Brasilia

What can I say about Brasilia that hasn´t already been said? Well I could say it is a lovely, green, well thought out, homely kind of place but then I´d be lying. Seemingly the result of a drunken one night stand between Milton Keynes and Swindon, this Brave New World meets Sim city nightmare left us cold. We had originally planned to spend a night here but sanity prevailed and we booked the next bus out. Sadly this still left us 10 hours to kill. We decided to hit the shopping mall as, well, this is about all there is to do unless you are a die hard architecture afficionado. We soon discovered that the pride of Brasilia and the flagship shop in the mall was (drumroll) ...... C&A - says it all really!

Perhaps the highlight of Brasilia was not the place itself, so much as the coach journeys in and out. Long and arduous as they were (23 hours and 18 hours respectively) they did provide us with much toilet humour. Literally. Something seemed wrong in the first toilet, I peered down and felt a breeze on my face. The coach had less a toilet, and more a hole disguised as a toilet, leading to the road. As for the second coach toilet, it was a design triumph. I first headed there in the middle of the night. The coaches aren´t renowned for their suspension and the journey to the toilet and in fact attempting to use the toilet itself can be rickety and perilous to say the least. Still, I reached my destination, pulled the door open, manoevered inside, closed the door (so far, so good), turned round ready to start thinking about toilet procedure, reached for the doorlock, turned. Light goes out. Odd, I think, turn lock open, light comes on. A few repititions of this procedure is enough to confirm that yes, someone has designed a toliet that plummets you in to darkness when you have the audacity to want to actually use it. Genius.