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Rafael - Living live a day at a time

 

Great night out

An AIESEC trainee that I met while was chairing a conference in Peru is now in Fort Lauderdale for training, so yesterday we decided to hit South Beach and enjoy a meal, some drinks and meet a friend of his over there. It was one of those moments when you can truly see the internationalism AIESEC is all about; my Mexican wife and me (Venezuelan) with our little gringo daughter, were having dinner with a friend from Peru who is in St. Louis at the moment, and a Swiss friend of his and his girlfriend, who actually ended up being from my own little city in Venezuela, and used to live about 20 houses from mine, isn't the world a small place?
It was the first experience of going out at night with Daniela (my daughter), and I have to say it even though it was hot outside, she was pretty good and we had the chance to talk and enjoy dinner and company till midnight, as when we jumped in the car to go a different place and had to buckle her up, she woke up and starting crying for about 10 min.
So it's a working progress, but we are starting to go out again without any problems. We'll leave Daniela with some friends the next time we go out though, just to enjoy a stress free night.

 
 

Another great weekend just went by

A great sunny and hot weekend just ended, and a new working week just started today. In the weekend we had a chance to walk and sweat a lot, have some barbeque in the house, exercise and read a bit, enjoy our time with our daughter, read, and see some movies, definitely a productive weekend.
Here are some pictures from last weekend, when Daniela swam for the first time in the swimming pool in our apartment complex. You can see in the picture below that she was really tired after swimming and catching some sun, we all got a bit tanned so I can't complain, life's good here in Florida.
We decided to enjoy for as long as we can the sun and good weather for as long as the hurricane season allows us to, and until it's time for us to move on onto my professional new challenge.
My internship ends in August 26th, I already have a proposal to continue with DHL, but still working out the details, once it's official this nomaders will be the first ones to know

 
 

Visit to Vizcaya

Lately I haven't been updating my weblog too often, so I decided to start right now with some pictures from recent short trips.
First we went to the Vizcaya, a mansion built by American Industrialist James Deering, who used the property on winter from 1916 to 1925.
It's amazing to see the way they used to live in this house, just to give you an idea, they wanted their friends to be able to visit them by boat, but as the waters close to the mansion are too shallow and their friends didn't have little boats, so they literally dug a channel for them, that starts in the back of the building and goes all the way to deeper waters.
The house had central heating, an elevator and an automatic central phone room, now imagine all of these in 1916, cool ah?

 
 

London is invaded by cyclists after attacks

After the attacks bicycle sales have raised incredibly in London. There are stories of weary walkers offering up to $500 (300 pounds) to Seasoned cyclists for their bikes as they headed home on Thursday.
Cycle Surgery, a bicycle shop near Holborn sold at least double what they usually sell in a day in a few hours. The shop manager said "We had people who hadn't ridden for over 10 years asking for refresher lessons -- we even had a judge". A shop assistant from Evan Cycles near Clerkenwell, said they had sold triple the usual number of bicycles Thursday, mainly folding bikes or cheaper models.
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This attack of course will mark and change lives of many people, but it's very interesting to see how people in London use their creativity to move on, and continue with their day to day life.

 
 

Dennis, New Hurricane coming to town!

So a Hurricane watch has been issued for South Florida while Category 2 Hurricane Dennis (110 mph sustained winds) passes near Jamaica and keeps moving North-West towards the Gulf of Mexico.
Weather analyst expect the hurricane to gain more strength once its in the Gulf of Mexico calm and hot water, so it's expected to go up to a Category 3 (there's only 5 categories, so that's pretty bad already if you were asking yourself). Dennis' projected path might take him to the North-West part of Florida, Alabama and surroundings. My thoughts are with them as they got hit by Tropical Storm Cindy some days ago and have already been flooded by too much rain, so if it hits them it will be really bad.
If you want to track the Hurricane just check the map on the navigation panel of my blog, it will show you the latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center and will take you to their site too.
It's going to be a long hurricane season, as they projected!

 
 

Armstrong takes Tour de France Lead


Armstrong, the 33 year old Texan that has won the famous race 6 times and is fighting to remake history and make that 7, in this years Tour de France, took the lead of the race yesterday July 5th in Blois, France. He took the yellow jersey from his compatriot David Zbriskie, who crased into a barricade in the final moments of the team time trial.
Today July 6th, he tried to start the race without the yellow jersey on as a token of respect for what happened to Zbriskie the day before, but officials stopped the competition and forced him to. After todays race he is still in the lead, he leads Alexander Vinokouroc by 1:21 and Jan ullrich by 1:26.
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