Foxtrot ΘΔ🐺

y'know if I could have an apartment at the center of SP near Liberdade where there wasn't too much noise and I didn't need to have the fear of getting robbed.. maybe I'd enjoy living here more. liberdade is nice, good japantown and also other asian peoples town too. I'd even look the part with the "japanese" eyes!

my first thought was "wow it's kind of uncanny how familiar this all feels", the moment he drives out of the garage I could tell this was São Paulo, like a lot of that aesthetic just has not changed at all in over 30 years. The main difference I can spot having lived here my whole life so far is that we have a lot less billboard ads on buildings now, I think they were banned by law in the 2000s but I forget specifics, the city does look nicer without ads everywhere, we have street art by artists like kobra in place of ads instead making São Paulo sort of a living art gallery, it's all historic sure but there's people breathing a little life into the drab old aging architecture, and god this city does feel archaic. of course a lot's changed since '88 but the streets this japanese man drives around, I've been there, I've seen those and it's too familiar, the way the sidewalks look, the street signs, the famous bridges and overpasses and recognizable buildings.

Living in an old, massive city full of history is interesting, a lot of it is aging and forgotten which explains why much of this feels familiar, having been around the center of town a lot. other parts are not, but it's the aging town center that sticks with me the most. being there you feel like this was beautiful and pleasant once but now you see a lot of people suffering on the streets, beggars, the city trying to sweep it all under the rug so to speak while the buildings still stand, weathered by the passage of time and decay. I feel like these buildings may just outlast all of us, that's the sort of vibe I get from being in the center of town. I really want the historic city to be better taken care of and preserved but after the radical overhaul they did of a historic part of the city like Vale do Anhangabaú I'm not sure I'd trust them to preserve anything.

Anyways I'm not even sure if this japanese speaking man is japanese, I do know a lot native japanese speakers are just brazilian, brazil and japan have a long and complicated history and São Paulo is a massive center for japanese immigrants in brazil. So unless I know for sure what he's speaking to his family? friends? calling him a tourist feels like I'd be assuming too much though that hasn't stopped people in the comments from doing so. I can catch a few little words, like he is saying Japan a lot, he talks about a car that's in front of him at times, says "let's go" when the light turns green just basic stuff. I took a break from watching that video to write all of this but I'm definitely going to finish watching it later, it's super neat seeing snapshots in time like this, and hell what motivated me to write all of this, is how this does not quite feel so different from the present.