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More ideas: The Olympic Games will be in August, which is winter in the southern hemisphere. In Rio and most of Brazil, winter is still warm.

From the Slashdot story summary: "It was reported earlier this year that Rio has given up on its promise to eliminate 80 percent of the sewage found in the city's notoriously filthy water."

I've only been in Rio, at separate times, for maybe 3 weeks total. I haven't seen "notoriously filthy water". The heavily polluted area is in Guanabara Bay, I understand. This is a mostly true but sometimes exaggerated discussion of beaches in Rio: Beaches in Rio de Janeiro. (The article mentions where it exaggerates.)

The Brazilian media constantly emphasizes violent events in Brazilian cities. However, the murder rate in Rio de Janeiro was, the last time I checked, less than two-thirds of the murder rate in the U.S. capital city, Washington, D.C.

Discussions of the song, The Girl From Ipanema, are usually examples of cultures outside of Brazil not reporting Brazilian culture accurately. The author, Antonio Carlos Jobim, was sitting in a restaurant, I suppose, writing that song. If he had wanted to talk with that woman, she almost certainly would have been happy to talk with him. That's been my experience, and I'm not as physically attractive as was Jobim.

Many people live in the area surrounding Guanabara Bay, Go there. People from the U.S. will see that the people everywhere in Rio are generally far more healthy-looking than people in the United States.

I grew up in KC, went to collage at RPI in New York and spent some time working in Boston. I've done a lot of traveling both inside and outside the U.S. and I think Kansas City gets a bum rap.

Many people from the coasts have such bias against KC (and all the other cities in "fly-over" country), but it is actually a pretty hip city. I've eaten some of the best food of my life here and here. The Chicago Tribune recently called Kansas City "America's Next Great Cocktail City. We have tons of fine art theaters, including the new Kauffman Center which is considered one of the most technically advanced performance halls in the nation. The lack of traffic and great roads make it easy to get around. I go out far on the town far more often than when I lived near Boston.

Kansas City also has one of the best academic medical centers in the country and is also one of the highest ranking cities for smart phone app creation. It is consistently ranked on of the most affordable places to live among .

Sure, the rural parts of Missouri and Kansas tend to be a bit bible-belt backward, as they are everywhere in the country, but Kansas City and it's surrounding suburbs are decidedly more liberal. It is great place to live and I'm tired of people who haven't lived here recently, much less visited saying otherwise. If you have a knee-jerk negative reaction when you hear the name Kansas City, then maybe you aren't as open minded as you could be.

Of course, now everyone and their dog declares bankruptcy at a moment's notice, but I think that's better for society as a whole than the State starving people to death on a regular basis.

It's legal on the strip, according to this

Not sure if that's exclusive to the strip or all over the city, though.

I'm not really a sushi gourmand, but I do really like it (just can't tell the bad stuff from the good stuff.) I'm looking in dropping about $90 for a dinner at this place in Tsukiji, but I just want to know ahead of time if I'm going to be disappointed if I'm going for an amazing culinary experience.

I've always lived in both Brazil and US. I have more contact with Brazilians from Sao Paulo and Americans from the eastern coast (DE, NJ, MD, PA).

That said, I guess, from my experience, I have some authority to disagree with some points from your posting.

Brazilians are more disorganized, yes, mostly. But one thing about Brazil that cannot be forgotten: It's a multi-faced country.

While some areas, like some north-eastern cities can be [almost] as poor as most African coutries, other cities like Sao Paulo mix some beggars with extremely wealthy people. Well, they don't really mix, as they live two worlds apart. The poorest people can't possibly grasp the life of a rich one. And that's the problem.

Social distribution is very bad, and that leads to a big distortion. Not an easy problem to solve.

Anyway, I know of an American company that, despite all red tape, prefers to hire Brazilians than Americans, because they think Brazilians are more hard working. So, their oppinion differs from yours.

But why does it differ ? Maybe you have had contact with just one "type" of Brazilian. You may be aware that inside Brazil the "paulistas" (those from Sao Paulo) are known for working hard.

Sao Paulo reminds me of NYC. Just with more homeless, more trash on the pavement, more violence (due to social distortion) but's that's basically it. Most people in Sao Paulo are hard workers. It's actually Brazil's economic capital. Lots of choppers there. Its helicopter fleet one of the biggest in the world, second only to Tokyo.

You said you live in Rio. So you had most contact with happy-go-lucky cariocas. I'm not saying all hard-working Brazilians live only in Sao Paulo, just making a generalization. Generally speaking, paulistas tend to work more than cariocas. Of course there are exceptions.

And, yes, there ARE buzzcut, Coke-bottle bi-focal, white button-down Oxford, pocket protector wearing, STRAIGHT-LACED, ANAL RETENTIVE, NO SOCIAL LIFE HAVING NERDS in Brazil. Think about ITA, one of the hardest universities in Brazil. It has a very hard entrancy test, in wich there's about 70 elite candidates per vacancy. The ones that manage to join ITA are trully nerds. BTW, ITA stands for Instituto Tecnico da Aeronautica, and they did help building this rocket.

For more info about Sao Paulo (in English), please read
http://www.fragilecologies.com/jul09_97.html
http://www.frommers.com/destinations/saopaulo/2851 010001.html
http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/wm/ci/101076/

So, let me see if I've got this right. You have an indeterminant amount of time to spend in the US. You can go anywhere you want to go and do anything you want to do. And you want to spend it in computer museums, big bookstores, and the Smithsonian? Granted, these are all neat places to visit, but why do you want to geek up a perfectly good vacation?

My advice? Ditch the nerd stuff and do something outside.

Learn to kayak in Colorado.
Hike in one of the last beautiful places on Earth.
Play in the water at a beautiful beach in Florida.
Or go to one of the best beaches in Mexico.
Slide around on snow on purpose.
Go to one of the last truly wild places.

There is so much to see in North America. Please don't spend your whole trip at Frys.

Frommers

Careful, their server's not going to be able to handle all the coming users. ;-)

You mean like Fabtek's Work Boy? Frommer's also did an organizer - do a web search to see the ROMs (don't use them of course - that's illegal).

America has its priorities so fucked up that I can't stand it. A nation of the corporation, for the corporation and by the corportation. Families? Forget it! And, if you're working for us (at bargain basement prices), we expect you to ruin your life just as much as we ruin our own.

Read this and think about it, unless you're one of those manager-types. You probably would understand the concepts anyway.