My adventure in Brazil

Why was I in Brazil? Well, because our (leo and I) paper got accepted at the ACM SAC'08 conference in Fortaleza, Brazil!! This was one of the most adventurous conferences that I have ever been to and I am so happy that I had the chance to meet with other researchers from across the globe and even made friends with some of them. So what I have to say about the country Brazil-- Beautiful and HOT! Beaches are GREAT, the sand are soft and the sea water is clear and clean at the temperature of around 27 degrees . The only thing is that it is a bit too HOT and humid for me. It's just like being in HK in the summer. I can't stand that without A/C. Another thing is that I wished I had more time to sightsee around the city, too bad that my talk was scheduled on the last day, last session so I didn't have much time/mood to really join a tour on the last day.

Anyway, some highlights of the trip:

• Met Leo's cousin (Henry, still can't pronounce his first name correctly) + his aunt -- they are really great and nice ppl! Very friendly and took me out to look around Fortaleza. They took me to a local Brazilian restaurant which the food (grill + beans with cheese) was really delicious. They even took me out to a Japanese restaurant to try out their sushi.. well to be frank, the sushi was a bit strange cos they put cream cheese in the sushi!! As a matter of fact, Brazil is consisted of a mix of people from various nationalities. Sometimes you thought the chinese and japanese you saw are tourists but actually they are locals. Leo once told me that a large amount of Japanese immigrated to Brazil long time ago. Anyway, Henry and his mom also took me to Beir-A-mal which is one of the most famous beach areas in Fortaleza where I also had the chance to shop at the night market there.
• Met the girls.... Farshi and Camelia -- they are great to hang out with. Although didn't talked much about research (most of the time), we had a lot of fun exploring the lingerie section of Fortaleza's biggest Mall Iguatemi . And of course learning Portuguese from Taxi driver "obrigado", "muchacha" and also learned that it's more or less god's will whether you will arrive safely at your destination with a car, cos traffic laws/rules does not seem to take place (at least to most Brazilian drivers). ;-) Camelia left already on the Tuesday, the second day of the conference so I was spending most of my time with Farshi until Friday.
  
• Men in Red - well, not to forget that I have met Man in Red, the strangest German guy that i have ever met. And when I told him that he is the strangest German that I have ever met he even asked me if that was a compliment!!! You see how strange this guy is? Another funny thing is that I was trying to tell Farshi about the "man in red" and when she spotted him, she looked at me and said "Unbelievable!" but then I noticed that there were two "men in red" and I immediately knew that she has gotten mixed up with the other guy who was wearing red. It was a really funny moment because this "mistaken" guy happened to be someone I just talked with in the afternoon and he ended up to be someone who is giving a talk at Farshi's session. =-)
• Met others... I also met a professor from Kanagawa, although we have some difficulties understanding each other 90% of the time, (cos we usually need some mins before we can fully understand each other), we ended up talking from pure research talk to music composition! Through Farshi, I have also had a chance to met with a professor from Greece which after attending my talk he approached me and suggested to work on EU proposal together!! That's cool.
  

That's more or less my one week in Brazil. I really enjoyed the time there and I am sure that I will visit Brazil again (when Leo gets married.... hee hee) .... but now, I have to concentrate on my thesis again... sigh... how motivating.....