My trip to Brazil

I have decided to take a hiatus from my hiatus to document my trip to Brazil before I forget everything that happened. This is a long-ass post, so brace yourself.

The trip down

I left my place around 11am and arrived later than I should have at Logan to catch my flight to Miami. They bumped me to the front of the check-in line and I ended up making the flight no problem. I arrived in Miami and had two and a half hours to kill before my flight to Manaus, so I popped into a Mexican restaurant at the airport for some dinner. I ordered a Labbatt Blue with my enchiladas and the waitress had no idea what I was saying because they don't pronounce "Labbatt" correctly in Miami. Anyway, the flight down to Manaus was alright. The Brazilian airline I was on (TAM) is superior to American Airlines as far as I can tell. The planes are newer, they have better cabin service, and their flight attendants are all young and attractive and smartly dressed. The job of flight attendant is for young attractive people. That is how airlines should operate. Let's face it, it makes the flight a more pleasant experience when the cabin crew are all well-dressed and good looking. Young people would find the travel more exciting and who wants to be away from home that much when you are 50? When you get older they should give you a nice desk job at an airline counter. When we arrived in Manaus there was a short wait and then we took off for Belem. I had popped a couple Dramamine to try to sleep. Of course I should know by now that it's futile for me to try to sleep in transit - I just can't do it. We arrived in Belem at around 4am and then took off again for Fortaleza. Finally I arrived in Fortaleza at 6:30am local time.

At the airport

Oh, I was so clever on this trip. In order to avoid the hassle of getting a tourist Visa, I traveled to Brazil using my Irish passport. That ended up almost backfiring on the way home, but I digress. I got through customs without a hitch, and then was faced with a decision. Do I try to check into the hotel 7 hours earlier than I'm supposed to? Or do I just go to the conference and tough it out even though I haven't slept in 24 hours? I decided to go to the conference. I needed to get a cab, but I had no Brazilian currency. I found a bunch of bank machines, but to my horror I found that my bank card wouldn't work in any of them. Then I tried my Visa card. No dice. Now I was worried. It was possible that I was stuck in Brazil for 5 days with absolutely no money and no way to get any money. Thankfully I still had a Royal Bank card for my Canadian account. It didn't work in the first bank machine, but to my great relief the second bank machine finally coughed up 50 Brazilian Reals. I grabbed a cab and was on my way.

In the cab

Two minutes after I got in the cab the driver starts yapping at me. He spoke no English and I spoke no Portuguese so needless to say he was having trouble getting his point across. Eventually I clued in that he had no idea where he was going. I retrieved the address from my bag and gave it to him. Bingo! He gave me a smile and a nod and it was smooth sailing. As we drove through Fortaleza my first impression was that it was poor, run down, and dirty. There were broken down cars with flats in the middle of the road, the buildings all seemed to be crumbling. I saw the occasional burro grazing along the road. I got to the conference center and was relieved to finally be in an environment where I could communicate.

Conference - Day 1

The keynote address in the morning was given by Robert Huber - he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1988. I wish I could say his talk was fascinating, and it's quite possible it was, but I slept through most of it. I was exhausted. I caught my second wind after the coffee break and listened to some talks on protein structure prediction before lunch. I ate lunch with a post-doc I know from MIT. That was pretty much the first and last time I ran into someone I knew at the conference. The lunch was......how you say?......gross. Everybody raved about the food at the conference, but that's just something that people do regardless of how good the food actually is.

"Let's all thank the caterers who did such a fantastic job! The Brazilian cuisine was divine! Isn't the food wonderful?"

No. The food was not wonderful. Brazilian cuisine is not divine. And the caterers did not do a wonderful job. From what I can tell Brazilian food consists of various meats and fishes covered in thick, milky sauces. There was very little in the way of vegetables and very much in the way of flies. Coffee breaks meant mayonnaisey sandwiches on white bread and coffee with chunky milk. After my first encounter with chunky milk I took my coffee black for the rest of my stay. The coffee was good though. And actually the fruit plates were good too. Anyway, the rest of Monday was Systems Biology talks, papers, another keynote, and finally a poster session in the evening. That night I stumbled onto the shuttle bus to the hotels very much looking forward to checking into my hotel and getting some sleep.

At the hotel

I got to the hotel and managed to check in through a combination of miming and laboured, broken, English conversation. I have to say, I felt guilty going to a country and not being able to speak the local language at all. Most Brazilians have no English, but some of the people at hotel desks etc.. have some English and were happy to accommodate you the best they could. God bless them. I did try to learn some phrases before I went. I bought a book and CDs, but it's tough to learn a language in a week, and I was very busy before I left and so I had little time to practice. I did manage to master the following phrases:

"Please"
"Thank-you"
"Sorry, I don't speak Portuguese."
"I want to go to the airport."
"I love your stylish tank top! Would you like to go somewhere private so we can chat about Brazilian fashion?"
"Oh, I see.....well how much would it cost?"

Anyway, the hotel was fine although there are small differences that threw me off. For instance, you have to stick your keycard in a slot to get the electricity to work. Also, they wire their buildings with 220V power, so I couldn't use my laptop or anything like that. I crawled into bed and fell asleep. Ah sleep......at least until about 1am or so when the car horns started honking and the people started yelling. My hotel was located in the nightclub area and every single night the traffic would get congested because of all the cabs picking people up and dropping them off and the cabs just basically honked constantly until dawn. I mean constantly. They kept me awake every night except Wednesday when I was just too exhausted and must have slept through the noise. I have never seen or heard anything like it before in my life. The police station was right across the street from my hotel too, so apparently there are no noise by-laws or anything like that. Damn Brazilians and their wretched night life.

Conference - Day 2

I crawled out of bed at 7:40 or so with 20 minutes to make it down to catch the shuttle bus. I took a quick shower and got electrocuted by the plumbing fixture. The shower head had some exposed wires and basically if you touched the wrong part of the plumbing you got shocked.

I learned quickly what to touch and what not to touch while washing.

Of course, it wasn't all bad as a brisk electrocution in the morning gets you going better than a cup of coffee any day - and I didn't have time to go to breakfast. Day 2 of the conference was characterized mainly by loneliness. I was sick of not being able to communicate outside of the conference hall, and I was alone and didn't really know anyone. I sat through a whole bunch of talks and just kind of wandered around feeling sorry for myself. At lunch I couldn't find my MIT friend and ended up sitting at a table with a bunch of people who made no attempt to talk to me after I introduced myself and feebly attempted to converse. One older gentlemen literally turned his back to me at the table while carrying on a conversation with two other great men. Classy. Although Tuesday was frustrating and lonely, scientifically it was the best day of the conference and there were a lot of nice talks that were of great personal interest. By the time the poster session rolled around I was sick of feeling sorry for myself and even though I felt like a leper I went out of my way to introduce myself to people and talk to them about research stuff. By the time the shuttles arrived to take us home I had met some nice people and I was feeling much better. That brings me to another crazy thing about this conference - they picked you up at 8am and kept you at the conference center until at least 8pm and only gave you 1 meal. I am not a big eater by any means, but that was a bit much. Anyway, I got back to the hotel and went to bed right away. I managed to about 5 hours of sleep before the taxi cab symphony started at 2am.

Conference - Day 3

So I haven't mentioned up to this point that every morning the conference was started by our daily dose of Brazilian culture. It was always some kind of dance performance. Day 1 was like lambada or something (obscene). Day 2 was this weird martial arts kind of dance thing, which was pretty impressive. Day 3 was some kind of other folk dance thing with colourful costumes and horrible music. Day 4 was some other type of crap with hand claps and the guys had capris pants on. Mostly forgettable stuff except for the flips and kicks and stuff on Day 2. It never ceases to amaze me how people will clap and applaud anything and say how wonderful it was as long as it's some kind of "cultural exposition". I don't accept that bullshit performances like those dances should be inoculated against criticism just because they're ethnic. They sucked. I'm glad I wasn't one of the people standing and clapping and raving insincerely over lunch about how wonderful it all was. What was wonderful was getting to go to the beach Wednesday afternoon after the morning talks. They bussed us out to the "Beach Park" where there was food and beer and a fantastic band. I sat at a table with a couple guys from New York and a Canadian who works for Merck. It was a nice lunch and a nice conversation. Afterwards I excused myself and took a walk along the beach. The beach was really beautiful. It was just white sand for miles. The water was blue and clear and the waves were just huge. Definitely this was the highlight of the trip. I brought a little shell home with me as a memento of the best part of the trip. I tried to get a bikini top, but Brazilian women are both tough and beautiful. Also - I would like to point out that the fashion watchword at the Beach Park was "snug". If you are a 20 year old smoking hot girl from Fortaleza or Rio, then I will be crying "Snug!" along with you (at the top of my lungs and with tears of joy in my eyes) but if you are a 55 year old German or Argentinian man then may I suggest that on your next trip to the beach you make the difficult but necessary transition from "snug" to "modest". Anyway, Wednesday night I slept like a baby and not even the late night Concerto for taxi cab horn woke me up.

Conference - Day 4

The last day. Frankly I'm getting sick of writing this epic so I'll make it brief. Thursday sucked. I was ready to go home. I was tired. I had to stand next to my poster for an hour trying not to look like an idiot. The ****'s who organized the conference had the final poster session overlapping with lunch, so you can imagine how many people skipped their one and only meal of the day to come talk to me about my research. What a colossal waste of time.

Returning Home

There was no alarm clock in my room, but I figured out how to program the TV to turn on in the morning and wake me up. I got up a little before 5am and checked out before 6am. I saw some guy in the lobby who was obviously a conference attendee and offered to share a cab with him to the airport. We got there early because we were worried about all the security measures that would be in place (this was one day after all the arrests in that plane-blowing-up terror plot in the UK). They made me toss all my gels, shampoos, toothpaste etc.. before I got on the plane. As some of you ladies out there know, I have many exotic toiletries that I use to stay beautiful, so this was a not insignificant financial and psychic loss....definitely a bad omen. Also, when you leave Brazil you have to go through customs again and give them a departure record. I was careful to show the lady at the TAM counter my Canadian passport and the immigration guy my Irish passport. I passed through security no problem and was chuckling to myself about how clever I was. Unfortunately, in Manaus we had to get off the plane again and were subjected to a really intense and thorough search, and we had to go through immigration again. This time I wasn't thinking (over-tired etc...) and showed them my Canadian passport. That turned out to be a mistake. My Canadian passport had no entry stamp. The guy starts yelling at me "Where you from? Where you from?"...and a whole bunch of other stuff I couldn't understand. I just kept saying "Canada, Canada..." Finally I clued in. I mimed at him "one second! one second!" because it looked like he was about to get out of his booth and slap the cuffs on me or something...then I went through my luggage and found the Irish passport and showed it to him. That calmed him down, and before I knew it I was back on the plane. One other noteworthy thing happened in Manaus. I was talking to this guy from UCSC while we waited to get searched. But right in front of us was Rich Roberts (who won the Nobel Prize in 1993) and he turned around and said something to the UCSC guy. Well it took about 2 nanoseconds for Mr. UCSC to realize that the guy talking to him was Rich Roberts and he dropped me like a hot potato without a word or the slightest acknowledgement I even existed. No, "excuse me", no "Oh! Rich Roberts! I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Apple", no "Piss off Apple, someone more interesting just showed up." It was one of the top 190 rudest things anyone has ever done to me. I hate you Mr. UCSC and I will have my revenge.

Oh my God, this is so long.

Anyway, I got to Miami. They forgot to give me my I-94 departure record from when I cleared immigration so now I'm stuck in the USA until I get **** sorted out. I caught my flight from Miami to Boston. Arrived in Boston around midnight. Took a cab home and cried salty tears of joy because I was finally back in my own bed and back where people speak the Queen's English (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and where I can eat decent food and get some exercise.

The end