"If you live in a nice area close to where you work, Sao Paulo is a great place," commented my taxi driver, as we drove in from Guarulhos Airport, Sao Paulo, Brazil. He was refering to difficulties with congestion and traffic jams, that seem to grow worse each year as Sao Paulo's population increases. Sao Paulo is a great place, regardless!
[Link to Google translation into Portuguese, (machine translation, so apologies for all errors)].
But the cab driver is right, too. The metro area of Sao Paulo has grown so large that it has swallowed up two other neighboring cities. With 27 million paulistanos (inhabitants of Sao Paulo), this is the third largest city in the world (after Tokyo and Jakarta). Everywhere you look, new buildings are rising, and the streets are jammed with cars. Sao Paulo, Brazil, is a bustling, busy, fast-moving city, full of culture, history, and surprises. The MOTODEV team has come to Sao Paulo as the first stop in the Latin American part of our developer App Summits.
In each App Summit location, I try to get out of the conference hotel, and explore the streets of the city. I want to meet people, and see the local culture first hand. There's a big art market held every Sunday in the Praça Da República, so I went along last Sunday morning. There were the usual stalls of paintings, leather goods, t-shirts, gems, jewelry and so on. I can see all those at the art fairs in my home town in California. This sight was new to me, however.
Fortune Telling in the Praça Da República, Sao Paulo, Brazil
The colorful bird in the cage has just used its beak to pull out that paper card, from a selection of many cards in the tray. The card bears the lady's fortune (the card amazingly predicts that she will resolve a situation in her family, and will come into a sum of money unexpectedly). The man holding the cage charges a small sum for this service. (And is that Inspector Morse keeping a wary eye on proceedings in the background? I think it is!)
As well as folk culture, Sao Paulo is home to world class financial and commercial enterprises. This is the Avenida Paulista, a two mile avenue of the most expensive real estate in South America. Ave. Paulista was originally a residential neighborhood, but now has the headquarters of many important businesses, as well as untold radio/tv/cell tower antennas, and a comprehensive fine art museum (the MASP, which I passed by, but was not able to visit. Maybe next trip). Avenida Paulista is often compared to Fifth Avenue in New York. Fun trivia fact: the tropic of Capricorn passes through the Avenida Paulista.
The Petrobras Building reflects one of the many towers on Avenida Paulista
The actual App Summit went extremely well - around 400 developers attended, and one developer told me he had ridden for 6 hours on a city bus to be here. With that type of dedication, developers are really working for success. As I type this, I can hear the applause marking the end of the final presentation of the day. That's my signal to go over to the Device Bar, where we have a full range of Motorola Mobility products, including the latest XOOM tablets, and ATRIX smartphones with the lapdock. The developers here are dedicated, and many of them have demonstrated their apps running on these products - in some cases without seeing the actual hardware.
I would love to hear the views and perceptions from any developers who attended this summit - please add your comments below.
Locals sometimes call Sao Paulo "cidade da garoa" (city of drizzle), and we had a strong thunderstorm the day before our App Summit. May and June are late autumn months south of the equator, so some drizzle is expected. A little more surprising however, was this label on the orange juice dispenser in the hotel breakfast buffet...
Orange juice with ... eggplant?
Did I read that correctly? They're offering me orange juice with eggplant mixed in with it? My first guess was that this was a mistranslation - the orange juice was probably fortified with calcium or sweetener, or maybe from made from concentrate, and someone had mistyped an unfamiliar foreign word.
Nope! I asked Gui, one of the local Motorola team. He patiently explained that eggplant has many beneficial nutrients including one which acts to lower cholesterol. Well, I'm all for that! I drew a big glass of OJ/eggplant, and took it back to my table. At the table, I took a healthy cholesterol-lowering gulp of OJ/eggplant. To my surprise, it tasted exactly like ordinary orange juice, into which someone has shredded a serious amount of eggplant. We all learned something in Sao Paulo over the last few days. But some of us about Android, and some of us about aubergines.
Cheers,
Peter van der Linden
Android Technology Evangelist
MOTODEV App Summit, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
