Some time ago, I had a discussion with a friend on a topic that doesn’t really have any valid answer. We were discussing when it is…somehow appropriate to say that you’re actually living in a place instead of just travelling or staying there temporarily. What would be the factors involved: how much you’ve seen in that place, if you have friends there, if you feel like a local, the actual time that you’ve spent there, etc.

Well, I will add two more factors here – the coolness of the place and my desire to say that I live there – and say (it’s facebook official, yes) that I live in Sao Paulo now.

Not that long ago, I would think – and say it proudly – that one has to be an idiot to move to Brazil and not to live by the beach (“That would be a total nonsense, c’mon!”). That reasoning, combined with an image of São Paulo of this superbusy and grey financial centre never really made me that interested in visiting it. Well, until I started hearing some different things from people who’ve actually been there, and, since maybe half of my film production people were from SP, I had started getting a much better image of the city (and its people) recently. “The biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere actually has something to offer? No way…”

So, I was enjoying my Saturday morning in Lençóis, Chapada Diamantina (where my work travels had taken me), swimming in a river there followed by getting some tan on the rocks (“Tan of the Rocks” – here’s a cocktail name for you), when my boss asked me if I could come to SP, ideally the next day. “Ehmmmm I’ll check if there is a night bus to Salvador”, I said, and, well, to skip some logistical details involving, as always, a lot of swearing while trying to buy anything online in Brazil (and crying “but…but…I have my CPF and it’s still doesn’t work”), I was in SP the next evening. That was already more than a month ago, and since I’ve been in Rio for one month and claimed that’s where I was living, I thought I can – and maybe should – say I live in SP now instead. Instead of making a “So where do you live?” question very complicated, (“Well, my stuff is in Rio, but I’ve been actually travelling for some time, blah blah”), I’ll just say SP. Woooh. You’re welcome.

Not to attempt to make this blog entry somehow actually about travels and to try to list interesting objects in the city (for anyone reading my blog for the first time, I should have indicated earlier that it’s not a travel blog; or, if it is, it’s a very shitty one! Yeah, so “for anyone reading my blog for the first and last time…”), let me just reiterate that SP is just freakin’ awesome. Concerts, film festivals, loads of free events, good food, a good metro system….when I think about it now, I guess I might be simply describing ANY big city, hmmmm, maybe, maybe…

In the end, any place is always about the people we meet. I met some really cool people here, in SP, I guess that’s really it. You could have read just this one sentence. Who knows, maybe you did (well done, well done…).