Brazil Day 12 - Belo or bust

In retrospect, booking a hotel in the middle of town in Belo Horizonte in an area with loads of bars on the day Brazil beat Cameroon 4-1 to progress to the last 16 may not have been the best idea. I write this in my hotel room with the most tumultuous noise going on outside. We're 8 floors up (Ben is sharing with me) and with the windows shut it's still bonkers. I've just come back in from having a steak sandwich for dinner in a bar down below, sharing my table with 3 Brazilians, and we could barely hear each other speak. The whole place has literally gone crazy.Belo Horizonte is about an hour's flight north of Brazil. It was founded in 1701 and has an economy largely based on mining, but which has moved into the service sector recently according to my Brazilian friends. It's also the centre of government of the state of Minas Gerais (literally "General Mines"), and there's a lot of infrastructure building going on, and some fairly flash buildings as well. The people seem to be extremely happy with their lot, at least the ones I've met. So happy are they that the 3 I met bought me my dinner and a couple of beers and would not let me pay!Getting here was a tad fraught. I evaded checkin with my 20kg Peli case went through security, only to be stopped as they inspected my monopod. Now if there's one bit of kit I can't do without it's my monopod - it supports the big lens which is too heavy to handhold and while I can get another camera from Canon at any stadium, I can't get a monopod. After some pleading the boss security man came over and I told him how many flights I'd already done with it as hand luggage, but no came the answer. I was sent back to checkin to put my monopod in the hold.This is pretty traumatic, but the nice checkin lady wrapped it in two plastic bags and put 4 sets of luggage tags on it. I was desperately hoping it would make it to Belo with me.A brief wander around the very nice Santos Dumont airport, which is like the City Airport in London a bit in that it is in the middle of the city stuck out on reclaimed land, revealed some intriguing toilet signage.Not sure you'd get away with this in the UK! I'm not sure which but they are referring to as small.The plane was a Embraer 195 run by Azul - an airline I hadn't come across before. It was smallish but I managed to get my Peli case in with no trouble, hoping we wouldn't hit any heavy turbulence which would result in the whole overhead locker rail failling on my head. Seating was 4 seats to a row in two pairs, and I had the other seat free which was nice, the benefit of sitting at the rear of the plane. We did a few very sharp turns after takeoff, presumably to avoid the big mountains, giving a nice view of the airport we'd just taken off from.I fell asleep almost immediately, although it was only 11am, as I felt pretty shattered, and woke up as we descended into Belo.My monopod was the first piece of luggage onto the carousel - excellent news! Then straight off to the stadium for the England press conference and training session. Finding the media entrance was quite easy, and after negotiating the mandatory security scanner (the guy in front of me had his apple confiscated! No food or drink - FIFA rules, but you can buy an apple in the canteen inside) I was in the media centre and getting sorted out.The press conference was a now-standard affair, with Roy Hodgson and Frank Lampard in attendance. Photographers are allowed in for the first 2-3 questions, then we all have to leave as our cameras are very noisy. Every time Hodgson rubbed his nose it was like a buzzing gatling gun as everyone hit the shutters at the same time.With that all done it was out onto the pitch for the first sight for me of the Mineirao stadium. A large circular affair that it's impossible for me to show effectively as they wouldn't let us up into the stands to take any GVs - maybe tomorrow. I did manage to get a really decent lunch from the buffet though - a beef stew-like thing, rice, and salad, for about R$30 which is just under a tenner so not too expensive.Everyone was keeping a very close eye on their kit as well, as Belo Horizonte has been one of the worst camera gear theft spots according to some of the other English photographers there. I had all my gear locked away or right next to me, but apparently someone had their 1D and 70-200 swiped from between their feet the other day. Vigilence is key.And so we had our 15 minutes of shooting whatever we could get, and for a change the players warmed up very close to us allowing me to get some quite nice tight shots, rather than the more usual pictures from the other side of the pitch.With our allotted 15 minutes up we trudged back to the media centre to edit and caption the pictures, something I made a right hash of due to being quite knackered. I also got to watch the last half of the Brazil v Cameroon game and it looks like Brazil have really turned up the wick now - very impressive indeed.Ben and I got the media bus into town as our hotel is just around the corner from the media bus stop so we had a free ride. We arrived into a mass street party which is still in full swing - we had to walk around the long way as we couldn't get down our street for love nor money - it was completely clogged.Dinner was a steak sandwich which was very good indeed, along with some locally brewed gastro beer, shared with 3 Brazilians and two Brits, so very convivial indeed (when we could hear each other speak).Tomorrow it's up early to get to the stadium and have a good spot in the queue for a position for the England game against Costa Rica. They've made 9 changes so it'll be interesting to see what happens. If they play really well and win Hodgson will get panned for not being more adventurous in his selection approach. If they lose, Hodgson will get panned for losing 3 in a row. What a life.Oh, and I found out that the very first picture I took on Brazilian soil got published in the Mail Online - it was a grab shot of the long queue at immigration that I encountered when I landed in Rio at 5:30AM what seems like months ago, but was only 12 days ago.