Nerdy trip gone awesome.
Ahh traveling. Ahh as in contented sigh type of ahh. Even though I'm totally on a work related trip, I'm still enjoying my time in Brazil. Currently I'm in Cococabana staying at the Mariott. Pretty nice hotel if you ask me. I don't actually have a camera, so I'll share a couple Pinterest pictures of the area and where I've been.
If this picture isn't the exact place I'm staying, then it's pretty dang close. I wish I had a camera when I woke up at 5:10 am and went to the gym on the rooftop and watched the sunrise as I was sweaty and gross from running and free weights while two men were daintily pedaling the bicycle and using the elliptical. Lame.
I came to Brazil because of work, we're (the engineer Mimi who hired me at Oceaneering and I) going to a nerdy engineering conference in Natal tomorrow where a collegue is presenting a paper we had a part in writing.
In the meantime, we're hanging around Rio de Janiero near our plant in Niteroi. On Sunday, a friend/colleague who used to work in Panama City and is now back in her home country of Brazil, was awesome enough to take Mimi and I met to Sugarloaf Mountain where rode the cable cars up to the mountains and ate empanadas and drank coconut water out of real coconuts. She took us to a mall where we all proceeded to spend too much money on authentic Brazilian bikinis (couldn't resist), then ate our way through the evening at Porcao Restaurant. Delicious. Quite a bit salty, but delicious.
One of the things about Rio de Janiero that has plagued my attention is the graffiti here! It's everywhere. And actually artistic, and intriguing, and kind of actually pretty. We literally saw some people spray painting the side of a building in broad daylight with tons of traffic driving past them. I guess it's legal? No idea. Either way, it gives the city some character. Not that it needs more, because there is so much to look at even without all the graffiti.
A lot of what you see of Brazil pictures are the fancy tourist pictures, but a lot of Brazil is industrial, buildings with corrugated roofs that are falling apart, walls that are falling down, and fences with razor wire. But even with all of that, there is some sort of charm with Brazil. Maybe it's the beauty of the rolling hills that look like God was playing with the earth, forming all these crazy lumps all over, that look over the bright blue ocean, all the green grass, the beautiful people...