Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Business Trip Extraordinaire--Day 18

Today was a lot like yesterday, except that we did not have to set up. We simply arrived and started talking to people at the trade show. It was a busy enough day. We had a good amount of traffic.

I forgot to mention that yesterday, my water bottle was taken from my computer stand. We had set out some company luggage tags as swag, but the water bottle was mine from a conference I attended in 2007 (and marked as such). I guess someone thought my still-wet bottle from 2007 was swag too, because it disappeared. (To the extremely intelligent person who did this: enjoy the bottle, as well as the cold sores you might now have for the rest of your life.) This morning I bought a bottle of water at a market near my hotel so I wouldn't have to pay the convention center price (about $0.80 near my hotel, about $2.40 at the convention center). During the show, I set my water on my stand, and it disappeared too! Good thing I locked my computer with a cable lock or maybe someone would have thought that was a freebie too.

I returned to my hotel around 8:00 and had dinner. I ate at one of those comida á kilo places. If you see a restaurant that says "á kilo" or "á quilo," it means you choose your food from a buffet and they weigh it to determine how much you pay. It's an economical and fast way to get some decent food. It wasn't all that cheap tonight, but no restaurant in Rio is. Plus they had some authentic Brazilian food: beans, rice, and farofa. It was not nearly as good as my lunch in Manaus, but it was good enough.

I sure miss my family. I'm glad I'll be home in five days, because this trip has already been too long.

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