I spend a lot of time thinking about how long it takes to feel like you get to know a place. A month is usually enough to start to get the rhythm of a city. A week can at least give you a sense of day-to-day life. A day clearly isn’t enough. But sometimes, that’s all you get, and you have to make the most of it.

When figuring out how to get out of Lima, it was pretty clear that direct flights on short notice to Buenos Aires were super expensive. The problem with layovers, though, is that we needed to qualify to enter the country we were transiting through in the first place — for COVID, that mostly means proof of vaccination¹ and a negative PCR test.² In theory we could have just transited without leaving the airport, but having already been burned once I wanted to go someplace we could in theory get in if things went wrong. Our choices were Bolivia or Brazil. I chose Brazil.

With that settled, I could have booked a flight with an 18-hour layover, but for roughly the same money I managed to book a flight which landed in São Paulo at 10pm and another which took off for Buenos Aires two days later at 7am. That timing meant we wouldn’t need a second PCR test.³ And it did give us a day in São Paulo. We tried to make the most of it.

We saw the main cathedral, rushed off to a great lunch at Maní,⁴ came back to tour the art collection at MASP,⁵ then rushed through the Edifício Copan before walking over to a microbrewery⁶ and finally ending up at a pizzeria.⁷

And then the day was over. A flight out the next morning at 7am meant getting up at 4am⁸ so we turned in early. I’m still figuring out how I feel about São Paulo, let alone Brazil. It seemed nice, despite the heat and the traffic jams. But I’ll need to see more. I’m not going to figure it out this trip. Maybe next time.

Next: Buenos Aires (EZE) to São Paulo (GRU)
Prev: Lima (LIM) to São Paulo (GRU)

Footnotes

¹ Which is simple, unless you’re trying to enter Chile, apparently.

² Which should be simple, but maybe isn’t.

³ I know the risk of testing positive a couple days after the first was low, but it’s not zero, and I’ve got way too much scheduled in Argentina to risk not getting in because of that.

⁴ Booking everything at short notice — namely the night before — I was happy to score a lunch reservation. Lots of South American restaurants aren’t great with vegetarian options, but Maní was great. My friend had the ravioli which was more of a pasta sheet lovingly wrapping a dish of eggplant and mushrooms with a fried egg, I had the black rice with pumpkin and fried kale, and we split the goat cheese bon bons as an appetizer.

I don’t want to make too much about the chef de cuisine being a woman, but if anything it seems to me those kitchen are smarter, more inventive, and more broadly inclusive than male-led kitchens. Maybe I’m just imagining it.

⁵ Museu de Arte de São Paulo. It’s a great museum, with a wildly eclectic collection ranging from the 14^th to the 21^st centuries and a surprisingly competent cocktail bar in the basement. The big innovation is the art isn’t arrayed in galleries but hung in an vast open warehouse space on transparent easels; you wander among and through the art, not past it. If art is about reorienting you in relation to the world, maybe curation is about reorienting you in relation to the art.

⁶ Cervejaria Dogma. Unabashedly a great microbrewery, but their selection was one bitter, one Imperial stout, and about a dozen different IPAs. The brewmaster’s got a type.

⁷ Leggera Pizza. Not as weird as it sounds; there were a lot of Neapolitan immigrants to Brazil.

⁸ Although, in truth, we breezed through security and had our documents all in order. We could have slept in an hour.

Our original plan was to stay at the airport hotel — São Paulo has a hotel weirdly in the international terminal, past security and the passport checks, and it would have been great to have been able to just walk to the gate this morning. But we literally couldn’t find it when we landed, and everyone we asked just directed us out through immigration control and into baggage claim, and after you’ve left the secure area there’s no returning without an upcoming boarding pass.