NEW STATES OF MATTER IN HADRONIC INTERACTIONS

PASI: January 7-18, 2002

to be held at

Hotel Leão da Montanha, Campos do Jordão, São Paulo, Brazil

This document, arrival page: "http://physics.arizona.edu/~pasi/Arrive.htm . offers a continuously updated source of practical information. If you have questions or comments about this information please contact the PASI organizing committee.

This page offers general information for US and other foreign participants on their first research trip to Brazil, and some information specific to this PASI for all participants. All information was thoroughly researched but is subject to change. We cannot assume responsibility for events and situations beyond our control.

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.
In the club there are 4 fully equipped PC-computer terminals (two worked on last visit), many phones, and an english-speaking attendant. While waiting for someone you can read your E-mail and enjoy the complementary juice or coffee. If you do not carry a Diners Club card you can try to persuade the nice lady that you are a guest of "Prof Thews" or "Prof Rafelski" (both carry a Diners Club card), or otherwise use your charm. We will try to arrange that arriving PASI participants even without a card can enter as our guests, but that we can only do a few days before your arrival. If you cannot enter, just shop/relax in the area. In any case we will look at or near this VIP lounge for you as a meeting place.

EVEN IF YOUR FLIGHT IS LATE AND THE LAST OF OUR BUSES HAS LEFT, you should still go to the Diners VIP Club area. We will attempt to locate or leave messages for all late-arriving participants. This task will be more reliably accomplished if you have informed us of your flight number and scheduled time of arrival. If you are `lost', check for a message left for you at the Diners Club VIP lounge. We have arranged for a van from Sao Paulo University (USP) to pick up participants who are delayed until mid-afternoon. Perhaps you will have the pleasure of meeting someone from the STAR group at USP, see pictures below for Alex to left, Marcelo and Jun in center, and the charming representative of RioVoyages, Mrs Cecilia Bulgaco, on right.
IF YOU CHANGE flights at the last minute, and/or are delayed during a venture into Sao Paulo etc, we may be unable to find you or arrange alternate transportation. In this case you may have to arrange transportation on your own. There is a general bus terminal (Rodovario) in Sao Paulo where you can take a bus for Campos de Jordao, but for several persons in a group a direct van/taxi from airport is better (look here for further info what to do whom to call). When you negotiate, please remember to make sure that the price is in Brazilian Real and not US Dollars. Just make sure that the taxi has enough space (often liquid gas tank leaves no space in the car trunk for luggage).

Transfer to Hotel

At present the plan is to have two buses leave GRU (Sao Paulo International) , one mid-morning and the other in the afternoon. (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 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 130km 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.

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.

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



http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~pasi/

PASI Conference Coordinator
Department of Physics
University of Arizona
TUCSON, AZ 85721, USA