São Paulo, Brazil + Add a trip

Torre Altino Arantes

Go to the first skyscrapper in São Paulo. Their own Empire State. Free entrance to the best views in the center.

Morumbi area

Hilton Morumbi is quite nice hotel if you do business in the WTC block. Nearby shopping: Cidade Jardin, Iguatemi, Morumbi mall, Ibirapuera mall, Market place (in Morumbi). And for caipirinha, go to the roof top terrace of hotel Unique=).

fantastic place to see live jazz. intimate, dark, great classic jazz. hit it at about 1am. good drink selection, tho a touch pricey

The Liberdade at the saturday/sunday morning , the dowtown at the morning too (don´t stay there after 18:00!)

Nice place for RPG games and comics commerce.

Travelers at "Praça da Liberdade" should explore "Galvão Bueno" street and whitin its shops and restaurants. If you are looking for some of the nicest restaurants around, take a look for "Thomas Gonzaga" Street, or "Aska" restaurant on "Galvão Bueno" street.

Interesting, involving exhibition on the evolution of the Portuguese language as spoken in Brazil. We went on a schoolday and there clearly were a number of groups of schoolchildren going round as well; it looked like it was successfully engrossing them as well as us.

One less positive comment - the show in the auditorium with poetry and whirling lights was less successful as a learning experience, though quite dramatic in itself.

A good collection of art both old and new, though not focusing on modern art per se. The basement floor has interesting temporary exhibitions; on this visit (April 2011) it was a video installation of interviews done with people from around the world, being asked questions such as what they thought was the greatest challenge facing mankind. It was visually impressive but hard to get anything substantial from it as you couldn't make out much of the actual answers unless you waited a long time to be able to sit in the area in front of the video screens where you could hear the voices or read the subtitles.

The display of the main collection upstairs was flawed by the light display: the lighting shone on the paintings causing reflections that interfered with us viewing them. Seems an elementary thing to be considered when setting up this sort of thing, surely?

Paid good money for an exhibition on ecological architecture that would have been better done in another medium - it was all wordy boards like you'd get in an academic conference, only in a conference you'd also get a real person talking about too. tl;dr. If it had been done as a tv program it would work well.

I wouldn't mind so much except there didn't seem to be much else to look at once we got fed up with that. Style over content.

Awesome bookshop with excellent stock coverage, excellent atmosphere, excellent and helpful staff. The only downside is that books are (and have always been) very expensive in Brazil.

More a place for people who live in SP than for visitors, as its main function is as a venue for many different sorts of classes - adult education, sport, IT, art, etc etc. There is a reasonably-priced canteen with food priced per kilo, and an exhibition space. When we went (May 2011) the exhibition was very interesting and well laid out, with large b&w photos and accompanying text about midwives in far-flung rural communities in the Amazon.