Got to the airport in Rio more quickly than I expected (with an excellent burned soundtrack provided by the cabbie), and got airside without any problem, which itself led to a problem: there’s nothing to do airside in Rio, unless you’re in to severely overpriced duty-free shopping.

Thanks to cunning use of the seat selection map a few hours before getting to the airport, I had two seats to myself on each flight. I might have managed two and a half hours sleeping on the GIG-ATL leg, which is nothing short of incredible for me.

Atlanta was pretty typical, with no notable nightmares. The ATL-CRW leg did change gates three times within ten minutes, though, with the last change to a different concourse: fortunately, it was well before the flight and I didn’t repeat plane-chasing experiences from the past. My bags somehow made it all the way with me, and here I am.

If I can stay awake, tonight I need to start the typhoid vaccine and take an LSAT practice. Should be fun.

I think I’m pretty much done with massive food intake. Tonight there’s a wine-and-cheese send-off for the local US cultural attaché, which could be very boring or interesting. And tomorrow I’m out of here.

For those of you not strong of Babelfish, there was a very, very loud shootout in the hills nearby about 1:30 this morning.

Anyway…

Lunch at a churrascaria rodizio (look it up and drool–it’s pretty much an all-you-can-eat meat pit) in Centro today with my godfather. Unsurprisingly, it was good.

After that went through Copacabana to Ipanema after dark, catching some nice harbor views in the process, for a “lanche” at Chaika.

In other news, the word from an employee of the Federal Police is that my valid passport should be enough to get me out of Brazil. Hope she’s right.

Lunch was at a feira nordestina (a fair of food/crafts/etc. from the Northeast region of Brazil).

Just got to look over my purchase from yesterday… an “Ironmen” watch. At least it’s not a counterfeit, or it’s an honest one. Should serve for the month or two I need it.

In an interesting complication for my Hong Kong plans, a check of Yodlee, which I use to keep track of my accounts, revealed that my credit card balance was about $3,000 higher than it needed to be. No transactions showed in Yodlee’s “last seven days” view for that card.

A visit to that card’s site reveals that on the 15th, when I bought my Hong Kong ticket, the travel agent decided that I would also be happy to buy two tickets for the Reddy family to go to Singapore. I guess I was celebrating too hard…

Those two transactions, unlike the real Hong Kong ticket, posted ten days after they were charged on the 25th, so they came from nowhere. I’ve already called and disputed the charges, but seeing a balance like that is a real gut check. I hope this doesn’t end up jeopardizing my HK ticket through that agent.

SkypeOut (shameless commercial plug) has been valuable in talking to Hong Kong, Houston, Washington, and so on. I don’t know what it costs to directly dial HK from here but I’m pretty sure it’s more than U$ 0.04/min.

Began the day on the phone with Consulados Americanos (which if you’re Brazilian sounds like the name of an appliance chain), and continued to lunch at my god-mother’s little… uh, place. Lunchery? I’m not sure exactly what it is. Good food, though, with a sublime torta de abacaxi (pineapple) and ameixa (prune, which Brazilians pride themselves on including in almost anything sweet and a few salty things too) for dessert. It was so sublime that while I ate I spent the whole time trying to figure out the Portuguese translation of “sublime.” (still don’t know as of press time, but I haven’t asked or searched either)

Later went to the old Sta. Teresa part of the city and enjoyed a square for a few hours, which is something I hadn’t yet seen in Brazil (all over in Spain). Had a good carne asada sandwich (think BBQ, but not the liquefied sort). Sta. Teresa has some nice views of the harbor and Centro, too, including the trams running up to/down from Urca to Pão de Açucar (Sugar Loaf).

Rio is a curious place in that it has comprehensive public transport, but there are such gaps in the transportation system that some things you really can’t do (safely or at all) without a car or taxi. Sad.

News on the home front is good: I received my acceptance packet from Lingnan in Hong Kong today (via WVU’s Office of International Programs). As described to me over the (computerma-)phone, it’s… comprehensive.

As you can perhaps tell by the tone of this post, the weather has finally broken… it was a brilliant day, a little chilly in the evening by Rio’s standards but the bitter onset of winter can be blamed for the thermometer’s drop to [checks] 72 Fahr a couple minutes before midnight. If the weather is similar tomorrow we’ll head out to the… uh, I’m not sure what the name is precisely, some walk near Urca (the smaller mountain on the way up to Sugar Loaf) near the Praia Vermelha (Red Beach, not red). It’s very pretty, as I remember it… forest on the inside, waves crashing below on the outside.

Happy Saturday.

The weekend’s sun has been replaced by… well… something. It’s been foggy and gray, and this morning some rain has finally, blessedly cleared the mugginess from the air (though not the fog). This made for an unpleasant night last night, pre-rain, but yields a decent-feeling if not decent-looking day today.

I don’t think it’s made it below 67ºF at night–not bad for late Fall. Forecast calls for some rain through at least Thursday morning but meteorologists are famously inaccurate around here.

My grandmother’s most recent dessert was unfortunately exhausted yesterday: it was a torta de ricota (yeah, ricotta, the stuff you find in good lasagna, except a little sweet) covered with goiabada (guava paste).

Today I got to sleep in and then went to lunch with family at a kilo place (you buy your food by the kilo (or fraction thereof, you greedy pig), followed by a decadent dessert session at my great-aunt’s apartment. And back here I am, finally, cracking my LSAT books for the first time and making embarrassingly little (no) progress.

A couple interesting things about Rio that I’d pretty much forgotten… the smell of alcohol near gas stations (Brazil claims this year to be completely energy independent), the neat sidewalk patterns, and the fact that a palm tree across the street looks to be taller than this apartment (on the sixth floor).

OK, I think I’ve got the Internet and such mostly fixed for tonight. Review of the trip:

Short typical delay out of Charleston, followed by wandering around the Atlanta airport for a few hours (bought a copy of the Economist and a meal from Popeye’s, they went well with each other). The flight from Atlanta to Rio (DL 61) was delayed for an hour and a half and gate-changed three or four times. Somewhere in there they switched planes. I suppose we left soon enough after the delayed time (10:05, originally scheduled 8:35).

The gate agent in charge of the flight looked frighteningly like Scotty McClellan.

The flight itself could have been worse. I had interesting conversation around me, though not always as interesting as those speaking seemed to think. It was more fun to listen to blowhard-Brazilian-hotshot-physician and blowhard-Canadian-oil-rig-dude than the chorus of babies in the center section of my flight.

The plane was a ratty old 767-300 with the communal movie screens and other atrocities of age. Cheers to Delta for springing for free headphones (I can’t believe I’m writing this), but no cheers for scheduling only one movie (King Kong) and following it up with some of the least inspiring “television” programming I’ve yet seen aloft. An ABC story on some BBQ festival reminded me of helping a friend shoot the Buckwheat Festival in Kingwood, so that was kind of fun. The one-hour-long profile/detailed sucking up to Home Depot redefined excitement, though.

Breakfast was edible, which merits a mention: a warm bagel with cream cheese and jam, a cereal bar, and a banana (yellow, not green!).

Immigration in Rio was about as strict as ever: someone looked at the picture page of my passport and handed it back to me. Customs was interesting though: traditionally, one pushes a button and a big traffic-light gizmo flashes green (go ahead) or red (stay for inspection). There has always been speculation about how random this flasher is and whether it’s controlled by agents nearby. Today I was stopped before I could press it and sent straight to the red line, where I was hassled for a bit about my laptop: no worries about randomness at all.

Here begins the food-blog that will comprise the rest of the Brazil trip.

Lunch was at my grandmother’s, with a traditionally over-the-top presentation of carrots and a cauliflower salad with garlic olive oil dressing, a torta de bacalhau (a codfish torta… mmm, codfish), and for dessert some mango, and some torta de maça (apple torta) washed down with guaraná.

Various people visited the apartment in their evening to pay their respects.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going to be dragged off to the beach before lunch and waste most of the day, even though the weather is not quite what I’d call beachy: warm but not that warm. When I landed it was 21 ºC at the airport, and it might have gotten up to 26 or so but the water should still be freezing.

Skype works from the cable modem here: that’s pretty cool.

Guess that’s all for tonight.