continued from Sao Paulo for Lovers

Getting to Sao Paulo

International visitors come in Aeroporto Cumbica, about 45 minutes from the central part of the city. The airport is modern and easy to navigate.

We arrived in São Paulo aboard TAM Brazilian Airlines, aboard a direct flight from Miami. We flew business class, which was truly pampering in terms of service, meals, and seats that reclined 180 degrees. After an overnight flight (about seven hours from Miami), we arrived rested and relaxed.

Brazilian Visas

To visit São Paulo, Americans will need a visa prior to leaving the US. Visas are obtained through your region’s consulate. Allow plenty of time (a month if possible) to obtain your visa—you can’t walk your passport through in a day.

For a list of Brazilian consulate offices in the US, see http://www.brasilemb.org/consulado/consular_jurisdictions.shtml

If you don’t live near a consulate office, you’ll need to ship your passport to the nearest office to get a visa. We had to ship our passports and visa applications to Houston and received them a few days later, although the website had warned us that turnaround time could be one week.

Some important things to note about visas:

• If you do not live within driving distance of a consulate’s office and have to ship your passport, be sure to ship via a trackable method like FedEx or USPS Express Mail.
  
• Payment for visa charges will only be accepted in USPS postal money orders. (To get a postal money order, you must pay at the post office in cash or with a debit card.)
• Visas and passports will only be returned to you via USPS. We prepurchased an express mail package and added that to our application so we could track the return of our passports (and it cut return delivery time to one day.)
• You’ll need a recent passport photo. (There are regulations regarding photo size, background color, etc. Most larger drug stores and print shops can shoot the photos for you for just a few dollars.)

  Next page: Getting Around Sao Paulo

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  Air arrivals into Sao Paulo are easy thanks to numerous connections from North America.