Brilliance lives in the mind, but ideas need a place to grow. One of the great things about creative people is that they have no shortage of ideas, but as is often the case, hard currency can be in short supply. Before leaving the States, my friend, David, mentioned an organization called The Hub that builds multi-purpose work spaces, and plans to build one in New York. However,  since I was leaving town, it didn’t register at the time how helpful it could be. Looking back at how casually I leaped into the unknown, I realize now that I too needed a hub of some kind to connect me to the people I was hoping to meet in Brazil. After a week of furtive cold calls, I was over the moon when my efforts finally materialized into on-site interviews and a visit to The Hub Sao Paulo. My gracious guide was Paulo, a programmer and blogger whom I met through an Aardvark query. Just goes to show how creative applications of technology can deliver unexpected results. The Hub is a flexible, membership-based work space where creative types from all disciplines can come to socialize and cross-pollinate ideas that lead to exciting and unexpected new projects. “It’s a mixture between a Starbucks, a traditional office and an incubator,” said Barbara Stutz, one of the co-founders and a  partner in The Hub Sao Paulo. Opened in August of 2008, The Hub Sao Paulo was still in “soft launch,” Stutz said, with about 120 members paying 440-600 Reais (approx. USD 220-300) for an allotment of hours in the workspace. Members can book space for meetings, tackle personal projects or just hang out and be inspired if they like. Said Stutz, “It’s just an excuse to have all these people here linked and doing something.”

Paulo @ The Hub Sao Paulo

From the outside, The Hub was one of a dozen unassuming doors lining Rua Bela Cintra, a busy thoroughfare that crosses Paulista Ave., Sao Paulo’s most notable drag. Inside, however, the building had the unmistakable feel of a creative agency, such as a tony architect’s studio or a graphic design firm. The high ceilings, exposed brick and minimalist art pieces gave me a sense that experimentation and reinvention were happening constantly inside. The rear wall had a row of huge, circular windows looking out onto a handful of Sao Paulo’s innumerable office towers, a jumble of while bathing the room with natural light. On a central island, a group of people worked quietly on desktop computers, while in another corner, two women chatted excitedly with a camcorder. The first Hub location was built in London in 2005, said Stutz, and it has expanded its operation throughout Western Europe, India and South Africa, as well as three North American venues: Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal in Canada and Berkeley, CA. Hub Sao Paulo co-founder, Pablo Handl, confirmed that a Hub location in New York City is expected to open in 2010. He also said that walking into a Hub anywhere in the world, a certain look and feel is maintained. Tell me more …

The girls in Rio De Janeiro don’t wear makeup and the mountains slide straight into the waiting ocean. As if by magic, I had a 30-hour Rio adventure that stirred my soul and restored a sense of childlike wonderment that had been flagging.

Sao Paulo is gargantuan, overwhelming and nondescript. Its packed subway cars, high prices and air pollution have lately been causing me to wonder aloud if I left New York at all. Rio de Janeiro is one of the world’s few special places; passionate and delectable, known for it’s raucous Carnival, iconic beaches and gorgeous people. It is simply unique, a gem in Brazil’s crown.

The hostel where I was staying threw a delightful dance party and afterwards, I went to Lapa with an Australian named Dave. Lapa is a strip of bars just outside downtown Rio bisected by a Roman aqueduct that acts as a bridge for the overhead trolley tracks. By the time we arrived, at half past 4 in the morning, the Lapa crowd, which was in the upper hundreds, or even thousands, was disintegrating into a drunken melee. At home, in the States, these bars would be closing in a matter of minutes, but it’s quite possible patrons here continued to samba and sing on the street until the sun came up after 6.

The long bus into town and the subsequent week of late nights left me content heading home as 5 approached. There’s something about Rio though, with it’s sticky climate, soaring hills and the energy of 6 million souls that could have made me push through the exhaustion to find another thrill.

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I have been told that Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, South Africa were once joined when Africa and South America were a single land mass. The geology of the two areas, Cape Town’s Table Mountain, besides Pao de Açucar in Rio, makes me think that this could be true. But while Rio is unlike any city I’ve visited, it somehow conjures the best: The lawlessness and hedonism of New Orleans, the architecture of Buenos Aires, as well as New York’s addictive cocktail of grit, hustle and filth that one only has to smell to understand.

Tell me more …

I arrived at the gorgeous Casa Carioka hostel in Copacabana 90 minutes ago and now I’m unwinding with a beer. Rio is warm, humid and lush with tropical foliage. Just a few blocks down a steep hill is the ocean. A party is already underway and after some tense negotiations, the Canadian DJ’s are playing traditional samba music. Although I was exhausted when I woke up, the escape from Sao Paulo has already been worth it.

The Sao Paulo bus terminal was a very civilized and efficient affair, especially when compared with many of the Greyhound Bus terminals of American cities. Most telling was the cornucopia of cash machines from local, national and international financial institutions, such as HSBC, who bills itself as “the world’s local bank.”

After boarding the bus, our escape from Sao Paulo was a blur. I fell asleep instantly and awoke at intervals when our driver would stop on the roadside to pick up stragglers. As the road unfolded before us, I wondered if the entire journey between Sao Paulo and Rio would be one continuous urban expanse. However, at one hour and 35 minutes, almost to the second, the bus passed through a shelf of incandescent red clay and the megalopolis of Sao Paulo came to an abrupt halt. Where there had been factories and house upon house, crammed right up to the highway, only grass remained with cows to munch it, and termite mounds that  pocked the landscape like acne. The first “lanchonete” we passed had two emus in a fenced enclosure.

Sign: "The flavor of America"

Gradually even the frenetic picaçao that covers every vertical surface in Sao Paulo melted away to thick, unfazed stands of bamboo, dark green pines and row upon row of eucalyptus. The smooth blacktop cutting through rolling hills reminded me of the ride through Northern California as you approach Mt. Shasta on Interstate 5. Here and there we zipped by clusters of bicyclists clad in lycra and at random intervals I saw solitary homeless men walking barefoot. With jeans, a sweater and sometimes a baseball cap, it was remarkable how closely they resembled one another, though in all likeliness, they did not no of each other’s presence just a few miles down the road. Halfway between Brazil’s throbbing industrial heart and its most storied city, these lonely urchins seemed as though they were one million miles from either.

Cruising through hamlets of rust-colored brick hovels, with boys flying handmade kites on the spanish-tiled roofs, I was beginning forget about Sao Paulo behind and, Rio, which awaited, as I focused on soaking up everything outside the windows.

As our bus climbed higher, we skirted a nuclear reservation as the clouds grew thick and low overhead. The road began to twist and the hard top deteriorated, causing our carriage to bounce on its springs. Soon I feel asleep again and when I awoke night had already fallen. We were on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and every car that passed us seemed to be headed somewhere important and fun. From the Novo Rio terminal, I boarded a city bus that took me near the center of town for $1 and then a taxi took me the rest of the way.

I’m sleeping alone in a room with four beds and for the first time in Brazil, I intend to get a good night’s rest. I’m not sure how likely that is to happen, but at least the possibility exists. And now, my night begins!

I’ve been experiencing an existential crisis ever since I left New York. It’s only been a few days on the road, but I often find myself wondering, aloud, “What am I doing here?” To date, the hardest thing for me to stomach has been leisure time. Although I graduated two weeks ago, I’m not on pleasure trip. If anything, I consider this a hybrid “workation,” where I am chipping away at a task while simultaneously exploring a new city. Inactivity feels like failure and sitting still is terrifying.

There are ways in which such  a reaction is to be expected; there is no road map for what I have set out to accomplish, and those whose journeys inspired me, had to wrestle with their own doubts either publicly or privately. With meetings and interviews with founders set for early next week, I’m starting to hammer away at my objective, but I can’t shake the feeling there is more I could be doing.

For whatever reason, I accomplish the most when I’m not at my computer. After last night’s rousing introduction to Paulista pub culture, I went with Joao to meet Roberto and Bruno at their house near Villa Madalena. Bruno, who is Debby’s nephew, and my age, is a musician who recently returned from a master course in Barcelona. When I arrived at the house, Bruno was out buying guitar strings, so Roberto and I watched the Roland Garros French Open and talked about sports. Soon Bruno came back and we ate the most delicious beans I’ve ever tasted, followed vine-ripened figs no American unknown to the American palette.

After lunch Bruno and I took the Metro to the Pinacoteca, where we visited the Museum of the Portuguese language. While the idea of creating a museum to honor the language of a colonizing power seems odd, the facility itslef was an homage to the dexterity and richness of Portuguese spoken by Brazilians themselves. The bedrock of Brazilian Portuguese is the European mother tongue, but its influences include other continental languages such as France as well as languages spoken by slaves kidnapped from Angola and Africa’s Southwest coast. The motivation and execution of the museum were brilliant and it’s the third museum I’ve visited where I feel I must go back.

We headed back to Jardins at the height of rush and  I’m inlcuding this short video because I can’t remember the last time I saw a train station this crowded. It’s very possible that more people pass through Grand Central Station during peak times, but the flow of bodies in Luz station was tremedous. At the same time, however, even a full subway car was not that full and if we missed a connecting train, the next one arrived no more than three minutes later.

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Back at the ranch, several of the emails I had been waiting for arrived.  In just a few minutes I was was able to set up interviews for next week when I get back from Rio de Janeiro on Monday. Today was also special because I celebrated Shabbat for the first time in months, or years. While it seems that things are moving along quickly enough here, it’s easy to lose sight of how incremental actions will lead up to a big finish when this trip is over.

It’s approaching 3:30, which would normally be early, but part of me wants to be on a bus to Rio that leaves at before 9 am. It might happen, but I’m already feeling warn down from sleepless nights, hurried days, schizophrenic winter weather and air pollution. If you have any suggestions on how to stay healthy, I would love it if you drop some comments below. I was told that commenting was non-functional, so if this is the case, you might have to email me so I can take the appropriate action. Perhaps I will even cut myself a little slack and cease the crisising for now.

What do Brazilians love more than meat? More meat. I love it too!

After a good’s night’s rest–and through the morning–I awoke refreshed and ready to explore. The first stop was VideoImagem, a full-service, vertical multimedia agency started by Debby’s brother, Roberto. VideoImagem was started as one of the first firms in Brazil to handle internal corporate communications, and today their largest accounts are some of the world’s biggest companies, such as Microsoft and AmBev, the brewing giant that recently purchased Anheuser-Busch (maker of Budweiser) for a paltry $52 billion. As we toured the editing bays, archives and video production studio, Roberto told me that while his company was learning to cope with the economic crisis, it was important to “dance with the music,” he said.

For lunch, I visited my first rodizio with Roberto, which is a Brazilian-style steakhouse. A colorful spread of starters is arranged on a central table, with sushi, sashimi, cheeses, deepfried poppers, green salads, pasta salads, hummus, taboule and plenty more. By flipping a colored wheel from red to green, a sumptuous  variety of barbecued meats was brought to the table on spits. I don’t know the names of anything, but I was too busy stuffing my face to care.

After lunch I took my first excursion on Sao Paulo’s subway system and arrived quickly in Liberdade, Sao Paulo’s Asian district. The world’s largest concentration of Japanese outside of Japan call Liberdade their home, and the first Japanese to arrive in Brazil were enticed to harvest coffee. The story of Japanese in Brazil and South America is fascinating and I would love to revisit it soon.

My next stop was MASP, the museum of art on Paulista Ave, where an exhibition of the Vik Muniz’s photos totally blew me away. I then met with a wonderful CouchSurfer for a beer and a chat, then I went to meet the emisarries of the Sao Paulo weekly CouchSurfer meetup at a bar called Genuino.

No wonder I’m so wiped out. Gonna hit the rack and update in the morning.