>>>"Por favor, não venha em 27 de Dezembro, mas preferivelmente em 03 de Janeiro."
>>
>>So Rio was some sort of code from the beginning! I'm connecting the dots now. There's Rio Road in Charlottesville, and everyone there knows it was first called R10. Code becomes a name...
>
>It looks like it, as Rio is River in Portuguese. So that would be a River Road, would you need to have an amphibian car to live there? :)

Which is weird - the street is zig-zagging over and around a hilltop and doesn't even come close to the river.

The trick here is the way they write digit 1 in the US - it's just a straight vertical line; if they want to write an I, they must add the serifs. That's for handwriting; for printing, the regular - I has serifs if font has them, and 1 has the slanted line. So confusion is quite common if the fonts aren't exactly right, which then makes everyone read R10 (ar-ten) as Rio. Eventually they named the street (when the city engulfed the road) the way everyone was calling it.