![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2014\/05\/latinamerica.jpg\")
<\/a>Just before I left Bloomington, my son David said,\u201dDad, you\u2019ve never been to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. I expect I\u2019ll be reading a lot from the\u00a0Lonely Planet.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>I want to assure him that I don\u2019t have a copy of that standby, so what follows are sleepy observations over 6,000 miles south of Bloomington Normal.<\/p>\nI\u2019d like to say it\u2019s an easier flight than Asia, and it certainly is shorter\u2014by about 3-4 hours.\u00a0 In addition, the time zone change is only 2 hours (it\u2019s two hours later in Sao Paulo than in Bloomington, lying south but also East).\u00a0 But David is right: it is a new experience for me.<\/p>\n
I can sort of thank the Pope that I\u2019m in a Portuguese-speaking country.\u00a0 Early in the age of exploration, he divided the world between his two major Catholic countries\u2014Spain and Portugal\u2014and what is now Brazil fell into the Portuguese partition.\u00a0 That\u2019s made the Portuguese language one of the most popular in the world because Brazil\u2019s population is nearly 200 million, surprisingly overwhelmingly urban.\u00a0 I think the figure I saw was 85%, with Sao Paulo at around 12 million, and the more famous\u2014and once capital city, Rio de Janeiro, around 6 million.<\/p>\n
Sao Paulo owes its founding nearly 460 years ago to the Jesuits, who came to convert the Indians. One byproduct was that the fields and mines that fueled the growth of Brazil (this was the age of mercantilism, when colonies existed to enrich the mother country) were staffed by African slaves, adding to what proudly has emerged as a multinational society.\u00a0 Sao Paulo has Jewish, German, Japanese (yes, there\u2019s a Japantown, but not a Chinatown) areas, among others.\u00a0 In return for the language and the religion, Brazil made Portugal richer; Lisbon suffered a major earthquake in the middle of the 18th<\/sup> century, and it was rebuilt in Baroque style, made more baroque by the import of gold from Brazil. The churches in Lisbon are incredibly gilded!<\/p>\n Ironically, it was gold that led Brazil to declare independence from Portugal.\u00a0 During the French Revolution, the royal family fled Portugal to settle in Brazil when Napoleon took over the Iberian Peninsula.\u00a0 Apparently, when the King returned to Portugal, his son remained as Emperor of Brazil.\u00a0 Son apparently got annoyed when dad raided Brazilian gold to pay debts to Britain (the Brits should have settled for port wine, I think), and declared independence from Portugal.<\/p>\n Sao Paulo owes its prominence initially to agriculture.\u00a0 There\u2019s not much left from 450 years ago (the churches, though, are quite classic; the main Cathedral, the Se, is supposed to resemble Notre Dame in Paris), but there were some nice mansions once owned by coffee barons.\u00a0 Brazil is one of the leading countries of the world in coffee production, which we savored at a local non-Starbucks stop on our tour of the city.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a major producer of sugarcane\u2014and ethanol\u2014which has led to a number of auto plants located in the Sao Paulo area, partly because the car engines need to be adapted to burn the \u201ccleaner\u201d ethanol fuel (ethanol from corn is expensive because the corn needs to be converted to the sugar that comes from sugar cane).<\/p>\n It is fall here, and getting cooler; which means the large homeless population is camping in the public parks.\u00a0 There were a few squares downtown that I would love to have explored, but our guide exercised caution and kept us on the bus.\u00a0 It will be interesting to follow the world\u2019s greatest sporting event\u2014as the World Cup is (probably accurately, except in the United States) billed here, given the cost overruns and deadlines for facilities that might not be met, which begins in 33 days.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad we\u2019ll be gone by then.\u00a0 Someone said there are 8 million cars on the streets of Sao Paulo, but the government will probably do something like Beijing did (license plates dictated when people could drive); we may get a sense of the potential nightmare when we start our serious visits tomorrow.<\/p>\n I hope you all had a wonderful mothers\u2019 day.\u00a0 It\u2019s celebrated here, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" May 11, 2014\u00a0 bom dia from Sao Paulo Just before I left Bloomington, my son David said,\u201dDad, you\u2019ve never been to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. I expect I\u2019ll be reading a lot from the\u00a0Lonely Planet.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0I want to assure him that I don\u2019t have a copy of that standby, so what follows are sleepy observations over … Continue reading “Bom Dia from Sao Paulo”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fdib-latin-america-2014"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3043"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8480,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions\/8480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>