So, bringing your own bottled water?
I’ll trust the Dasani there.
No offense, but you have no idea what you are talking about. You’re talking about a single neighborhood in LA. Sao Paulo is like Detroit with 25 million people. It’s dirty, crowded, and pretty dangerous if you don’t know where you are going. 2/3 of the city seems like it’s made up of favelas (shantytowns). People litterally bulletproof their cars. Not to mention that airport is terrible. From a pure infrastructure standpoint, I have no idea how they are going to handle the World Cup.
We stayed in a shore town a few hours outside of SP and there were still crazy over security concerns. Our hotel hired extra armed guards for the week and every house and hotel was surrounded by concrete walls topped with cameras, electified fences or concertina wire.
One guy was actually mugged at knifepoint in the middle of the day on Copacabana Beach (Rio) the week before.
I heard there was a murder in L.A. once too. Possibly with a knife as well.
Ya but what difference does that make to the OP? If the US had a population of 500,000 and they all went to the world cup, or if it had 500,000 go out of a billion, it’s all the same to him. If he really doesn’t want them there, then he should worry about it. The fact that a lot more Americans care about other sports more than they care about soccer won’t stop them from still being the most abundant foreign soccer fans in town.
Meh. People said the same thing before our hosting last year. “Johannesburg: Murder Capital of the World” and similar sensationalism. Remind me again how many WC 2010 attendees were butchered in their hotel rooms? Oh, none, you say? Oh, there were some muggings and even one team was burgled, but violence? Remarkably little. The worst security breach was by a British journalist.
The 2010 World Cup was perhaps the singular most effective event I’ve seen for bringing out the best in South Africa, even more so than our first vote or the release of Mandela. And doubly gratifying for spitting in the eye of all the pessimists. May 2014 be the same for Brazil.
Naw, they speak Portalese I think. It sounds a lot like Mexican though, so you should be fine using Mexican. 
I heard Southern Africa actually imported hookers to help keep the tourists in line. I wonder if Brazil will be as courteous.
No, man, I can’t believe that. LA is that place on the TV with red carpets and little gold statuettes. I went there a few years ago and I didn’t get murdered once. I did see some people who I think might have been speaking Spanish, though I wouldn’t swear to it.
As for the World Cup, no doubt it’ll be an orgy of killing like the one last year in South Africa. But without the vuvuzelas.
I don’t know who the hell you were with or where you stayed, but you must’ve been on the Paranoia Package. I’ve been to SP, Rio, Salvador da Bahia, Natal, and various other places in the interior and never worried about being victimized. Yes, people (particularly rich folks) take precautions— it’s common for apartments, condos, etc. to have security gates and guards—and there are places one should avoid, but all in all I felt a hell of lot safer walking in Rio at night than I would in Atlanta.
There is crime, and in places it’s bad, but Brazil is hardly the “Escape from New York” dystopian scenario you imply.
Of course, it helps that I speak Portuguese so I’m able to say “please avoid my vital organs” when it comes time for my broad-daylight knife assault on the beach.
msmith537, where the hell were you staying? I’ve never seen anything like it either and I’ve been going to Brazil since I was a kid and I have a lot of family there.
The one thing that I’ve noticed is that houses in the nice neighborhoods tend to have walls around them, and the walls tend to have broken glass embedded in the top, but that is more of a burglary prevention system. Most buildings in Rio that I’ve seen have a doorman and intercoms, so someone has to buzz you in.
Congonhas is an awful airport but the international flights land in Guarrulhos airport which is all right. Sao Paulo certainly has its bad neighborhoods but there are plenty of nice ones and tourists really wouldn’t be leaving those neighborhoods.
Vinyl Turnip, I find that as long as you use situational awareness in most Brazilian cities, you should be fine. I wouldn’t wander through DC like a drunken jackass and not expect shit to happen to me and I wouldn’t do the same in Rio de Janeiro.
Crime is a concern in Brazil. My parent’s neighbor’s son was recently kidnapped via car jacking, but he might have been targeted specifically.
It’s true, a friend told me about it. Sorry to tarnish your vision of L.A., but someone had to.
What’s an orgy of killing (or orgy at all) without vuvuzelas?
Hey, I just got offered a job in Sao Paulo, so if the board could come to some sort of consensus whether its a dystopian hellscape or football playing candyland, I would really appreciate it.
Did they ever solve it?:eek:
And what part of a polluted, ultra-crowded, skyscraper-farm megalopolis with crappy infrastructure doesn’t sound like something out of an Escape From New York dystopia?
Tall and mean and rough and ugly
The thug from Ipanema goes mugging
And when he stabs ya, each one he stabs goes… ow!
Well… the part where you can leave, for one thing. Also the cachaça, cold beer, great food, hot women, and relative lack of Donald Pleasence.
To be honest, I haven’t spent that much time in São Paulo. It is big and sprawling and dirty, but to its credit, lots of people aren’t killed there every day.
I have been travelling to Rio for a decade and am considering the Cup. It is fair to consider the city a dangerous place. It must be said, however, that I have had more fun there than most places. Seeing a game at the maracana connot be compared to any other sporting experience I have had. I hate to promote stereotypes, but I believe it is true that Brazilians know how to have more fun that Americans.
The murder rate in Rio is about 5 times that of in LA and slightly higher than Detroit (2010). I certainly don’t think it’s worth mocking people that would warn an outsider that Detroit is dangerous.
I could cope with an orgy of killing- so long as you weren’t kidding about the lack of vuvuzelas…
Yes, but the guy who did it was a famous ex-football player and actor, so he got away with it.
Who did Joe Namath kill?