São Paulo Hostel Downtown, São Paulo

Arrived in São Paulo yesterday evening and checked into a HI hostel close to Praça de Republica. Activities done today:

• Had a sumptuous breakfast at the hostel, including sausage and eggs and no traces of the comida tradicional (spaghetti + rice + beans).
• Called British Airways (BA) because discovered that our tomorrow's flight to Santiago had disappeared from the BA online booking system. Now it's fixed and we are flying tomorrow at 10am to connect in Santiago to a flight to Easter Island. (It is remarkable how often we have to communicate with BA regarding our round-the-world ticket. Sometimes it's because we want to shift our flight dates, but more often it's because the online list of our future flights has got messed up, and most often because BA calls to inform us that the time of our flight from Helsinki to Budapest (which is going to happen sometime in July according to the current optimistic schedule) has changed by 10 minutes...)
• Posted 4.8kg of stuff to Europe (107 BRL including the box). These are the useless kilos that we have gained during the 4.5 months here. It's mostly paper (brochures, maps), but also coins for my coin collection, gifts, and some Yerba Mate (which will probably be classified as gift). The estimated time of arrival is in 15 days, so the package probably won't beat the record currently held by a wooden giraffe whose journey from Lilongwe to Utrecht lasted 3 months.
  

It's raining in São Paulo (although not as heavily as in Rio where it's flooding) so we haven't planned any activities for the evening. Will probably try to have lunch now in the vegetarian restaurant Apfel (that is only open for lunch) and then drink a "good bye" Caipirinha.