City of Culture (and more sunshine)

Beautiful day today, lots of sun, but  not too hot to walk around.  We walked down to the Parque Ibirapuera again to visit the museums within its grounds.  Started at the African-Brasilian Museum, with an incredible array of exhibits relating to the African-Brasilian history of this country.  You could spend all day here, but if we´d found the English translation booklet in the gift shop BEFORE we went in, that would have been helpful!  Would recommend everyone to visit the gift shop first and spend R5 on the booklet to get the most out of the museum.  It also had an interesting photographic exhibition on the Camino del Santiago, the pilgrims walk across northern Spain, which we would like to do at least part of one day.   The museum has a good collection of art by African Brasilians, along with religious items, carnaval costumes and slavery relics.
Also in the park is the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) which is currently featuring a Marcel Duchamp exhibition.  This was very well organised and allowed us to see replicas of many of his most famous pieces such as the moustachioed Mona Lisa, The Fountain (the urinal) and The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors) etc..  Duchamp produced replicas of the original ready-mades as the originals had all been broken or destroyed and no longer existed.
The Bienal building next door had an exhibition of 50 Years of Bossanova, which would be fascinating for Brazilians, but a little difficult to follow for non-Portuguese speakers.   We listed to lots of music and enjoyed that anyway.  Up above on the 3rd floor of this huge building is the Musuem of Contemporary Art (MAC), which only had a couple of temporary exhibitions, neither particularly good although the photographic collection of `modern life`was interesting.
We then caught a bus back up to the MASP, which fortuitously was free on Tuesday, so saved us R30.  The top floor has an internation collection of art from the pre-Renaissance to the present including good quality works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Constable and El Greco, amongst others.  The middle floor has a temporary exhibition of contemporary Italian art, which was not so good, but some interesting pieces.  The actual quality of the works in this museum are world-class and explain why Sao Paulo is known as the ´cultural capital of Brasil´.  Last stop was an early dinner then home to rest our weary feet!