Gustavo Noronha (kov)

So, next Saturday Luciana and I are moving back from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte after about 6 months here. It was an interesting ride. We didn’t really have a good time finding a good place to live at - Rio is very expensive and it looks like demand is so high anywhere close to Luciana’s work place that the only reasonable solution was to live very far away, and even there we didn’t really have much success, although for other reasons I may talk about later.

“Belo” is how the foreign people who live there usually refer to Belo Horizonte. I think that is probably because it’s a bit too hard for them to say ‘Horizonte’ =D (if it helps you, you could use the “Mineirish” ‘Belzonte’). I have borrowed this svg file kindly licensed in the FDL by Raphael Lorenzeto de Abreu, and generated a simple png image that you can see in this post with Belo Horizonte, and some other cities we often talk about at Collabora =):

A straight line between Recife and Belo Horizonte has about 1640km. There are 340km between BH and Rio, and 973km between BH and Florianópolis.

A bit about Belo Horizonte, for those friends of mine to whom I always have a hard time explaining where it’s located, and what kind of city it is: Belo Hozizonte is a nice, beautiful city, with a quite big metropolitan area. About 6 million people live in greater Belo Horizonte. It is considered one of the three most influential cities in Brazil, along with São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It’s surrounded by mountains, which are considered one of the defining geographical features of the Minas Gerais state, of which it is the capital.

Here’s a picture that is available under the public domain in Wikipedia:

Speaking of Minas Gerais, it is, according to Wikipedia, the fourth in size among the 26 States of Brazil, being just a bit bigger than mainland-France. Minas Gerais is one of the main earth transports hubs of the country (having the largest number of federal roads), and is famous for its tasty food, the beauty of its people, its cheeses, the calm, introspective nature of its people, its interesting way of speaking portuguese, and its alcoholic beverages.

Now, going away from Rio to Belo Horizonte has a single big disadvantage associated with it: we don’t get to have the Sea a few minutes away, anymore. Our solution to that is, of course, going to one of the numerous bars (the legend goes around that BH has the largest absolute number of bars of all cities in the world), and drinking instead of swimming! Quem não tem mar, vai pro bar!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 9:42 am and is filed under English, Pessoal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.