Sept 25 - Sao Paulo

On Wed morning the taxi service picked me up at 5:45am to bring me to the airport. I landed in Brazil just around 11:00 and got checked into the hotel. I worked all day, studying and making slight changes to the presentation, to iron out the rough spots in my performance from Buenos Aires. So, the only sights I saw in Sao Paulo were what I saw from the taxis to and from the airport, and what I could see from my hotel room. Luckily I was in a room facing a Sao Paulo landmark, the Obelisk of Sao Paulo, commemorating the revolution in the early 1900s.



From what I've heard, Sao Paulo is a dangerous city. I was told to take a taxi from the hotel to the IBM building just 2 blocks away, for security reasons - you don't want to be seen walking any distance with a laptop bag over your shoulder, lest you get robbed of it... IBM has a number of taxis inside it's security gates at the end of the day, to take visitors to their destinations. I wish I had taken pictures from the taxi. From what I saw of the city, it is easy to tell that the Brazilians love color. All the houses and businesses were painted outrageously bright green, red, orange, blue, yellow, pink, gold... Truly the most colorful city I've ever seen.