Porto Alegre is the capital of the southernmost state in Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul. We found it to be a rather unpleasant city.
The architecture is a mixture of Stalinist realism and weirdly 19th century Belle Epoch reminder of past prosperity.
All of it looks quite run down.
Traffic is aggressive and streets wind completely at random through downtown making driving more exciting than necessary.
Fog gray skies and mizzle I’m sure didn’t help.
One and a half million people live here in a city founded by Portuguese emigrants from the Azores.
They promise a quality public education, free to all. 
Except when the office and technical staff go on strike. If I got it right they are protesting the loss of job security to advancing technology. 
The city is located in a freshwater lagoon at the junction of five rivers. The lagoon is navigable and Porto Alegre (“happy port”) has a long history as an industrial port city. Not exactly the tourist hub you might like if you show up in a camper van. We drive the waterfront looking for a recreation space. It’s there but there isn’t any parking.
There’s a museum in there and a market worth visiting, but nowhere to park.
We developed a plan to go to the wine country for a couple of days then to come back on our way to the coast.
There’s a campground outside the city so we could take an uber into town to deal with aggressive traffic and parking issues. A good plan. 
Meanwhile we are heading out of town to the wine country for a few days of tasting and other riotous behavior.
Perhaps when we come back we will find better weather too.
And this down the cost to Uruguay. 
And in Uruguay we hope to finally get our electrical shore power charger fixed. Much excitement. I should point out our solar parks have been excellent and our second alternator has done a fine job except briefly when the app took a dump.
We get to sleep with air conditioning which keeps us cool and dry and makes sleeping comfortable.
And then we found our campground, a swimming hole in a river for people to cool off in summer and on weekends. 
I’m not fond of these places when they are crowded with happy families picnicking with loud boisterous children having a great time. But this is out of season and a weekday.
220 volt shore power if we had a charger…
We stopped in pursuit of culture and bought a bag of weird peanut candies.
And fruit; Brazil has the best fruit for some reason and we will miss it.
