Wow, it has been one craaaazy day. Bri and I picked up the Budget truck and flatbed tow trailer this morning at 8:00, and I sit here now in a Best Western out in Du Bois, Pennsylvania just about to pass out. In between, we packed the truck with all of our stuff, cleaned the house from top to bottom, loaded the car and drove about 270 miles. I can't believe it has been just one day. Yikes.

So I'm not going to fill you in on a whole bunch of details... all I can really say is bullet points tonight. Here's the highlights:

• Renting the truck and trailer was AWESOME. I guess the guy assumed I knew what I was talking about when I said "I can handle it", because after a short run down he handed me the keys and said "you're good to go". It got me thinking that this must have been what it was like back in the old days when you said "sure, I can drive a tractor" and they just took your word for it. No problems with the rig, but the flatbed for the car is complicated, but in a good way.

Hmm... So if Bri and I are moving to California, does that mean we should change the name of our blog? See, we thought we were just SO CLEVER with titling the blog "phlashy". See, it's like spelling Flashy if you're in Philadelphia. Super clever I know.

Not a whole bunch of pictures from today, mostly due to the restrictions on pictures while we were at Petrobras. Petrobras is a big oil company in Brazil, and it's partly owned by the state (50% share). We toured one of their refineries about 45 minutes outside of Rio. The tour was nice, although I'm not super interested in the petroleum industry. Probably the most impressive thing was the sheer size and complexity of the refinery. They made everything from lube oils to coke to the various gasolines and diesel (including some biodiesel). The number of pipes around that place was enormous.

In the afternoon we had a nice round table chat at IBM. The representative talked about IBM's goals in South America which centered around providing IT related services. I could geek out about this for a bit, but I'll spare the details here ;-)

Today was a pretty cool day. It didn't start out so hot - all of my late nights are starting to catch up to me. At least I'll be able to sleep on the plane when we head over to Rio de Janiero tonight.

After checking out of our fancy Sao Paulo hotel we headed to tour Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics company. Natura focuses on sustainability, which is part marketing, but seems to actually be a part of the company culture too. The building itself uses a lot of solar, and they're making an effort to reseed the forest behind the manufacturing plant with natural trees to replace the eucalyptis that was planted by the paper company on the site prior. They even had a few cheesy crystals planted in the ground to ward off the "evil spirits". Not exactly scientific, but then again image is everything in cosmetics.

The above is a pretty cool set of furniture at Natura. The chairs and table are made straight from cardboard boxes glued together. They must have a big cutter that then cuts the glued boxes in the contour as the seat.

Nobody said this group doesn't know how to party. After having little sleep on the plane the night before, we still had to burn the town down our first real night. It was some sort of children's holiday so most of the bars were closed down, but the few we found stayed open. I'm sure our group of 20 made some Piracicaba locals pretty happy.

Despite the night's festivities we had a pretty long day today. Our first stop was APLA, the Aranjo Produtivo Local do Alcohol. This is the national institute for promoting ethanol production in Brazil. Piracicaba is the heart of the region, and thus the reason for our 2 hour drive out from Sao Paulo. Brazil creates ethanol from sugar cane, unlike the U.S. who tries to do it with corn. Sugar cane is waaaay more efficient at producing ethanol. I think the stat about the energy output from cane based ehtanol is 8.5:1, compared with 1.5:1 for corn based ethanol.