Walking up & down Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo

It’s quite difficult to catch people on the phone. With the time difference, either with France or Asia, I often attempt a quick call but it’s often at the wrong time for my friends and family.
Today we made an appointment with my best friend, but it means waking up at 8am for me. I am not seeing things straight but we end up chit chatting away for at least two hours and I was happy.

We have a very slow morning, still recovering from yesterday’s travel and the very early flight. Our accommodation has a facial and biometric system to get you in. We attempt to get registered but everything is in Portuguese… communication is going to be tough here. The building guardian ends up helping us and between Alexis’s Spanish, google translate and patience, we get it done. 

Now that we can go in and out of our apartment – it’s time to get some groceries for our stay in Sao Paulo. We are staying four days: we have some administrative tasks to do and had to plan for an appointment with the French Embassy. 

We discover an absolute gem of a shop: an authentic Italian delicatessen and bakery. The bread is exceptionally good and we bought some spreads and a stuff bread with meat that was so tasty ! Homemade mozzarella as well. I think we will go back these next two days for more – it’s 5min walk away from our place. Barely 3 customers can fit inside the boutique, it’s full of great product and stuffed to the brim with good and artisanal food  - you don’t know where to look !

After that we complement all of our findings with the supermarket. It’s a little after lunch, and we brunch with Italian products at the apartment before taking a few hours nap.

At the end of the afternoon, we decide to walk Paulista avenue, the equivalent of Sao Paulo’s champs Elysees. It’s about 15min walk from our place. The avenue is very large and it’s basically rows of tall buildings, some of them have interesting architectures. There are shopping malls, parks and office buildings. We walk up and down a large portion of it until we find a park and a nice gelato shop. 

I discovered a new fruit today: Uvaia. It tastes like a slightly sour apricot as first taste and pear as second taste. It looks like a crossover between an apricot and a plum.

We backtrack to the apartment as night falls.