our first morning in the hostel and it includes a brasilian breakfast spread which consists of: assorted bread, jam, jelly, assorted fruit, two kinds of juice, coffee, tea, cookies, cake, ham and cheese, granola and a little milk.

walking around yesterday and today, i feel like the air is cleaner in mexico city! the air feels dirty here. i don't feel like i'm getting a breath of fresh air. i grew up in los angeles, which is considered the dirtiest city in america. yet, california has strong pollution control measures that i take for granted because when i breath it is fine. looking at the condition of my skin and checking to see any resurgence in asthma, i still say los angeles is quite clean compared to what i'm breathing here. i seriously want to know how this ranks to beijing due to all the media focusing in on the pollution levels in that city with the olympics going on right now.

today while we went to the zoo (zoológico de são paulo), the others went to a favela. and by others i mean our friend dani and the people we met yesterday that are staying with my family. one of them requested to see a favela and so my family made some contacts and made the day trip possible. i doubt you could convince me to go but i already promised a friend i'm not visiting favelas during this trip. they are notoriously bad. favelas are shanty towns. none of us speak the local language or would look like a local. without the contact, i'm sure we'd be dead if we stepped foot in there. later in the day when we met up with dani, he described how awesome it was to visit, yet scary, and that you never say the word "favela" there, that they call it "la comunidad" (the community).

i wanted to go to the zoo to see animals that could only be seen in brazil. i didn't care if it was a smaller or dirtier zoo. i thought that surely it must contain some regional animals that i cannot see back home. finding out info about this city in english on things to do, addresses, and directions has been a pain in the ass so i'm going to describe a bit how we got here to help out others. we took the metro down to jabaquara station, then you walk outside around the building to platform a. there is a little kiosk there decorated with a zoo theme and it's past the restrooms and vendors. you pay for your zoo admission and a shuttle which boards directly in front of the kiosk. you get on the shuttle which is decorated with a bunch of animals so you really can't miss it. the shuttle takes you directly to the zoo and when you're ready to leave, just go back to where it dropped you off and present the other portion of your ticket. yep, you already paid for the ride back when you bought your ticket at the metro station kiosk.

giant anteater

the zoo isn't really special. the first part we walked by was dirty water and we don't think any animals were in there--at least we hope not! next to it were some birds from australia and then american bison or something like that. then a sea lion on one side and a penguin across from it. it's kind of sad looking up to this point. i definitely think the interesting animals at this zoo are the ones from south america. there was a small reptile house full of various snakes, an enclosure for an anaconda, a small aviary of pretty birds, and a south american bear that i was surprised to see. when i think of south american animals, i definitely do not think of bears. i don't know why but what impressed me the most was the giant anteater. they're not kidding. they really are giant. they're like the size of a really large dog! i also like the monkeys because they were on their own little islands in the middle of a lake instead of being in cages.

my lunch plate at vegethus

on the way back, we got off at metro santa cruz and tried to go to a place i read about on the internet called lagoa for vegan feijoada. however, we made a wrong turn at the catholic church nossa senhora da saúde and walked for a couple blocks until by chance we ended up at another vegetarian place, restaurante vegethus. we were really hungry at this point and it was a happy accident! we went inside and weren't really sure what to do. the lady working there said something to us but i don't think twiddle thumbs was able to decode portuguese into spanish so we both just had blank looks on our faces. the front part of the place is also a little store and i noticed they had vegan stickers for sale. so i picked up one of them, pointed to it, and asked if they had "comida vegana?" the lady said yes and we asked which ones and she pointed out maybe one or two things that weren't vegan and said the rest is vegan. mind you, this was all in portuguese but to see so many things to eat that are vegan was heaven sent. you pay after you eat so we grabbed some plates and went for it!

all desserts were vegan

i went to get food twice and i grabbed just about every thing on the spread that was vegan. i had lentils and rice, which weren't very flavorful. there was also some black sesame seed hummus type thing there. it wasn't bad but i wasn't really sure what to do with it so i ate it plain. the rest of what i ate was pretty good. i didn't eat much, just a little of everything, including some veggies and tofu, flavored tofu, burdock, some sort of veggie casserole, some kind of grain that i have no idea what it was, and some really excellent corn (or other kind of starch) soup. for dessert, i decided to get a piece of each dessert and we split that, giving our thoughts on each one. again, i'm not really sure of what we had. there was some kind of cake with a glaze on it, some strawberry pudding-like thing, some fruit, and something that looked like peanut butter with shredded coconut on top. i ate the mystery peanut butter-esque thing first--big mistake! that's the worst thing i've ever eaten! oh my god it was so awful. honestly, it tasted like i was licking the armpit of a hippy who had just gone jogging. there's no way in hell i could finish that! it had cumin in it, which should not be used in desserts. the rest of the desserts were really good so at least i didn't finish my meal with hippy pits and have a sweaty aftertaste lingering in my mouth for the rest of the day. after eating, we browsed the items they had and got a couple things. i got a vegan t-shirt and once we saw that they had soy condensed milk (looking at the ingredients, it appears to be vegan), we screamed joyously of all the things we could make. we only bought one because we don't know if it's tasty or not, plus it's in a can and will weigh down our luggage. if it's really good though, we're going to have to find some way to get this stuff in america.

we walked back to the santa cruz metro station and decided to browse the mall that's right there. we needed to use the phone to get a hold of dani and my relative to figure out when they'd be back from their favela trip. we looked in one sports store and i found one of the things on my shopping list: sandals with a brasilian flag on them! i was happy to snag those. then i used the restroom and there was an incident: the zipper on my pants broke! great, of all times to break, while i'm on a trip in another country. at least it happened in the mall so i could shop for another pair of pants. we wandered looking for a shop. for the hell of it i decided to go into t&c (town and country--yeah they apparently still exist) and it was ridiculously expensive. it must be trendy because i don't know how the average brasilian could afford it. so we wandered back to the sports store where i got a pair of pants at a much more reasonable price. but back to the restroom. there were some young girls in there who wanted to change clothes and rather wait for stalls to free up, they decided to change right there. so at least i can say i've seen naked brasilian girls, sorta.

after going back to the hostel, we decided to walk around the italian neighborhood which was nearby. there were signs all over for the archiropita festival. when i was planning the trip, i had read about the archiropita festival but i didn't realize it was going to be so close to our hostel. it only happening this month on weekends after 6pm so we're going to have to find a time to squeeze in some time to check it out. it was a little early for dinner by brasilian standards (just about to turn 6pm) but we thought it'd be best if we ate some food. we have plans to go out later tonight with a local but if we wait until then we'll be too hungry and we don't know if there will be food we can eat. so we talked to a couple restaurants that were just opening up to see if they had anything we could eat. we ended up having pizza again at silla's pizzeria. the waiter was cool because he tried to explain the vegetables to us that were on the menu and we didn't know the portuguese words for them. at one point, he went to the kitchen and came back with a plate of some corn kernels. ah, so it's corn! this is how we were able to communicate and order. this is going to definitely be an interesting trip!

at night, we went out with our friend's brother for drinks and had some food. i think it was in or near the gay section of town, which again turned out to be not too far from our hostel. but driving at night in a car, everything can seem close. when you walk around in the daytime to get to a metro station, it can feel like everything is so far away. for drinks. i had a caipirinha. it's not served as simply in brasil as i have had in other countries. you have to pick which liquor you want and which fruit to flavor it with. i didn't want to get the same thing as others so i picked passion fruit. big mistake. it tasted like shit. the seeds kept getting stuck in the straw. the liquor was the standard cachaça rather than pinga but it was still strong. we had an interesting conversation regarding "bunda" (ass). our friend's brother got really serious at one point and said that "the problem with brasil is the bunda". once he explained the word we starting laughing. we continued to laugh as he explained his point. he was very serious so maybe he got offended that we were laughing but it was a funny conversation. or maybe i'm just laughing because i didn't realize bunda was such a big deal, that people think brasilians have a big one, that brasilians are focused on it, etc. it turns out that there is a huge bunda sculpture just outside the sambadrome in rio de janeiro. anyway, all in all it was a good day.