São Paulo. Nightmare hostel and amazing city.

We made the first mistake of the trip; Trusting hostelworld.com reviews.
We are staying in a shit-hole. Sorry, but it is. It's pretty much some blokes house and he is renting out every square inch to gullible backpackers. We are in a glass room, like a fishbowl. Yes you read that right. But it's less than £30 a night, and it's our own glass room, and it is frosted glass you should know.

Paraty

Anyway, after a night in a very noisy hostel in Paraty with slamming doors through the night, and breakfast with local monkeys - who knew what time breakfast was - we caught a 6 hour bus to São Paulo. The trip was great, very comfortable seats, semi-cama. The bus stopped a couple of times for breaks. No drama.

Got into São Paulo and immediately booked our tickets to Curitiba for Wednesday. Another 6 hour coach ride, but for now we are going to enjoy São Paulo.

After checking into the before mentioned 'hostel' we went to the supermarket and bought stuff to cook and stay in to plan our day and book a hotel in Curitiba, oh and do some washing, it's the first place we have found with a washing machine. It's one of the 2 good qualities of the place. The other is the very informative manager.

We got up early ate our breakfast and headed out to the big city. São Paulo has 16.5 million people, that's double London! We walked down to Batman alley to see the great graffiti, then walked up and over several hills to the Metro and caught a train to Luz. Here we saw the Luz gardens, walked and walked the streets of the Centro and made it to the Municipal Market just in time for lunch, how convenient. Naturally we had to partake of the traditional sandwiches, which put the New York delis to shame. One word, HUGE. Quite salty, but the food here is either very sweet or very salty, for example they add sugar to their fresh fruit juices! 

Batman Alley

Municipal Market

After about 4 hours of walking we got back on the metro to Vila Madalena, the area of our 'hostel' (sorry, really have to use quote marks when I write hostel, and it is not really hostel, not really.) we walked around again for a couple of hours until we found this little bar, called Piraja, we've had several small beers. Our feet don't hurt as much now...just waiting for Braz to open, it's one of the best pizza restaurants in SP, according to Lonely planet.

...and it was brilliant. Here is Angel about to tuck in.

Braz

Braz was amazing. Probably the best pizza we have ever had.

Also at Piraja we learnt that in Brazil if you want them to stop serving you beer, put a coaster over your glass, otherwise they keep bringing them. We got a little tipsy, and it cost us about half our daily budget to pay for the many beers.

After 2 nights at the hostel we left Sao Paulo. To be fair the bloke who ran the hostel was amazing, top bloke who told us loads of stuff about all the places we were headed.