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This is coming to you from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where my sleep deprivation experiment continues; not having adapted to the [six hour] time change I didn't sleep until 4:00AM, and had to get up at 7:00 for a meeting with Ambriex, Aperio's Brazilian distributor. After a good discussion which continued over lunch we flew to Rio de Janeiro, had an amazing dinner, and here I am.
Lunch was so nice we missed our flight to Rio de Janeiro. We booked on the next flight, and then missed that one too while chatting directly next to the gate. Some things cannot be explained. Fortunately there seems to be a regular bucket chain of planes between Sao Paulo and Rio and the third try was a charm. The 50-minute flight into Rio was cool; as you land you can see the hills of the city (including the famous Sugar Loaf) and fly over the bay and islands, then land at the an airport which is itself an island. Interesting factoid: Santos Dumont airport, named after a famous Brazilian aviator, is noted for having some of the shortest runways of any commercial airport in regular use.
We checked into our hotel and discovered that the rooms set aside for us had flooded and were unavailable. The hotel graciously booked us into another hotel at the same rate, a much nicer hotel, in fact the tallest and nicest hotel in all of Copacabana Beach. How great was that?
To top it off, I had an amazing dinner with Sanda Martins-Boyte, Aperio's South American channel manager, and Leila Vecchio, a Rio-based sales rep for Ammriex, at the Skycab restaurant at the top of our hotel. Another meal which will require a week’s riding to compensate. And so ends day two! Tomorrow we are meeting at INCA (the Instituto Nacional de Cancer) and giving another presentation / demo... should be fun.
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