I’ve landed in Brazil after a nice overnight flight from Boston via New York. This is my first trip to Brazil, so everything here is interesting to me. The people seem nice and everyone is an order of magnitude more attractive then me. I’m in Sao Paulo, a huge metropolis, and pretty different than any city I’ve seen in the states. It’s modern and interesting, but at the same time you can taste the poverty hiding at the edges. I wonder what this city was like 10, 20 or 50 years ago? Has it changed a lot over the last decade as the rest of the world has gotten smaller? I suspect so, but I don’t have the benefit of knowing what it was like. It will be interesting to see it in a few years.
I’ll be in town for a couple of days for some OLPC-related meetings but then I fly down to Porto Alegreo for the 7º Fórum Internacional Software Livre. I’ll be hanging around the OLPC booth and trying to meet people from the Brazilian Free Software community. So if you’re at the conference and you’re interested in meeting, track me down. I’m the guy who looks out of place and is shaking his head at the people who try to talk to him in anything other than English. I’ll be happy to talk about GNOME, the Mozilla project, Red Hat, OLPC – whatever.