I’m heading for Brazil today. I’ll be there for 3 weeks. I haven’t taken any vacation at work this year, so I was able to lump it all up into one trip. My boss and team members have been very gracious as I leave them to fend for themselves for a while. Out of those 3 weeks, I’ll be traveling alone for one of them. I’ll be meeting Lauren and her friend Becca in Rio about a week into the trip.

The idea for the trip originally came up when a good friend of mine, who works for big green international, told us about his trip to Brazil (where he is now) helping to setup the new market in Sao Paulo. Obviously, that sounded like a sweet, and by sweet, I mean totally awesome trip so a couple of weeks later, we started planning.

So, here we are, one “free” ticket paid for with miles, expensive visa processing, travel supplies purchased, and a hardy dose of last-minute planning later, I’m off to Brazil. My flight leaves in about 3 hours. I’m VERY excited since this is my first trip outside of N. America since I lived in Berlin 7 years ago.

One of the things I originally wanted to do during my trip was to visit the rain forest. That plan sort of skidded to a halt since I only started looking into tickets for my internal flights last weekend. I picked up on a couple of signs that had me thinking that FSM was trying to tell me that I shouldn’t go. A) I hadn’t started planning until this weekend, b) Since I didn’t start planning until this weekend, I didn’t have any of the recommended vaccines for potentially fatal flying-insect-borne diseases, c) tickets to Manaus were pretty ridiculous and since I didn’t plan far enough in advance (see a.), I couldn’t get a Brazil airpass in time. So, I decided that these signs constituted being touched by His Noodly Appendage and decided instead to spend a week in Salvador instead. I’m actually looking forward to spending some time just hanging out on the beaches and fishing for a week. Oh, I’ll probably see some cool stuff since the town was established c. 1500.

After Salvador, I’ll be flying to Rio to meet Lauren and Becca and visit with an old high school friend who now lives in Rio helping people or something like that. Pshhh. You call that a life?

After a couple in days in Rio dodging dengue fever mosquitos, armed thugs and dancing monkeys, we’re heading back to Sao Paulo, the 4th largest city in the world, weighing in at 19 million peeps, to finish up the trip with Josh, Becca’s husband and his new-found Brazilian friends.

I tried to learn some Portuguese before going down there and managed to finish the first set of lessons, so now I can fight with someone over who will pay the bill, know how to ask a pretty shopkeeper if she wants to go to lunch with me, how to ask for N beers (up to 39 with my current vocabulary), tell someone that I’m going to eat something, and make sure I know how to ask where the restaurant or hotel is. I used the Pimsleur series, which is available at the Seattle library, and I must say it’s actually a really good program. I’ve got the next set of lessons on my iPod so that I can annoy the passenger next to me with my attempt at learning the language.

I made sure that I followed the 3-1-1 guidelines for packing. It was tough to get all of my travel lard into 3 oz containers and those in turn in a quart sized ziploc bag, but I managed to get my required 24ozs packed.

Crap, I still need to pack my carry-on…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 8:58 am and is filed under Brazil, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.