about 100,000 legal and another 150,000 undocumented. So as we walked around I was able to spot Bolivians all around. I think I even heard some Quechua spoken. I had hoped to find a Bolivian restaurant, but no luck.







Our walking tour ended with a stop at this bar called Café Bichega. They had live music. This bar was located on a strip filled with other similar type bars that have live music or other performances. Finally walking home we stumbed on the Itallian festival.

Rio getaway

Language class is over and my work is still not set. So I’ve taken off for a few days to Rio with Chinyere, Gaetan, and Alexis. We arrived on August 2, on the night bus from Sao Paulo, which only took 6 hours. The weather has turned to be more winter-like which does not make for the ideal time to visit Rio, but there are still plenty of sites to be seen. Our first day in Rio involved walking on the famed Copacabana beach in the rain. It’s hard to believe but even with this less than perfect weather the scenery is so amazing that we were compelled to brave the elements.




After hours of walking around, we ended up at a shopping mall where we were hoping to see a free concert of Brazilian Rock, unfortunately when we got there, there was no concert to be found. At the end of our long day, we set out an itinerary to hit up some points of interest in Rio. Alexis took charge as our tour guide by mapping out the most efficient route for us to see all main points of interest up in Centro Rio. Here are some of the pictures we took.



























The city is amazing. It is much older than Sao Paulo and you can definitely feel it. People also seem to be more laidback up here and they are more diverse with a stronger African presence than we’ve seen in Sao Paulo. I don’t remember the names of all the places we visited, but there were a lot of churches including this really cool church that was built in the 1970’s with some amazing stained glass windows. But of course, no trip to Rio is complete without a visit to Corcovada, the hill with the giant Jesus. Though I must remind you that the largest freestanding statue of Jesus stands in the slightly less exciting city of Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Going out Sao Paulo Style

I went out the other night for some drinks at the Sky Restaurant. It’s located on the top floor of the Hotel Unique. I had heard it has a great view of the city but I was amazed when I got to the top and saw the lights of the city glittering all around me. I felt like I was in the middle of Central Park looking out at the skyline. The pictures I took can hardly capture this impressive view. The drinks were overpriced but I will definitely have to go back. The building itself is also impressive. It’s shaped like a watermelon or a ship, depending on your perspective.