São Paulo (GRU) to Paris (CDG)
Mar 19, 2022
Elisabeth Alba
At the moment, I don’t really exist. I’m in transit, always an unstable state to be in, rendered particularly absurd by the peculiarities of global travel. My flight to Paris left São Paulo last night, on the 18th. I land in Paris tomorrow morning, on the 20th. That in itself is a little mindblowing; I’m basically skipping a day. Right now I’m in Dallas, in the middle of an 11 hour layover. But even then, I’m not leaving the airport.1
The Dallas/Fort Worth airport is probably one of the better places to kill a day, which doesn’t really mean it’s a good place to kill a day, just that there’s a lot around to waste some time. Modern airports are still deeply weird places; the better connected they are to global air networks the more unmoored they are from the places they’re situated. It’s the same chain stores and the same brands in Duty Free no matter where you go, as if to soften the blow of global travel they’re trying to create the illusion you haven’t left at all.
Adding to that vague sense of unreality is the fact that I arrived in São Paulo two days ago, on the 17th. I spent the night at TRYP,2 the airport hotel I tried and failed to stay in on my first visit to São Paulo. And if you can forgive the expression, it was a trip.
To start with, it’s a transit hotel — it’s not just in the airport, it’s in the international transit area. You don’t go through passport control after landing.3 Technically I didn’t even need to be permitted to enter Brazil, since I never left the transit area. This would be a huge advantage if I had a early flight the next day, since I’m literally a five minute walk to the gate and don’t need to pass through security.
The hotel is a pretty standard budget hotel, with pasteboard furniture and an okay mattress but an absolutely stellar bathroom. And the A/C works and there’s solid WiFi and plenty of electrical outlets, so I can’t really complain. It’s tucked into an oddly empty corner of the airport, and the most unsettling part of it is the industrial carpet and overly wide hallways. It clearly wasn’t designed as a hotel; it’s like someone tore out the desks and Aeron chairs from a failed startup and tossed up a maze of hotel rooms across the open floor plan.
The worst part is probably the lack of windows. The best part is the checkout time; you have the room for 24 hours. I checked in at 7pm, so I spent the night and most of the next day curled up in blankets, reading and watching TV and napping, sneaking out for breakfast and snacks. When I finally checked out I had just enough time to grab dinner4 before rolling up to the gate with an hour before my flight boarded.
I had to leave my Russian friend behind in Buenos Aires. I’m still adjusting to being alone, after ten weeks of effectively conjoined travel. I’ve repeatedly offered to travel with friends over the past few years and only a handful of people have taken me up on it. So I was genuinely surprised when one agreed to meet me in Mexico. And surprised again when they agreed to tag along for the whole Latin America trip.
I was delighted and honored. And apprehensive. This is someone I knew casually but not someone I had spent a huge amount of time with. And travel is stressful when you’re just flying someplace to relax for the week. When you travel the way I do — rarely staying in one place for longer than four days, constantly pressing on to see something new — it can be daunting.5
Mercifully, we clicked pretty quickly. We were never entirely simpatico,6 but we worked rather well together anyway. As an extreme introvert, it was nice to be traveling with an extreme extrovert — I hate calling up restaurants or tour companies and quizzing them on availability or reservations, so having someone around who actually enjoys talking to strangers was an incredible perk.
Overall, it’s just intense spending that much time around someone else. We both tried to give each other space when we could, but there’s a limit to how much you can when you’re always sharing hotels and flights and tours. And spending too much time by yourself defeats the purpose of traveling with someone else in the first place. I spend 90% of my time alone; by now I have a reasonably good idea how I’m going to react to things. It’s a treat to see how someone else reacts as well, even when that reaction is utterly baffling.7
Near the end of our trip, my friend asked me what I had learned from them, after so many weeks of travel. I had no answer. I hadn’t even thought about it. And ever since they asked I haven’t really stopped thinking about it, even if I still don’t have a good answer. It’s tempting to say something like “To be more outgoing and talk to more strangers” or “The value of a good home cooked meal” or even simply “To get out more often if only to walk around” — all answers I’m sure my friend would be happy with — but those are glib and easy. None of them are wrong. They’re all things I’d like to be better at appreciating, but they’re not new ideas. I’m working on them. I’ll work on them more. But I can’t say I suddenly learned them.
Something more subtle happened, something harder to put my finger on. You can’t spend as much time together as the two of us have without absorbing some of each other’s sensibilities. Even now I’m noticing stores I think they would like, or or places I’d like to mention to them. I see things I didn’t notice before. I look at cities differently. I look at people differently. I think that’s gonna stick.
Even if I can’t quite articulate what I learned, I know what I’ll remember: the restaurant that served an impossibly creamy avocado gazpacho, the triumphant run through an airport catching a connection we had every right to miss, the antique store where the proprietors foolishly sold a vintage fan for a song. I’m not going to remember my trip through Latin America, I’m going to remember our trip through Latin America. What more could I have possibly wished for?
Footnotes
1 I was sorely tempted, but my flight got in before 6am, my next flight out is just after 4pm, I barely slept on the flight, and most of the museums I’d consider hitting are an hour away on public transit, don’t open until 11 or 12, plus I’d be schlepping my luggage. There’ll be another trip, maybe one where I’m spending the night.
2 More properly, “TRYP by Wyndham Sao Paulo Guarulhos Airport” and no, they don’t put an accent over the “a” on their website.
3 This was the mistake I made the first time. And I knew it was a mistake the first time. There just weren’t any signs directing travelers to the international transit area, just the domestic one, and before I knew it I had been herded out to baggage claim.
4 There was a hot dog stand selling vegetarian hot dogs in the terminal, which is bizarre, because the vegetarian options everywhere were nigh nonexistent.
5 I mean, I still find it exhausting, sometimes. I try to balance things and intersperse longer, more languid stops with the “last chance to see” kind of stops, but especially when I’m visiting places I’ve never been before my enthusiasm can get the better of me.
6 Just one small example: I eat two meals a day, and more than that usually makes me feel bloated and a little ill; I’m also typically fine not eating for twelve hours or more. My friend has to eat at least three times a day and will crash hard if it’s been more than about eight. They were ecstatic to discover Argentinians typically eat four meals every day.
7 That goes both ways, of course. My friend can’t figure out why I spend so much time on this blog talking about flight cancellations or the war in Ukraine, on the not unreasonable grounds that travel blogs ought to talk about how great travel is and what there is to see.
My position remains that the readership for these posts is typically in the mid-to-high single digits, and if any of them wanted to know what there was to see or do in, say, Buenos Aires I can think of a half-dozen better sources than myself.