Finally in South America! My initial view of São Paulo, the slums seen through the bus window on the way from the airport in pouring rain weren't so exciting, but it has definitely picked up since. The metro system is quite alright too, even if they don't have full maps on all stations. Tired status and rain made sure there was nothing much on the day of arrival, but I did have a walk and got my shoes wet.
On the second day I was almost ready to pack up and go to Rio when I got a reply from a São Paulo vegan on VeggieConnection and changed my plans to meet her in the afternoon. Then, walking on Avenida Paulista, someone suddenly pulled my sleeve and after a second of wondering if he wanted money or directions I realised it was my former tango teacher Giggio! He stopped here on his way back home to Argentina. Then I found a great vegetarian buffet restaurant (Apfel) for lunch, with vegan things clearly marked, and very tasty.
Good things only improve sometimes. After lunch I met this local vegan who turned out to be a really nice girl. She and her friends took me to an organic food fair with a section for vegetarian stalls. They even had vegan white chocolate! Incredible, I've never seen such a thing before, and it was so yummy! In the evening we went to a vegan pizza place where they bring slices of pizza around and you can pick as many different kinds as you want, and some BBQ soya sticks and soy-shakes to go with it. Their vegan "cheese" was really well done too, it melted much like the real stuff. No idea where to get that stuff yet.
The next day (well, today) they invited me to a vegan birthday party, lucky me. So not only did I get to spend more time in their amazing company but also got some more great vegan foods and even birthday cake! This time the food was East Asian style and that's a tad less exciting for me, having had heaps of great cooking of that style on the other side of the planet. Afterwards we went off to a place that serves 10 different flavours of vegan ice-cream. Not that it'd be ice-cream weather, it's only about 20 degrees, but just for the sake of trying out this amazing stuff. Really good it was too, and of special interest was the açaí ice-cream, since I didn't know of the fruit before.
Off to Campinas for the conference in the morning, but very happy indeed about São Paulo now. :-) And the pictures can be found
here, although I must apologise for the lack of good photos this time.
Goodness, I'm writing this very late indeed. But I headed back to São Paulo from Rio, and over there went for a picnic with the SP vegans. And made some pastries for the road since the hostel had an oven. The picnic was excellent, a beautiful park / forest very near the city. There were all kinds of trees identified by a biologist who was along, but please don't assume I'd remember any of them. And even some monkeys, yay! :-)
And there was indeed more and more awesome vegan foods to be found. It seems there are quite a lot of vegan and vegetarian restaurants in SP, not the kind of numbers there would be in India of course, but relatively many, and of high quality. The picture on the left is from Fulo, which is supposedly the best veg restaurant in town. I don't really know about that, it was fine and more expensive than most, but didn't seem that amazing.
