Bom dia, Brazil

This is going to be a long post! I have safely arrived in the city of Curitiba yesterday- actually more like this morning at 5 am because my local committee had to travel for 8 hours from the conference site, a place called Caraguatatuba which is 2 hours from São Paulo. Apparently i snored quite a bit on the way back- but meh, i was super tired. The 15 of us, along with our luggage, were put into this tiny van and all of us passed out on the way back. I got like 15 mosquito bites from the conference and they are sooo itchy it hurts! At some point in the conference i was a little paranoid as i was running out of clean clothes. My jeans were really dirty (because i have been wearing the same pair of jeans for the past 8-10 days and right now) that i think there has to be some bugs in my jeans and i feel itchy everywhere!) it is raining really hard in curitiba now, so i decided to wear my dirty jeans.

(you might have noticed that i am not making much sense when i am typing this post- its funny how when you are immersed in a different language you start to lose some of the languages you speak at home! I had some trouble pronouncing Cantonese words the other day as I was trying to show some people how Chinese sounds and I noticed that Puneet made a few grammar mistakes in his blog!)

So yes, i was in são paulo for two days, right when the "riots" happened, but they were mainly in the south and west part of the city and i was in the north and east part- mind you that the city is HUGE and therefore i didnt even know about the riots until i got to Jess' house, which is the other Canadian girl who is in Brazil doing the same thing as me through AIESEC. she was super, super nice- she spent 80 reais (around $35-40 CAD) to take a cab to go to the international airport to pick me up, along with another aiesec member, and i was sooo thankful! so for the taxi ride we took to go to a subway station (where we met to take the bus to the conference), i paid for the ride instead. Transportation are not that expensive save for cab rides, but only by my standards- i guess because i have lived in Hong Kong I don't find bus fares expensive, but some people do think so.

I stayed in a REALLY nice house for the time I spent in são paulo, and the family that i stayed with is lovely. They are also quite rich by brazilian standards- they have a maid and they have all travelled extensively.

The conference was really quite nice. I had to skip a few sessions because they were entirely in portuguese and i just dont have the command to understand it. however im definitely picking up words and i am able to say now "Can I have a chicken snack please" in one complete sentence- Eu queiro um frango por favor- LOL...hahaha...they always clap for me when i managed to say a complete phrase in portuguese...however i think the novelty of being a foreigner will wear off very soon.

The AIESEC conference that I attended (called CONADE) was near a beach and the site was called Caraguatatuba. It's quite nice, I went to the beach and dipped my feet in the ocean. its not the nicest beach but i had a lot of fun- they had a capoeira group doing some practices there (capoeira is a type of brazilian martial arts which black slaves made up back in the day of colonialization for self defence. it looks like dancing as the slaves weren't allowed to practice martial arts and so they made it look like a dance to pass the bar). Anyway i tried capoeira- i SUCKED but it was cool, and then i tried to dance samba, which was quite easy to learn (mind you, just the basic steps!) because i know how to dance salsa. I also learned how to do fouho, another type of dance.

Brazilian food is REALLY good. and yes they have TONS of meat. And I mean TONS. they eat mostly beef and pork and the occasional chicken (frango in portuguese). My friend Susan (fellow CEEDer from Edmonton) had a rough time as she accidentally ate some meat. She was quite upset and i can really feel the challenge for vegetarians in this country. i am hoping that i won't get fat! There are two girls who live closer to the university and they told me the walk is 40 minutes one way- i'll be moving in with them later on in my CEED term and i vow to walk to the university (where the aiesec office is) everyday, if the weather permits.

So far i haven't really seen Curitiba, as it's raining and the house im currently staying in is not in curitiba, but a city outside of curitiba called colombo. Kind of like scarborough/markham and downtown Toronto I guess. Fortunately i got a ride from the house to the university directly (just for today though). In addition, the university is also located directly across the Jardim Botanica, which is this famous landmark in Curitiba- it's a glass building- you'll see it on every website that talks about Curitiba. It's a breathtaking structure and i'm going to check it out later for sure.

so far im on my first day on my CEED and trying to catch up on emails. it's quite a bit to go through as i had already been missing out from checking some emails from before i left canada. Anyhow it's really cool that i met some people in the conference who knew certain people who knew someone else...it is indeed a small world. Its also amazing how being in a foreign country can really bring different people together as a group. I have met people from at least 18 nationalities. Myself, Susan, Leonard (Holland) and Mao (Colombia) hung out a lot at CONADE and had a total blast playing Dance Dance Revolution at 5am in the morning in the conference. I was the pro in the game. :)

There are a lot of things that i want to do in brazil but from this first week of living in Brazil I also realized that there are a lot of things that i want to do - for myself and for my family and just things outside of AIESEC- when i get back to Canada. I will elaborate on that later but for now I'd like to say that while the novelty of hearing a different language is wearing off, I am really, really determined to have a functional level in portuguese by the time I leave this country. I have NEVER travelled to a country where I am pratically stranded if I dont have friends with me who can speak portuguese. In the first 3 days or so I couldn't even order food, and my friends were telling me that I have a spanish accent when I try to speak words in portuguese, because I would pronounce the words literally by their spelling, which is something that portuguese speakers don't do. I also find portuguese a lot harder to learn than Spanish- but i will hopefully catch up sooner or later.

Aside from that, I see a lot of potential with AIESEC in Brazil and that with Canada- they have SO MANY best case pratices that AIESEC in Canada can really learn from, and I'd love to bring that back when I get back.

On a final note, I have signed up for a 4 day trip to Rio (organized by AIESEC in Rio de Janeiro), I am planning to visit Buenos Aires (Argentina) with Susan, go to Porto Alegre (just south of Parana, the state that i am in) to check out a DT PBOX, Belo Horizonte to visit Eduardo (who used to work in Toronto through AIESEC)....lots of travelling!

I am quite excited about what I am doing here and I am also really happy to find that I am organizing my thoughts a lot more effectively than I was in canada - I am taking a lot of new things in and trying my best to refine myself professionally and individually. It's going to be a long journey ahead!

Beijos a todos!