Fri, 6 Jan 2006 09:41:33 -0800 (PST)
Greetings from Florianopolis (Brazil)

Hey,

I am going to be sending out some email updates of my life over the next few months since I am now travelling again. For anyone who doesn't know what I have been up to, here is an update.

I finished my MBA at IESE in May of 2005 (The Economist ranked it the #1 MBA in the world in the 2005 rankings http://mba.eiu.com/). Bummed around spain for a few months after graduation. Went back to Canada, bummed around for 3 months more (lots of going ot the gym and bike riding). Went back to Spain in October to look for work, got a job offer, found out that it takes 6 months to process the work visa. Left Spain in December (because you have to be out of the country while they process the work visa to remain in a legal situation) to Winnipeg for a month. I bought all the equipment and learned how to do kiteboarding on the snow-covered fields of manitoba. Finally, I have just arrived in Florianopolis Brazil and will be here for the next 3 months. I plan on becoming an excellent kite-surfer, certified in SCUBA diving, and to speak portuguese (which I can already read quite well due to the similarities with spanish)

Assuming that all goes well, I will have a spanish work permit some time in April, but I am pretty suspicios that it is not going to come through because the company that is supposed to be sponsoring me is totally disorganized and seem to have their head up their ass. I will know for sure on January 10th (next tuesday). Assuming the offer falls through, send me some job openings!

Flying through Sao Paulo, I went to check in on the brazilian discount airline called GOL. My e-ticket indicated that the flight left at 1:30, and when I looked at the departure schedule, it said that the flight was leaving at 12:30. I asked the check-in guy what was going on and he just said with a big smile "I guess that you e-ticked is wrong ... if you would have shown up for that time, you would have missed your flight!". Luckily I made it onto the plane in time to fly down to Florianopolis (which otherwise is a 12 hour bus ride from Sao Paulo). I got onto the plane, and the female flight attendants had the most unique airline uniforms I have seen yet -- skin-tight white t-shirts.

Florianopolis is an extremely beautiful city that is located on an island in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil. It is on the southern coast between Sao Paulo and Argentian. The temperature right now is about 30 degrees celcius, and the atmosphere feels to me like a tropical paradise. It is a city of about 300K people, but apparently that nnumber swells to a million over the next few (summer) months. This is the city where sand-boarding was invented, and there is something like 40 beautiful beaches all around, as well as a thriving kite-boarding community.

I have shaved my head totally bald (no, not out of necessity!), and so will be using plenty of sun-cream over the next few months.

I will keep everyone updated as my journey un-folds. Now I am off to buy a SIM card for my mobile phone.