Marianne and I returned to our beloved São Paulo. We left Wednesday night from New York arriving in São Paulo Thursday morning. We were suppose to have heavy rains, but boy did we luck out with sunny skies. After a brief nap, my tour director, Marianne came up with a plan. We were to adventure out to find the highest point of São Paulo by foot. As you can imagine, many pitfalls came our way!

Our destination was to a rooftop at an apartment complex that allowed guests at 3pm to enjoy the view of the city. Our walking trip was suppose to be 2.9 miles and with a speedy gait we would make it on time.

Everything was going perfect until we came upon Little Italy and stopped to take photos. To our dismay we lost our way. We missed an important left turn. This is when the craziness began.

We thought we could get back on track if we took the next left, unfortunately we were definitely out of our element. We asked directions from the locals, in which, they only spoke fast Portuguese to us. We knew that we were left to our own initiative. After many twists and turns, we came upon a police station. We enthusiastically ran up the steps to find 2 nice police officers that also didn’t speak English, but they were eager to help. We showed them on our phone the destination we planned to go. They showed us on their phone how to go. We definitely thought we could do this. One of the police officers walked us out and the only English parting word to us was DANGEROUS! He pointed to our phone and showed us to keep the phone hidden. Yikes, now we had to memorize the directions. The São Paulo bad guys love to steal phones by riding by on their bikes and snatching the phone out of your hand. It happens so fast. You can’t even react. Thank goodness Marianne has a good memory. We were doing just fine until we reached the church. We couldn’t remember whether to take a left or right. Of course we took the wrong way.

We walked up this steep street and couldn’t see our destination. So we stopped and asked construction workers. They pointed back down the hill.

The photo above shows the tall building, which was our desired destination, Edoficio Copan. It’s a 38-story residential building in São Paulo. It’s one of the largest building in Brazil. Copan has guided tours to the top of the building to see the amazing skyline of São Paulo.

We couldn’t believe after almost 5 miles, we found Copan. We were late but we quickened our step to see if we could be lucky enough to get to the top to see the view. We entered the building and noticed not much was happening in the lobby. We asked a guard how to get to the top and the only English word we could make out was COVID. We figured it out that the tours at Copan had stopped because of Covid and never started up again. With a sigh and disappointment, we looked at each other with dismay. Although in an instant, our luck changed. The guard was kind enough to say and point to another building that was next door. We had no idea what we were going to encounter.

We arrived next door to ask to go up to the top; the concierge asked if we had a reservation. We said no. She waited a couple of moments and said would we like to go to the bar. Is she kidding , this is a dream come true for us. Have a drink at the bar and see the spectacular view. She said a fee of 50 reals per person would go on our tab, which is around $10.00 each. We agreed without hesitation. We didn’t walk all this way to go home without seeing the view.

Edificio Italia

Edifico Italia is a 46 story office tower which has the Terraio Italia Restaurant and Bar on the 41st floor. The view was definitely worth the 5 mile walk.

The great part of this experience was for the most part we had the place to ourselves. Brazalians come out much later for drinks and dinner.

Since we arrived at our destination late, we were right on time for a spectacular sunset at 5:34pm.

What a day we had! We decided to uber back to our hood and go to our favorite restaurant…Monte Carlo.

The next day was low keyed since we had to work on our bids. What are bids you might be asking? This is very important in a flight attendant’s world. Each month between the 10th and 15th, a flight attendant has to request what trips and days off he or she may need for the following month. So we start off by putting dream trips in and then we get back to reality. The last day is the 15th to put bids in and then the waiting game. Your bid results come out of the 18th. It’s all done by seniority. The bid results are always a surprise on what trips you get and the days off. Nothing is predictable! That’s why at our interviews over 30 years ago, we were asked if we could be flexible! American wasn’t kidding!

Marianne and I worked on our bids in the hotel lobby.

Time to say goodbye to São Paulo! Thanks for the memories.

We knew we made it back to New York when the purser put the red, white and blue lights on!

GOD BLESS AMERICA