Barrel Strength

Sao Paulo is great; 30 million people or something similar.We got into town yesterday and debauched ourselves merrily. Vastly fewer street people than nine years ago. The financial centre seems to lie along Paulista Boulevard, which surmounts a long high hill which dominates the town. It is filled with business people in dark blue suits and throngs of office workers in sober shades. Bad concrete architecture of 1960s brutalist modernism. The height of Paulista Boulevard means that the skyscrapers are surmounted with cellular, microwave and television transmission towers. Incessant, dense and noisy traffic everywhere. Sao Paulo has the world’s largest market for civilian helicopters, because why waste time in traffic when you could land on the heliport on top of the building? Rather like the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, with less fog and happier people.

The night life is splendid. The girls are astounding. The city is muscular and vibrant the way Chicago is.

If you ever want a bizarre and encouraging experience, listen to a technical conference using terms like BGP (border gateway protocol), routers, sub-net masking, IP addressing, IPv6 transition, cryptography, systems back-up, in Brazilian Portuguese. The Internet is pronounced “internetch”. It is a kind of Spanish filtered through the Australian vowel tripthongator with a few consonant transformations peculiar to Portuguese.

Brazil manifestly rising from poverty. Improvement everywhere. Adam Smith should do another book on how a society formerly built on slavery and sugar now makes airplanes: from Mississippi to a would-be Massachusetts in 150 years. These people have a great future.

I have been travelling in Austria and the Czech republic for the past two weeks and it is time to issue the score card. Austrians are not Germans, politically, but they are culturally. Top reasons to like them:

1. Good humour: They are essentially good humoured, with a simple sense of fun. However much this contradicts the “germanic”  image, they get along with each other well, and given a chance, will get along with you.

2. Machinery: the German love-affair with machinery is world-renowned. They have great machinery, from cars an tractors through wireless devices for everything. They are a good ten years ahead of us North Americans in terms of pricing and adoption of wireless gizmos. Every hillside farm has serious tractors and a host of implements to keep the place in shape. Farmers’ houses in Styria are heated with advanced automatic wood chip furnaces which use the produce of the farm to heat the house.

3. Well-tended landscape: It’s true. Until you have seen a weedless field you would not believe such perfection in landscape were possible. Fields and forests are tended, not just allowed to grow, as is often the case in North America. Every tree grows with permission. Trees are culled on schedule and sent to market like the pigs, to be turned into cash, with which to buy more tree harvesting machinery. Which leads to forest roads through alpine terrain, where you can take your afternoon constitutional.

4. They hate vegetables: How wonderful to dine where the only vegetable matter is mustard and horseradish. Where potatoes, onions and garlic are the basic vegetables, rather than squash, zucchini, and carrots. To eat in Germanic lands is to eat where every notion of modern American cuisine is refuted. Meat is good, more meat is better, and  vegetables are for women and pansies. Heaven! Would you like some whipped cream on your baklava?

5. Driving. Fun, fun fun on die autobahn. 130 kilometers per hour the minimum self-respecting speed, and the cars zoom by.

And now for the bad part: German toilets. Alone among nations of the world – even the neighboring Czechs do not have them – the German toilet is a shallow bowl in the back with a deeper hole in front so that when you shit, you stink out the bathroom. Your shit lies in all its glory stinking to high heaven, waiting to be flushed.  It is the weirdest thing! What possesses them to have such an intimate relationship with their excrement?  I dare not even contemplate what they do with it.  I only hope they wash their hands, thorougly.

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The Czechs are recovering from Communism. They need your help. Go to Prague and graze your way across town in the 5,000 great bars and restaurants, and marvel in the glories of the Belle Epoque, Baroque and medieval architecture, mile upon mile of it. It is overwhelming. Another generation of freedom and they will begin to laugh and be happy like the Germans.