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Rio, Home

The team touches down in Rio to be confronted with a pleasantly empty airport. Whilst you might equate this with a waltz through customs, it turns out that the kit that makes up our mobile office needs to be declared and it takes an hour form filling before we are allowed to escape into arrivals. What’s another hour added to a day and a half’s travel? Our camaraderie is high sustained gallows humour, the anticipation of impending personal bathing facilities, and gallows humour based on our need for personal bathing facilities.

Meetings with the ground team are scheduled for the following morning leaving us with enough time between ablutions and dozing off to stretch legs in the neighbourhood and stock up on supplies.

The preparation of this field study has been an impressive example of other people’s resourcefulness and adaptability, and an element of luck. Luck - a member of our ground crew recruited via Future Perfect turns out to be natural for this kind of work. BV, take a bow.

Our home for the next ten days is the top floor of an apartment block centrally located in Rio, with enough room to comfortably house the four-strong Nokia team and be used as an field office for the 12 strong ground crew. The apartment is split over two floors the upper dominated by a deck with a 300 degree view of the city and its coastline. The one and possibly only benefit to jetlag is enjoying the calm the early hours, an opportunity to review, think and write and take in the sun rising over Rio.

That’s not strictly true - I’ll soon be vacating the deck for my yoga practicing collegue. Personal moments require personal space.

Time to make a proper start to the working day.

Writing from Rio | July 28, 2007 | Permalink