During the past few days, thanks to the country-bumpkin-in-big-city enthusiasm of the Good Lady who's not From Around These Parts, I've been rediscovering the wonders of PoA. In this previous post I wrote a little about the river front's potential and privately funded partial revitalization. The city centre, generally neglected by middle class Porto Alegrenses as being "dangerous and smelly", is actually quite a surprise when you really get onto the streets (and get used to the smell).
Our Saturday touristic itenary proceded thus: bus at 11am direct to the centre (I didn't want to be worried with parking spaces or spending a short spell in jail for having a glass or two and driving), slap bang in the centre is the 19th century public market, restored with splendour and a roof in the 90s, there are some excellent rustic traditional bars and restaurants that serve a good cheap lunch to accompany your chilled draught lager (be sure to ask for "pouco colarinho" or you'll get half a glass of foam). PoA has a goodly number of second hand book shops, we managed to spend a few hours in two before they shut up for the weekend. I found a "Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake'", by one William York Tindall. Professor Tindall apparently wants us to "see that it is less formidable than it seems, and to see the fun.", hope it works. Pub. Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, in excellent condition and still has the price in Pounds Shillings and d. AND a 1951 book of "The Physical Sciences", which, in the chapter of "Man and His Machines" has a photo of "The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator" which occupies a room four times the size of my living room and has a storage of "400,000 digits in punched tapes and contains 12,500 electronic tubes"! All amazing stuff! Zillions of books!
Next stop, two separate exhibitions in Santander Cultural by Brazilian artist/writers Gilberto Freyre and Ariano Suassuna. One criticism I have of the place is that photos are not permitted inside, while I understand this with respect to the exhibitions themselves, this is a standard rule in any art gallery throughout the world, It dumfounds me why they don't allow photos in the café, the corredor area, entrance and shop, which has some beautiful decoration and arquitecture. The building is an old bank, one of those massive city centre banks from a hundred years ago when real money and gold bars were kept in huge safe rooms in the basement with doors a foot thick , these safe rooms are now a cafe and a cinema, cool eh? There'd be some photos here, but... (actually I did manage to sneak a couple in before a guard saw me).
We ended the afternoon with a few more beers in the public market.
