Let’s go for a Beer: São Paulo and its Bodegas

Here we are, back on track.

We left you with the story of our weeks in Silva Jardim and its rural community, still in 2018. In the meantime, a new year has come and we want to wish to all of you a wonderful 2019: with many travels, new destinations and great adventures full of curiosity.


Now let’s go on, talking about our way South through Brazil. We stopped in Piñeros, one of the neighbourhood of the biggest metropolis on the entire South American continent, with its 13 millions inhabitants: São Paulo.

It was a short stop but really busy, though: we met the family of André, who we got to know already back in Berlin, many of his friends, we tried a fantastic pizza at Picco (where Fabio even got a job offer to join the team, thank you Lula). And then, what a story! We spent more than 4 hours just to buy a simple bus ticket.

What a pizza we had at Picco!

First, we needed to find the right way from São Paulo to Alegrete, a small town in the Brazilian Pampa (we will write about it in the next article), combining several bus companies, routes and timetables because a direct bus doesn’t exist: we are still talking about a 1.700km journey!

This was not the most complicated part, both of us got used to deal with these kind of issues during our travels. So, that’s done: route found, price set. Let’s book it now.

The process involving the registration, instead, sucked up all our energy like a black hole, it felt like an odyssey between time and hundreds of web pages! Without the help of Kiko, the dad of André, it would have been impossible.

Every Brazilian bus company has its own booking system and each of them seemed to has a feature which we couldn’t accomplish. One asked for the passport number. We have one, that’s easy! But it only allowed us to insert digits and both our passports have letters too. Okay, nice try.




Two other platforms required specific Brazilians identification codes, which we cannot have as tourists. Well, let’s call the costumer service then... Yes, we have a Brazilian citizen nearby... At this point, they suggested us to create a profile with Kiko's name and we are going to be the passengers: what an idea! But it would have been too nice. Once we reached the moment to verify our credit cards, none of ours got accepted, several times. So he even had to pay for us, unbelievable!

We felt exhausted and Kiko proposed to go for a beer, just across the street, to cheer us up. We couldn’t refuse, we had to pay him back somehow. However, what happened next, will take a special place in our memories! A totally unplanned evening but for this reason, probably one of the best ever.

We entered in a normal and anonymous bar and in a couple of minutes we fell in love with it. One of those typical spot where you know when you enter, but you are not sure when you will leave go out. A place you can rapidly call home, especially thinking about our cultural drinking national backgrounds: we refer to the Italian Osteria or better the Venetian Bacaro or the classic German Eckkneipe. A bar where everybody knows each other, where the drinks are good and cheap, where you always end your night with more friends than before.
This is the Brazilian Bodega and if you will ever visit this country, you should definitely search for one of those on your way. 

The beginning of our Bodega night

It is not needed to mention that we ended our night pretty tipsy, probably even say drunk, after uncountable ice-cold beers and Caipiriñas, they proudly offered us the cocktail of the month and only God knows what else. We went back home with no dinner but with our hearts much lighter, a bunch of new friends and a wonderful evening to remember. We got even refused to pay anything, again! This time not due to a rejected credit card but because we were guests!

A complicated afternoon between not understandable booking websites and weird purchasing platforms was completely forgotten. This Bodega night, maybe also because alcohol is a great preservative, will stay in our memory for a long time.

See you sooner in the Pampa and Risk Curiosity!