São Paulo Airport and over Brazil

¡Hola¡ I made it. Here I am in Buenos Aires staying with a lovely host family right in the middle of Recoleta, a very lovely (and affluent) barrio.

The journey here was pretty much event-free, sleeping most of the way from London to Sau Paulo. I was sat next to Claudia, a wonderfully enthusiastic Brazilian woman who had been over in the UK learning English and visiting her English boyfriend (whose name was Chris, a name I discovered sounds incredibly cute when said with a strong Latin accent).

Claudia was returning home and I happened to notice that she wasn't the only Brazilian heart-breaker on the aeroplane as I overheard at least 2 other Brazilian women speaking to their English beaux before they returned to their native Brazil for good. My advice to men is thus: yes they are gorgeous but it certainly comes at a price. She will inevitably leave you to go home much sooner than you think.

After arriving in Sao Paulo I had to wait for 7 hours stuck in their small 'connections' lounge. I could neither leave nor buy anything as I didn't have any usable currency. The time went very slowly. By the time I made it on the plane I was so hungry, I wolfed down my food with such speed that even the positively planetary Americal next to me raised an eyebrow. The flight itself was really quite interesting. At first we flew down the coast and I saw miles and miles of indeveloped, nay uninhabited white sandy beaches with miniture islands. I wondered if Magellan and his crew had disembarked much for a frolic on the sands as I expect the whole coast must have looked like that then.... although I don't know if beaches had the same appeal before the days of Mr Thomas Cook.

Another thing about flying over brazil was the amount of trees! Whereas when you fly over most places in europe, the majority of the view is of the patchwork of fields, here the trees were so dense that even the mountaintops were covered in trees - right to the peak - making them look furry.