Adventures of a Discoverer

This last December I traveled to Brazil and my flight had a really long layover at the Houston airport: seven hours! I hadn't slept well the night before, so I was feeling very tired when I got to Houston and I still had a ten hour flight ahead of me to Brazil. That made it a perfect opportunity to try something new: Minute Suites. It is an interesting concept: in the boarding area of an airport (so, past the TSA security) you have a tiny little hotel with tiny little rooms that you can use for a few hours, typically two or three. Each room is the size of a little office, with a couch that can become a bed, a blanket, pillows, a small desk, a chair and a flat screen TV. You can control the temperature and the lights of the room, and there are plenty of power outlets, and also Wi-Fi. The rooms are soundproof as well. The idea is that you can be in a small space that you can lock yourself in, set the light and temperature to exactly what feels more comfortable to you, and take a nap,...

As I spend some time in Brazil, as always I take some time to do some urban exploration at my alma mater, Unicamp ("Universidade Estadual de Campinas" - State University of Campinas) as I did in a previous occasion . This time, in addition of taking pictures of some of the animals that roam the empty campus (everybody is on vacation) I also managed to check out a building that I had been curious for a long time: the unfinished theater. Pretty much since the University was created, back in the 1960's, the drama and dance faculty and students have complained about the lack of a proper theater in which they could show their creations. In the best Unicamp style, there are some improvised spaces where they can do so, but the lack of a genuine space for artistic performances is undeniable. So, a few years ago, the University managed to get some government funds to create a big theater in the campus. The structure and walls of the brand new building were put together and it was ...

A number of major cities around the world have created a similar tourist attraction, that has proven to be quite popular: a glass cube, made of reinforced glass, that sticks out of the side of a major skyscraper. I'm spending some time in São Paulo, which has its own version of this attraction, and I had the opportunity to try it out. In a major skyscraper close to the city center there is Sampa Sky : on the 42nd floor, four glass cubes stick out of the sides of the building giving an incredible view of the massive city of São Paulo (the eighth largest in the world, with 21 million people in the metro area - and also where I was born). I'm not going to lie: I had an intense feeling of vertigo when I stepped in the first cube. It requires some courage to go all the way forward and touch the front glass. After some time you overcome your fear, that is, until you look down and back at the building and you have the impression that you are not on the side that you should be in a sk...

A few days ago I had the opportunity to go through a trip through Brazilian History: I visited the Itaú Cultural Institute . First, some context: Itaú Bank is the largest bank in Latin America, headquartered in São Paulo. For many years it had a banker by the name of Olavo Setúbal as its chairman, and, in addition to administering the bank, he painstakingly collected a number of rare artifacts from the beginnings of Brazilian History (as in, when Europeans first arrived in the country, all the way back to the XVI century) and once he passed away a museum was built to show to the public all those artifacts. It's quite an extraordinary collection: it contains original drawings made by the first artists who visited Brazil, throughout the XVI, XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. To Europeans, Brazil was a big unknown land, full of strange creatures and unimaginable places. For the sake of comparison, the Europeans that looked at those drawings felt kinda like us when we see pictures of Mar...