Right, so, where did I leave off? With the passport that wasn’t in my hot little hands?
Yeah, about that. Turns out the Consulate in Toronto simply couldn’t print a temporary passport. They told me it was a catastrophe for them. I wasn’t exactly smiling when I pointed out that I was the one without a passport but with a non-refundable plane ticket to South America. They came back with, there was one possibility… if I went to Ottawa in person, right away, the embassy there could print me a passport. They’d even fax my forms for me… So to Ottawa I went, and the saga of the stupid passport finally came to an end.
And right after that, the trip to Brazil began!
The conference Gwen and I were going to began on a Sunday, which meant we’d have to leave Toronto on a Friday night at the latest in order to get to Recife on Saturday night so we’d be there in time for the opening speeches (the keynote sounded interesting) on Sunday. Now, if you must leave on a Friday night at the latest, there’s nothing to say you can’t leave on a Wednesday night, now, is there? Our work travel policy quite sensibly requires that extra days are at our own cost, but allows flexibility in dates of travel as long as the cost is equal or less than if we went for work alone. In our case, it was less.
It was less because we went to the beach, and stayed there until Sunday morning. If you’re already *in* the state of Pernambuco, you can make it to the conference site in time for a midafternoon conference beginning! And if you don’t have to be there til midafternoon, there’s nothing to say you can’t stay at the beach until Sunday morning, and since the beach was “fun” not “work”, we paid for the beach hotel even for Saturday night though *technically* we would have *had* to be in Brazil by this time already. Gimme my gold star for morality already, and then let’s get back to that beach. (Really, it *was* all moral-like. We get screwed out of lose weekends due to travel all the time - so, for a change, we *took* a weekend. It wasn’t even playing hooky!)
So, yeah. I went to a beach in Brazil. Some of the things they say about Brazilian beaches – totally true. Others – not so much. True, for instance, that Brazilian swimsuits always come in two pieces, and that the pieces are teeny tiny little bits of string and postage stamps. Not so true, however, the stereotype of the Brazilian beach body. While there were a few size tiny but impossibly endowed beach beauties strutting around in little bits of string, there were far more women with more realistic body types but wearing size tiny bits of string. Gwen and I, who had prepared ourselves for hiding under our sarongs in fear of getting green coconuts tossed at us for not meeting the Brazilian beach body standards – well, we weren’t so self conscious within about a minute of landing on the beach. Though we perhaps felt Amish… or at the very least, like we should be calling our swimsuits “bathing costumes.” Just saying…
And I’ll say more tomorrow, and upload some pictures and all that. Cause if I don’t do it soon, it will be like a whole bunch of adventures in the spring that I just never got around to, and if I’m gonna drag my camera everywhere, *somebody* needs to look at my pictures. Besides, after Brazil there was the Badlands, and there were the Rockies and standing in blowing snow, and starting next week there is Norway again, and I gotta catch up!