Sao PauloApproaching the airport from air, an immense and sheer endless cityscape of grey steel and concrete unfolds in front of me, dominated by large rows of skyscrapers and an apparently infinite number of multistorey apartment blocks. The dark sky is covered by thick clouds and the rain seems never to stop. No, I am not the Blade Runner and this is not the Los Angeles of the year 2019 - but São Paulo in the year 2005.The first impression reflects exactly what I expected of a south american city of 17 million inhabitants: Huge, ugly, polluted and full of cars and people. Arriving at the hotel with the supposedly best value for money in town, the Accor Formule 1, I have to queue with 20 other recently arriving guests at the reception. The hotel is very efficiently organized covering a large number of guests with a minimum deployment of staff. The rooms are clean, practical and comfortable. You pay per room and there are beds for 3 persons in the room. So if you are in a group of three, you pay around 9 EUR each. Unfortunately none of the girls I asked on the street wanted to share the room with me. Maybe this is due to my overwhelming sex appeal or just because I wanted to share the cost?

The rain continued the next day. No reason not to explore the city. I still had the images of Bolivias captital La Paz in my mind. What a contrast. This here is almost like any large western city: Just as clean, organized and civilized as any of them. From the tourist office I obtained a guide for a recommended walk along the tourist places of downtown Sao Paulo. I expected it to be a short stroll of maybe two or three hours, it turned out to fill almost the entire day. At midday the sun came out and changed the face of the city. Actually Sao Paulo turned out to be a lively place with large open and green spaces, music and smiling people. Even the air pollution did not seem to be especially intense - in Mannheim it smells often worse.

The city has its shadows of course. You have to keep out of some neighbourhoods to be safe (although you don't feel limited however), cross the downtown area at night only in taxi and in some areas of the city center the oppressive poverty catches the eye: Homeless people built small huts of carton and blue plastic bags in the green spaces close to the palace of justice and under viaducts, surrounded by the garbage they collected cause it might be of some value to them. In some corners of the shopping streets, groups of homeless sat lined along the wall with blankets and their few belongings - one of them even with a little child.

Nightlife is a problem. The cities structure is somewhat like Berlin: There are several separate neighborhoods and there's no place where bars and discoteques are concentrated (like for example in Frankfurt - Sachsenhausen) and you have to go far to find decent places, while the meaning of 'decent' is obviously quite dependent on your personal 'gusto'. If you are like me looking for a plain and simple place with life music like Jazz, Blues or Brazilian stuff, without smartly dressed bouncers and with a relaxed and diverse crowd - then you really have to know where to go and you need a car here. So what I did is follow the advice of my guidebook and walked a couple of streets and neigbourhoods in the evening - and only almost found what I was looking for.

Buses are a problem. The problem with the buses in Sao Paulo is that there are no plans at all, none at the stations, none at the terminals' information desks and none at the tourist office an none in the internet. You can obtain a 2-kilo book of all bus lines, but this is outdated in the moment it is printed. So for a foreigner using the bus for a longer distance within the city is almost impossible. Since the metro system still has some huge gaps, this makes you either walk a lot or - if you are in a hurry - take a taxi. So what I did - and what in my opinion usually is the best option to get to know a city - is long and exhausting walks through large parts of the neighbourhoods like Pinheiros, Vila Madalena, Jardins, Moema, Brooklin, that were recommended in my guidebook. So I can tell, the city is really big.

All in all, when I sat in the plane to Brasilia after almost 3 days in Sao Paulo, I came to the conclusion that it might appear intimidatingly huge - but it's a surprisingly friendly, civilized and liveable place to be - as long as you dispose of the necessary monetary resources. :-)