Monday, June 15, 2009

O Cristo Redentor - most people look away from him at the view of the city. We were up there on a Sunday during mass.

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Saturday, June 13, 2009

Rio Photo



















View from hotel.
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Rio

Rio de Janeiro has be amazing so far. Yesterday we went to the Niteroi Museum. Had to take a ferry across Guanabara Bay which was really fun. Cloudy and rainy; saw the Christ in the clouds. The museum contains an unimpressive contemporary art collection, the real draw is the building itself. Right on the water and offers some great views that I'm sure are even greater when it is clear.




















At night we headed to Lapa, the happening place at night, and went to Estrela da Lapa to see the samba group Bateria da Mangueira. About 10 guys on percussion and one singing/playing ukulele; simply amazing.

Today was spent wandering around and tomorrow we will head to either Ipanema or Christ the Redeemer.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Last Leg

Hello! I am in Rio de Janeiro at the Hotel Formule 1! Sorry I have been AWOL while in Maringa. Our workshop was packed in, we only had three days, and the internet was spotty. Nothing too exciting happend while I was there anyway. The highlights are: our hotel was named King Konfort, and none of the Brazilian students could figure out why we thought this was so funny; I had an amazing corn dish, called pamonha, which is like a Brazilian tamale for dinner one night at the market; and the Maringa airport rivals the likes of New Bern Int'l.

Our flights to Rio had exciting landings and despite the clouds Rio's lights were still very impressive. This city looks amazing, but there are some sections that we drove through to get to our hotel that look seriously frightening. Cloudy day today, so I'll hold off on Corcovado and Cristo Redentor until it is clear. Not too sure how much I'll be pulling my camera out, everyone seems to make this city out to be rather dangerous but we'll see.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

I Appreciate Your Patience...

I thought I'd get to posting about the past several days tonight, but I was wrong. Bus ride tomorrow, I'll type something up during the trip and get it up when I can in Maringá. I had my last round of night photography on our hotel's roof with a full moon send-off.


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The Past Week: Trailor




















This is one of my many photos from Parque Tanguá, which is where I spent most of today - my last full day here in Curitiba.

Our project is done and the presentation went pretty good.

More on the end of our workshop and my day about the city to come....

***Photo page updated: http://picasaweb.google.com/aaronnbland/BrazilBlogSupplementalPhotos?feat=directlink
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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Photos

I have created a photo album so I can put more pictures up in one place. I'll still put the most interesting and relevant photos on here with posts, but for those who want more - and to save the frustration of putting multiple photos on the blog one at a time - I'll post many to the album. Location of each will be in the caption.

Link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/aaronnbland/BrazilBlogSupplementalPhotos?feat=directlink

Workshop Info

For the past few days we've been heading to Universidade Positivo in the afternoons to work on our workshop goings-ons. My group has been organizing the data that is relevant to us into a cohesive (single) spreadsheet, collecting bits of information from various electronic documents and printed maps and matching names with lot numbers. It has been time consuming but today we finally started crunching some of our agolmerated numbers.

Also today, I started working with a GIS shapefile of the lots in Vila Nova. I organized the individual lots into our various "Sectors" (about 40) and our "Supersectors" (6) so that we could visually represent our measures of socioeconomic status. The map pictured below is our sectors, which are organized based on street frontage and access. We had to make the Supersectors becuase we had so few surveys completed and many sectors had less than 3 surveys from them, and therefore not enough data to draw any decent conclusions.

Out of about 850 lots we had around 140 surveys, which were sorted into the sectors that they came from via a fun process of matching the address (and possibly a name) on the paper survey to a spreadsheet on a computer that had addresses paired with lot numbers. Then the lot was found on the colorful map and the sector number was put on the survey and the survey into the appropriate pile. It felt like CSI: Urban Planning.





































Our workspace at the university.