Things that depress me in Sao Paulo

A night on the tiles ? Perhaps not.

- The high prices.
- The rain.
- The univited wildlife: cockroaches, rats, lizzards and, most of all, the mosquitoes which keep me up at night and now carry the extra threat of Dengue.

- The dearth of vistas, aided by the fact that all planning considerations went out the window when this town began growing.

- The raw, brutal, unvarnished concrete everywhere: ugly buildings (some feebly camouflaged by a bit of childish paint), park benches, sculptures ...which politician got the backhander for this architectural abomination ?

- The gigantic aerial antennae on the roof of downtown buildings, giving the impression of an army camp rather than the "New York City of South America" and reminding you that nothing here is done for the public good, only for the sake of selfish, private interests. How many other key cities in the world have such monstrous carbuncles blighting the landscape ? "Only in Brazil", the land that aesthetics forgot. If they were at least used for decent broadband or WiMAX that might slightly mitigate the ocular offence.

- The sh**ty, sh**ty sidewalks (pavements) that, even in the so-called posh areas, are often a chaotic, collapsing, unusable mess. I have the utmost contempt for a culture that can't even construct a friggin sidewalk. Latin cultures in general have this chronic problem. Why invest in public space when we can take our car from door to door ? Why worry about the sidewalk outside your neighbour's store, so long as your tiny patch of walkway is ok ? Who cares if, overall, it looks like a shanty town ? By the way, whose bright idea was it to use freaking bathroom tiles as a form of sidewalk - expensive, ugly and impractical, especially once half of them have fallen off and the ground beneath the remaining ones has buckled, making it doubly impossible to push a child's buggy ? Has this city ever replaced a broken pavement tile ?

No man is an island: expensive apartments
rely on cheap infrastructure.

- The electricity and telecoms wiring that looks - and is - so third-world: a brutish black mess of cables sloppily hung between ugly wood and metal pylons, all in desperate need of a complete overhaul. But the electricity companies, which charge more here than almost anywhere else in the world, couldn't possibly invest in something as insignificant as infrastructure, could they ?

- The total lack of guttering, so that the constant downpours never wash away but turn into huge lakes at the side of the roads;

- The incredibly poor store layout in almost all grocery shops: aisles that are way too narrow, products piled up and shoved any which way, clumsily-placed freezers suddenly blocking your route ... all combined with the incredibly poor product range and product quality .. not forgetting how abysmally most products are packaged;

- The naff as hell Santa Claus displays at Christmas, so ludicrously inappropriate to a humid, mid-summer climate. Santa Claus and his jingling lights only just pull it off in the cold, dark, Northern Hemisphere winters, but down here he's a really bad joke. Why couldn't Brazil have come up with something more suitable to its own terrain, something with a touch of authenticity and originality instead of slavishly trying to copy the crasser commercialism of the US? Answer: why change the habit of a lifetime ?!

- The grandly titled Museu da Lingua Portuguese (Museum of the Portuguese Language), next to Luz station. Can it really be designed by the man who created Washington DC's famous Holocaust Museum ?! It seems more like just another sinister extension of the ubiquitous Globo TV channel, which pumps out an unremitting diet of pure opium for the masses. Apparently a "multi-media" extravaganza, in reality this edifice is just another example of untalented museum curatorship in Brazil. Boring and not very interactive, if you exclude Globo's crass TV screens blaring away from the walls. And the darkened room in which you listen to soporific, pretentious, irrelevant-to-most-people's-lives Brazilian poetry ? My infant son had the right idea by falling asleep within minutes.