It possibly should be referred to as 'Letter from Brazil' as this and
likely the next missive are going to be focused on my trip to Brazil.
But for consistency, LfA it is.

Jason

___

My trip to Brazil represented nearly the end of a a very, very busy
time for me.  In many ways it was a bit of a break from the busy-ness
that has been the last little while.  And yes, as some of you have
put it, I need a sabbatical from my sabbatical.

The reason I was going to Brazil is a conference in my research area
- the 10th Latin American Conference on Physical Organic Chemistry.
Now, I know that it seems like a convenient excuse, but it genuinely
was a good conference.  It was held in Florianopolis, which is on an
island off the southeast coast of Brazil, in the state of Santa
Catarina.   But back to something like a chronology.

The trip actually started pretty well.  Checking in  was an absolute
breeze and I managed to get everything checked all the way through to
Florianopolis.  I then managed to get into the Admiral's Club (Qantas
Club equivalent for American Airlines) and must have sweet talked the
woman at the desk as I got two free drink vouchers.  I made the most
of them and had two gin and tonics which, and it might have been my
sleep-deprived state having only had about three hours the night
before, which were amongst the best g&t's I've ever had.  Needless to
say, I was pretty relaxed for the flight to Miami (and actually slept
for a fair chunk of the way too).  Miami was straightforward to
change at and the flight to Sao Paulo was fine - but the problem was
that I just didn't sleep (fortunately, there were sufficient
movies/TV to make the time pretty bearable).

Arriving into Sao Paulo didn't cause too many problems, though it was
the first of many occasions that I felt very monolingual.  While
every sign in Portugese had either a pictogram or a translation in
English underneath, it did still highlight that I was the one who was
linguistically out of place.  It was further put in focus by the fact
that Brazilians seem very friendly and will randomly chat with
people.  By this stage already, there had been situations where I
would be talked at and my confused smile was clearly taken as a sign
to continue rather than an indication I didn't know what was going
on.  While my 'survival phrases' podcast equipped me to say "thank
you", "your welcome", "I would like that please" and so on, sadly the
ones that I had got through didn't get to the key phrase "I'm sorry,
I don't speak Portugese."  Meekly saying this in English tended to
get a surprised smile and the person either switched to English (an
impressive feat in itself) or continued in Portugese for a short time
(as if it is important to finish the story, whether the listener has
any clue what is going on or not ...).

[It was similar at the conference itself.  All the sessions were in
English, despite the fact that it was the second language for more
than 90% of the people there.  At one point during the questions
after one talk, it was very odd to see two native Spanish speakers
having a laboured discussion in English so that everyone could
understand.]

On the flight to Florianopolis, I bumped into Dick Weiss (who avid
readers might remember as the person I literally bumped into at the
ACS conference - for those who don't, he's a prof I know quite well
from Georgetown) who was going to the same conference.  It was very
handy because Dick also spent the first three years of his academic
career in Sao Paulo and speaks Portugese very well.  We got some
local currency (Real - I believe it translates to "royal") and found
the shuttle bus.  The trip to the hotel was longer than we expected.
The hotel where the conference was held was an hours drive away on
the north of the island.  The area was called Praia Brava Hotel
(praia meaning beach) and was clearly a relatively recently developed
(say 80s/90s) area.

Checking in was no problem once we worked out that for some reason I
was booked in under the name "Jason B. Marpel" - clearly whoever
transcribed it from the online form had poor handwriting.  The hotel
was pretty nice, with a view out over the pool to the beach.  Later
in the week I was able to go for a bit of a walk along it but
surprisingly the weather was not brilliant while in Brazil.  Then
again, it was off-season so I guess that was why we could have a
conference there and it not be terribly expensive.  The amusing point
though was that the sand was amazingly fine (in the wind it gave a
weird 'sand tornado' effect) and seemed to have a magical adhesive
property as a result.  I didn't really venture onto the beach until
the second last day and I'm glad I didn't in some ways as the sand
got simply _everywhere_ and I had no desire to bring it back to the
USA.

[Another sidenote:  I only turned on my TV a couple of times but it
is hilarious to see some of the dubbing.  Trying to watch Jim Carey
in Portugese is unusual ...]

Now I won't go into incredible detail about the conference but there
are a few things that are worth pointing out.  First of all, the
attendance was dominated by people from (not surprisingly) from South
America (lots of Brazilians, Argetinians and Chileans particularly).
While this isn't necessarily a large academic community, because of
the focus of the conference it was actually pretty interesting (I'd
say it compares to a general Australian organic conference in terms
of interest for me).  The odd thing was that while they didn't run
parallel sessions (which is a good thing - no having to choose
between two things you want to see), this resulted in quite a bit of
'fluidity' to the session times.  That is, I'm not sure any session
ran to time - and it wasn't just a matter of the talks running long,
because most sessions started at least ten minutes late.  The South
Americans seemed to take this in their stride (as did those people
who have spent some time there) but it did frustrate the rest of us
at the beginning.  The other point that was a little odd was that a
lot of announcements simply weren't made, the information seeming to
be distributed by word of mouth.  Not being local and not speaking
either Portugese or Spanish meant that some of us simply had to
follow everyone about hoping we'd got it right.

The speaker list was pretty interesting though it took a bit of a hit
because two of the people I was looking forward to seeing (Herbert
Mayr and Guy Lloyd-Jones) both pulled out at the last minute with
illness (both had the 'flu).  While these people gave reasons, at
least four other speakers simply didn't show, which I thought was a
bit rude.  The amusing thing was that even with these absences,
somehow the sessions managed to take up exactly the same amount of
time.

It is worth mentioning, however briefly, that my talk (which was on
Thursday morning) went quite well.  I was a little nervous given the
person speaking beforehand has a publication history that indicated
that he and I might have some 'scientific disagreements'.  While I
think that these disagreements might still exist, his talk (which was
on the templating effects of ionic liquids on metal nanoparticles -
yeah, I'm not sure how it got into a physical organic conference
either ...) didn't highlight it and, as was the case in Santiago de
Compostela last year, actually introduced a lot of ideas that I would
also use in my talk (even if applied to different systems).  And mine
went down well ... or at least the audience seemed attentive (could
have been desperately trying to understand the accent ...)

Time to stop here as it will go on forever - Part II to come at the
end of the week (hopefully), but until then, see if I've put up
photos at the following link ...

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=152413&id=570906321&l=18b7d5f98a

--
Pre-Sig - I am travelling extensively over the next month and e-mail
is likely to be limited. Please expect delays in responses until the
end of October.

Dr Jason Harper                                 Present Address:
School of Chemistry                             Merkert Chemistry Centre
University of New South Wales                   Boston College
Sydney NSW 2052                                 Chestnut Hill  MA 02467-3860
AUSTRALIA                                       USA
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