The first day of the congress, and the reason for all this travel.

Diana sat in the room all morning, debating with herself whether or not to go out on the streets by herself, before finally deciding to do so. No problems at all. We were expecting the population of Brazil to all be light brown to black in skin colouration, but it turns out that there are people here with paler skin than us. Nobody with red hair though…

Returning from her walk, she watched a lot of programs dubbed into Portugese, such as the Fresh Prince of BelAir, The Simpsons, Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry cartoons, which was very strange. Some of these programs are even enhanced by the lack of English.

I arrived back at the hotel just before 8pm on the shuttle bus, with tales of grand disorganization. Basically, the people organizing the congress know how many people are at which hotels. However, rather than just running a bus to the one hotel in Piracicaba where people are staying, they make every bus go to every hotel, meaning that it takes forever to get home, and some buses were arriving with one or two people on them.

Added to that was the debacle where all the delegates left the presentation room, and went to the top of the hill where the buses had been boarded the previous evening. We all stood there for about quarter of an hour before finally someone investigated and found the buses were going to collect people at the bottom of the hill, 10 metres from where we’d all just trooped from.

Internet access at the Colina Verde is pretty scarce. There are six computers for the hundreds of delegates attending the congress, and of course, everyone wants to send an “hello, I made it to Brazil okay” email to family and friends. Two of the six computers required a password to get online, but nobody knew the password, not even the official people there to assist. On another computer, one man was taking the time to show his wife how the internet worked since she would be bored for the next few days and might want something to do. She was one of those people that loses the keys on the keyboard too, meaning she will hit the “W” key, and then remove her hand from the keyboard and look for it again, as though it might have moved. I think we have our SPOTD winners.

Diana found the drivers of Piracicaba to be maniacs, which was not overly surprising. We’d read in the Lonely Planet guide that in Brazil, the motorist is king of the road, and pedestrians have no rights. Certainly the concept of coming to a stop is lost on them. “Pare” is the equivalent to “Stop” here, but it has been loosely interpreted from “Give Way” to “Go Like The Dickens!”, based on what we’ve seen here in the drivers. Indicating directions of travel is optional, it would seem, and horns are a tool that make the car in front of you magically disappear so should be used at all hours of the day.

The congress was quite interesting though - many people I knew as only names on scientific papers were to be found there, and it’s quite odd to say to yourself “oh, so that is Professor X” as you look at them in person. Some people are exactly what you’d expect. Others are completely different in looks and manner. Still, there is plenty of congress left to check out.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001