Brasil II: São Paulo

I have returned to the land of snow! Boo... I'd planned to blog about my trip while I was on it, but I guess I ended up feeling more like doing stuff than writing about what I was doing (shock). And now that I'm back... well, there are many bits and pieces that I want to write about, so I will do just that: write about bits and pieces when the inclination strikes me.

I hadn't particularly wanted to go to São Paulo, but since I was already flying through, I figured I may as well spend a couple of nights there. En route from the metro to my hostel, I covered over half the length of Rua Teodoro Sampaio -- and man oh man, I have never seen so many music stores in my life. Not just in one place, either: I'm pretty sure the total number of music stores I've seen over the course of my entire life has at least tripled just from walking down that street. Musical instrument stores, I mean. It's insane. Not to mention awesome. Guitars, drums (of every type and size), violins, guitars, cavaquinhos, berimbaus, guitars, pianos, pandeiros, guitars... oh yeah, and then there were the guitars. I still can't believe I made it through this gauntlet of beautiful, shiny temptation without buying a new guitar... Especially since I spent a good couple hours in various stores trying out several. I'd been told while in Rio (to my surprise) that guitars are actually a lot more expensive in Brasil than in Canada, so I'd already sort of pre-decided specifically not to buy one... but in retrospect a lot of the prices, in this area at least, were actually alright... a supply/demand thing, I suppose? In a store I visited in Salvador, the same model of one guitar I'd really liked was a good R$200 (~$125 CAD) more expensive. I almost wish I'd just gone ahead and bought it... would've been really nice to have a guitar to play while I was there. But yeah, I don't even want to think about what hauling a guitar around, in addition to my bag(s), would've been like... definitely didn't pack *quite* light enough for that.