heading home

In dark & rainy Rio rush hour traffic. Slowly making our way towards
the airport. Motorcycles whip by through unbelievably narrow spaces
tapping their horns over & over to warn of their approach. Every 20
yards or so small groups of soaking wet people carrying heavy coolers
on straps over their shoulders and grasp giant clear plastic garbage
bags filled with Globos (really popular snack food here) in one hand
and rattling plastic water bottles in the other yell & sell their
goods to stopped cars on the highway. On one side of the road the
favellas sparkle up the side of the mountains and on the other the
side the water is filled with cranes, loading docks and oil rigs. I'm
glad to be headed home.

Sent from my iPhone

rio night landing

belo horizonte - shopping & dinner

I have learned that Belo Horizonte is the unofficial artistic & fashion capital of Brazil. From the few hours I've been here it seems really clean (compared to Rio) and much bigger then I expected.

We had a long day of traveling, software configuration validation & presenting to managers. When we wrapped up around 6:45 the client boss F and I headed back to our hotel. It took a really really long time to get taxi & drive from work site to hotel because bus drivers are on strike here and it was raining so car traffic was really bad.

After checking in with giant chandelier, piano & champagne - F & I walked around a really nice mall near our hotel. The mall had tons of really nice (expensive - $800 dress anyone?) boutiques that fashion designers from here have opened - kind of stores you'd find in south beach maybe? In a normal priced store I found a really bright fun dress and made my first Brazil clothing purchase. Yay!

Once we tired of shopping we went to a fantastic Italian restaurant called "Splendido Restaurante." I keep telling F that if she should ever want to quit her job as boss then she could become a super successful restaurant critic. She has given me the best recommendations for, or taken me to eat, some of the most amazing food in my life over the course of my trip.

Google pix of restaurant

My meal: Sea bass with lemon crust, amazing sauce, potatoes & asparagus - YUM

Google pix of Liberty Palace Hotel

Liberty Palace Hotel

Lobby

View from my hotel room.

Time for another long day of working and then flying back to Rio.

belo horizonte

belo horizonte

Santos Dumont airport view. Cool lunch place next door to office in
Belo Horizonte.

belo horizonte

Headed with client PM this morning to catch a plane another city in Brazil called Belo Horizonte to give a presentation to managers. Will fly an hour, stay overnight and return tomorrow. Weird to pack for a trip to a hotel from a hotel.

I know zero about where I'm headed. But wikipedia tells me, "It is the largest city and capital of the Brazilian state Minas Gerais." The Original presentation was scheduled for some place deep in the Amazon that took a long time to get there (over a day) but it got changed to short plane ride away.

(From Google)

surfing

Channel surfing here involves flipping channels looking for subtitles.
Which means a show that hasn't been dubbed. Good bets are Seinfeld,
really terrible cold case shows from 10 years ago, CSI (1/2 the time)
and made for tv type movies. Same channel will have two episodes of
the same show & one will be dubbed & the next will not.