This is my first blog post from Rio. While most of our stories for the paper will be on athletes and issues, we hope to use blogs to give you updates, tidbits and views from the ground now that we've arrived.
Rachel Blount is our lead Olympics writer and Brian Peterson is our photographer. Both are very good at this sort of thing.
We flew overnight to Rio, landed Tuesday morning, and spent yesterday on logistics. We haven't had any particularly nightmarish experiences; we've just heard about them.
The first journalist we talked to who had spent a night here said that in their media housing, the first time they flushed, their apartment was filled with sewage, and those in charge didn't seem interested in cleaning it up.
Our media apartment is small and sparse but clean and we have not had any problems more serious than a lack of hot water. I never realized how much I loved hot showers until this morning.
The topography of Rio is beautiful. It's mountains laced with jungles in the mist overlooking the city. There is famous Copacabana Beach, which a friend staying there compared to a combination of Miami Beach and Manhattan, and the weather now - in the midst of Brazil's winter - is much like that of San Francisco, windy, overcast and mild.
As journalists we interact everyday with Olympic volunteers, who tend to be helpful and optimistic by nature. But a piece in The Economist cited a local pollster, Rio Como Vamos, reporting that 56 of Rio's inhabitants want to leave the city, up from 27 percent in 2011, because of discontent with how the city is being run.
Not leave during the Olympics. Leave for good.
We'll be blogging daily as well as writing many pieces for the newspaper over the next three weeks. We hope you enjoy the coverage.
You can follow me on Twitter at @Souhanstrib. Rachel is at @BlountStrib and Brian is at @BMPPhoto.