Sao Paulo = Hell de Janeiro x 10

My friend Fabiola often refers to Rio as Hell De Janeiro, which seems a little unfair because it is pretty much the best place ever. And, aside from that, there are places where hell seems a lot more apt, and Sao Paulo is one of them. Or at least it is between the hours of 4pm and 6pm everyday when the heavens open and each gloriously sunny summer’s day seems like just a myth. I was in Rio on Saturday and that was the first day of my trip without rain. The six-hour bus journey was a joyous trip through sun-kissed mountains, and then we got to Sao Paulo. You could in fact see it in the distance; a dark, angry cloud hovering above our destination. As soon as we entered the bus terminal, which is on the city’s outskirts the rain started pouring down, huge rocks of water with odd bout of thunder and lightning in case you weren’t quite feeling the hellishness enough yet. It all reminded me why at 4 ‘o’ clock every afternoon, when I see the darkness circling, I run back to the hostel to hide for a few hours. It’s very possible that the huge amount of pizzas consumed every day could be related to this stormy predicament, but I don’t want to draw any conclusions just yet. It’s either that, or the unbelievable amounts of concrete, cars and heat that just cause some kind of unbearable tension to break in the atmosphere each day.