Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre is a bigger city than Santa Maria (~1.5 million) located in the south of Brazil. The centre is packed with big boring buildings, see below. There are also nice things to see here and there. The pictures below are taken from both sides of a bridge over the larger road below. The thing that makes this place different is the bridges on the sides. These are pedestrian streets that go down to the bigger row at a very small angle. It can’t be very useful with these slopes if you want to go down to a shop directly beneath you, but it looks kind of nice. I should probably also point out that these walkways form the ceiling to many homeless people.

An old bank in the city centre has been turned into some kind of art exhibition. I can’t say that I understood or enjoyed too much of the exhibition itself, but it was a pretty cool idea to turn the vault into a café and bar.

Here, just as in every city in the world, I’ve seen Irish bars. But I have to say that I was a bit surprised when I saw this shop:

If you have a lot of old plastic bottles, but don’t have the energy to recycle them, here is an idea what you can do instead (it might take more energy than to recycle them though):

There are a lot of palm trees all over all cities I’ve been to in Brazil. They do have such a warm feeling to them.

All these poles have several hooks attached at the top, as you can see on the closest pole. They are there so that you can bring your own hammock, hang it up and rest for a while. These are located in a big park just next to a few football pitches so that you can watch some of the matches from your hammock or just take a rest from playing yourself. Below are more pictures from a few different parks:

In the last picture, it looks like the sky is blue around the palm trees, but it also looks like there are clouds in the reflection in the water. This is because there are so much algae in the water that it makes it look like clouds in the reflection.

T(urtle) in the park

View from my hotel room in Porto Alegre. These ruins were squeezed in among the 20 (or so) storey buildings around.

These flats are located right on the beach of Porto Alegre. I mean the tubes in the middle of the pictures and not the taller buildings in the background…

Then finally to something that is very popular in the south of Brazil. You can easily buy this in a lot of places, and it’s not very expensive.

No, it’s not marijuana or anything similar. This is a typical kind of tea (mate or chimarrão). It is extremely popular and you see people walking around with their cups (cuias) and vacuum flasks filled with hot water. It looks rather peculiar to see so many people walking around with their tea cups in the middle of the street, especially since you don’t really need any tea to warm up.