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NEW STATES OF MATTER IN HADRONIC INTERACTIONSPASI: January 7-18, 2002to be held at Hotel Leão da Montanha, Campos do Jordão, São Paulo, Brazil |
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NEW STATES OF MATTER IN HADRONIC INTERACTIONSPASI: January 7-18, 2002to be held at Hotel Leão da Montanha, Campos do Jordão, São Paulo, Brazil |
This page offers general information for US
and other foreign participants on their first research trip to
Brazil, and arrival information specific to this PASI
for all participants. It will be continuously updated. Current version
is of DECEMBER 5, 2001. Find this document at
http://physics.arizona.edu/~pasi/Arrive1.htm .
If you have questions or comments about this information
please contact
pasi@physics.arizona.edu
the PASI organizing committee.
Click:
http://physics.arizona.edu/~pasi/ to return to
the main meeting page. All information was thoroughly
researched but is subject to change.
We cannot assume responsibility for events and situations
beyond our control. All foreign PASI participants should
carefully read the recently updated
U.S. State Department Consular
Information for Travelers to Brazil.
This page, including the pictures shown
will print nicely on a black and white printer, but it turns
out that netscape browser does a very poor job in color printing of these
low resolution (for speed of loading) color images. We recommend
printing this page in ``black and white''.
To access these and many
more pictures from the hotel and Campos de Jordao
in 200dpi resolution (typical)
click here. Many are dark in netscape
but clear in photo programs.
Contents
Travel Documents
All US citizens must obtain a Brazilian visa. Since you will not
receive financial support from a Brazilian source your travel is considered
to be for pleasure and a tourist visa will suffice. A copy of
your airline ticket or equivalent documentation is
required by a Brazilian consulate as evidence of your intent to travel to
Brazil. In very special situations we can provide
a formal letter of invitation. PLEASE do not delay your
visa application even one day. If it is not yet done, your participation
in the meeting is not assured! There is no visa requirement
for many other nationals, even if residents of USA and traveling from US to
Brazil.
MEETING YOU AT Sao Paulo Airport
The GRU (international Sao Paulo Airport) has two attached terminal halls,
with areas A, B in terminal 1 and C,D in terminal 2. Upon arrival you
will find non-citizen lines for passport control. Before you approach the
immigration officer you must have the
arrival document filled out and ready for inspection.
A copy will be left in your passport. You will need it
to exit Brazil, so DO NOT DISCARD IT.
When passing customs control, you
must ring a bell which picks out by random draw individuals who are
to be controlled more thoroughly. Do not despair if this happens to you,
since it takes just a couple minutes.
Once you exit the customs
control, look for someone with our PASI Poster. If not, look
for someone you know or perhaps just a PASI sign with directions.
Please DO NOT respond to
random or SUSPECT offers of services, taxis etc, sometimes rather
intense. Instead, please proceed to
the area connecting the two terminals at the level of DEPARTURES
(embarque) which is generally one FLOOR up from your arrival
level (desembarque).
In the picture below left you see a view of the airport
taken in the Terminal 2 `embarque' level, looking in
the direction of Terminal 1.
The middle level is where you want to go, the top level is a shopping arcade, and
the bottom is where you will exit the customs.
Once at the departure level,
if you are in Terminal 1 go towards
Terminal 2 and if in Terminal 2 go towards
Terminal 1. Between the two there is a shopping
arcade of about dozen shops and in the
middle you will see the entrance to the Diners Club VIP lounge
(photo below right).
If you carry a Diners Club card you can enter and bring with you
two guests.
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Transfer to Hotel
At present the plan is to have two buses leave GRU (Sao Paulo International),
one mid-morning (11:00) and the other in the very early afternoon (13:00).
(Ordinarily one should allow 45 minutes to leave the plane and go through
passport and customs). Details will be refined when we
receive a more complete
schedule of arrival times. Also, there will be a third downtown
Sao Paulo bus, watch for update of details.
For this purpose, you should periodically
RECHECK with your airline to verify your departure/arrival times.
(We already know of some major schedule
changes as airlines cope with a changing demand.)
If your ticket is prepaid but not yet issued, prepare for
an extra 30-45 minutes at your check-in time.
Once the bus is moving, the trip is relatively
short, the GRU airport is directly at
the Super-Tollway to Rio, and thus 140km of the 180 km to the hotel will
fly by in 1h15min. This is followed by the climb to the mountain resort which
may last another +45min.
(NOTE: The trip to the hotel is less than the time needed
to cross Sao Paulo in a different direction. DO NOT CONSIDER a short
visit to Sao Paulo
even if you have a couple of hours.
It is likely that you will NEVER make it back on time, since
is is a very busy city with a population of over 20
million and many traffic jams.
You will find on board the bus a significant amount of PASI school
information, forms to fill to register at the hotel, not to speak
of many friends and colleagues, etc, so time should fly.
School Activities
Everyone should arrive with a single `self-introduction' transparency,
to be presented during the Monday
self-introduction/reception session. Tell us who you are, institution,
academic level and research interests.
We hope and expect that many Students will arrive with POSTERS reporting
on their research and/or thesis work. Adjacent to the lecture area there
will be poster area. It may be possible to schedule a few short seminar talks taken from the
poster presentations.
The preliminary schedule of talks is quite full.
Tutorials and course lectures are
mandatory for all students, discussion sessions are
mandatory for course lecturers of the day, topical lectures,
seminars etc are optional for everybody.
We plan to have several windows-based computers connected
to the net and a few ethernet plug-in opportunities for
your laptop, with instructions how to assign to yourself the
local IP number. It should be possible to connect LINUX/Unix or Macs
but at this time we have not tested it. The total standing line
capacity will be at 80kb so heavy downloading of latest
preprints is not what you should plan for. Printing will be
very limited. The capacity of the web access was chosen assuming that
each participant will use this for not more than a few minutes
perday for e-mail activities.
Please plan accordingly.
There is a
slight shortage of good working spaces in each room, and surely
it is hard to find a desk with light. So please do not plan to finish your
PhD thesis or a latest research paper while at the meeting. There will be
working areas below the lecture hall for student group discussions,
preparation of proceedings reports, computer room and other
group activities.
Tips for your stay
While you should be prepared for a VERY hot Summer on the
beach and in Rio/Sao Paulo, the location
of the hotel in high mountains will bring to you the environment of
a Canadian or middle-European Summer. Mild mornings, followed by hotter
mid-day and a often rainy evening. So please do
not forget to pack, in addition to your preferred swimming suit,
also a light sweater, hiking boots, umbrella/light rain coat.
Aside of sauna, small pool, walks in the rather high hills,
and even a small ski lift operating in summer,
within 7 minutes walk you will encounter a very
touristic town with a large number of bars, coffees, shops etc.
The prices are quite affordable. However,
there is also no problem to find a US$100
bottle of wine, or a US$25
cigar; this is more or less the `Aspen' of Brazil.
The hotel electricity is 110V. A few rooms in one of the annexes are
also equipped 220V. Wall outlets will in general accept
both US and Euro style two prong connections.
Currency and payments
CURRENCY (Brazilian Real)
within Brazil is also denoted by the symbol "$" so
do not get confused. The Real has been within
recent 6 months trading at 1US$=2.5BRL+-10%. Note that only the airport
tax free shops mean US$ when the $-sign is shown.
US$ CASH is the most frequently traded foreign currency, it is often the
only foreign cash which will be exchanged, and some banks in
Campos de Jordao are offering daily tourist exchange rate.
Occasionally you will be able to exchange US$ cash with
a friendly merchant at a very reasonable rate.
TRAVELERS CHECKS: In Campos de Jordao
we did not find a single bank that would accept
travelers checks in US$ or any other
foreign currency. It is said that there is such
a bank accepting US$ travelers checks
about 70km (about 45 miles), but we did not test this.
PERSONAL CHECK:
(of any kind, also with guarantee card) will NOT be credited
immediately, but waits for 6 days (we think 2 weeks) for the funds
to arrive, in other words, forget this as a form of payment. You
can make payment to the PASI organizing committee for your
registration etc with US$ personal checks, but we CANNOT
act as a bank for any of your personal needs.
CASH MACHINES with American Express, Cirrus, Master Card networks we
checked seemed to work as if you were in USA or Europe!
Just do not forget your PIN. It also seems that the fees for this
type foreign exchange transaction are much better than those for the exchange
of US$ cash.
CREDIT CARDS are generally accepted and
this is probably the best way to make non-incidental purchases and
to pay your phone/drink bill
at the Leao da Montanha hotel (which accepts as we are told ALL
credit=debit cards).
CAUTION: Never carry a lot of cash with you, since
petty crime is not uncommon.
You will have in each hotel room a small safe available
(but just one key-lock per room!).
In this line of thought, at a restaurant and
at time of any purchase where you are not known as a returning customer
please check your account with visible interest,
an eventual correction is always easily obtainable.
Phones and Faxes
TO PLACE A CALL FROM A PUBLIC PHONE you need to
purchase a (thin plastic) phone card. 30 call units are 3 real (+-US$1.25)
and a larger card is available, simply ask `phone card par favor'.
You can call US or Europe
with such a card without a problem,
but you must know what you are doing!
To dial long
distance you have to select a long distance carrier
company. For example, the full long distance number for
Hotel Leao da Montanha is
0XX-12-263 1811 where XX is the long distance code.
A recommended one is "21", for it will work for all Brasil and
for foreign calls, when compatible with the
public cell phone instructions (usually given also in English).
To call US you dial
00XX-1-(Area Code) (7-digit number)
Note that national access code is one zero and international
access code is two zeros.
If you are using a public phone you have to look at
its instructions to determine which code XX to use.
Since the long distance city code for Sao Paulo is 11
and for Rio de Janeiro is 21, to no surprise the most clever
long distance companies acquired these numbers as their
codes!
Watch this space for update of useful phones and
faxes.
PLEASE CONTACT us with specific inquiries how to improve and expand this information page:
pasi@physics.arizona.edu