CU-ritiba!

*Note, first of two new posts*

On Friday morning my plan was to sleep in. But Iza woke me up at quarter to seven to ask me, “Are you not coming with us this morning?” Oh well. I got up around 9:00, had breakfast and packed. And then I had nothing to do! My plane didn’t leave until 2:40, but I left the house at 10:30 with the idea of taking my time getting to the airport. I took the subway to São Judas, and then a taxi to the airport. Even around noon the traffic was still crazy! Still, I got there ridiculously early. I was a little nervous about checking in, and the first person I spoke to didn’t speak English, but he directed me to someone who did and there were no problems. So I had loooots of time to kill at the airport.

The flight itself was only 40 minutes, and I got better service than 11 hours of Air Canada! We were given free chocolates and granola bars and nuts and juice. Not bad, eh? Rita and Igor were there to meet me at the airport and then we headed to the university. The @ Curitiba office is about 3 times as big as the @ Vic office, and it has windows and three computers. There were quite a few people there to meet. Igor showed me the botanical gardens, which were really beautiful. Too bad it was a little too dark for really good pictures. Then I sat in on a PBoX meeting to get some ideas and see how they were approaching it. Then Rita and I went with a few of the @ers to a June party being held at the university. It was similar to the one in Itajubá but smaller. They had a live band, and they were playing some seriously corny Brazilian folk music. Lots of people had dressed up in country outfits, straw hats and chequered dresses. We headed back to the office and met up with Igor and then headed home. The three of us were up till all hours making powerpoints for the event the next day. Haha, this is so normal for @ers. Long live the powerpoint!

The Botanical Gardens -
Yes I'm actually in that picture :P

On Saturday we had to get up early and head to the university. We were supposed to meet at 8:00 to go to an AIESEC “random” event. Our rides were not there at 8:00, so I hung out with Rita and Mao for a while. We went for coffees and witnessed some great Brazilian generosity. A whole class came in for some snacks and they bought us all free soup! And it was really good! I don’t think that would happen in Canada. We finally headed out around 10:00 and drove across the city to a park. There, they had rented a little room and the use of a barbeque. We chatted for a while, and then had some presentations about CONADE output. It was hilarious to watch the presentations about leadership and teamwork and then see Rita and Mao say “well… in the work abroad track we didn’t really do anything” Haha.

Mao wondering... what DID we do at the Work Abraod track??

Then we had Brazilian barbeque for lunch. We started off with some sausages (which are not actually sausages but I can’t remember the right name), and then they had some steaks. I had one sausage and then asked for another and Pedro, who was cooking, asked me if I wanted steak instead. I said no, I’d rather have the sausage. He said usually Brazilians start off with the sausages to fill up, and then eat the good meat, so he didn’t understand why another trainee and I had both asked for more sausage. I thought about it for a second and then told him it was because the sausages were brazilian and the steak we had eaten before, so we wanted to eat the brazilian food. This seemed an acceptable explanation for him, and he gave me another sausage. After lunch we had some cultural presentations. Mao did a very long, but very good presentation about Columbia. His mission was to break the image that most people had about Columbia. And he did a very good job, I learned a lot. Next was a Polish trainee, who told us about some polish traditions surrounding Easter and Christmas. Next was Canada, and we had to squish three presentations into half an hour. Rita used a modified version of my powerpoint… what I really mean to say is she butchered my work and took out all the parts that said BC is the best part of Canada and @Vic is totally awesome ;) . Then Igor had a powerpoint about his CEED that was amazingly good!! Made me miss Vic a lot! Oohh ahh ooooh ahh ahhh Victoria!!!!! So many amazing memories!!! But before I get all emotional, let’s continue… Rita finished off with a quick powerpoint about Hong Kong. We all headed back into town and stopped by Lizi’s (@ Curitiba LCP) apartment, then drove over to Habib’s for some dinner. I had some of the mini pizza things whose name I will never remember. Cutting them is tricky though, and in the process I’m sad to say that half a mini pizza ended up flying onto the floor…. !! Umm… whoops. Then I went home and did some research about buses and flights to Rio for next week.

Habib´s, ahhh Arabian fast food

On Sunday morning I made pancakes! They actually turned out pretty well, I think, considering I had never made them from scratch before. Then we went to the fair, which was really awesome. It went on for block after block and had everything from furniture to jewellery to bright green and yellow world cup decorations. It was really neat to wander around and look at everything. I bought some really cool stuff, and it’s really inexpensive as well. We (Igor, Rita and I) had some pastels for lunch, buying the $R1.50 ones before we realized around the corner they had some for $R0.50.

Rita´s really enjoying that $R0.50 pastel

Then we headed to the mall to meet up with another @er, Lette (Rita did I spell that right?). The plan was to go see the DaVinci Code, but neither of the Brazilians had their student cards with them. So Rita and I bought our tickets and then we bought two more when just before the movie started. In the mean time we went for a walk around the city. We went to a really great icecream place. I had peach and strawberry… mmmmmm.

Eu gosto sorvette! [I like icecream!]

Then we walked over to the Oscar Neinemeiyer (sp?) museum, and Rita and I freaked the other out when we started singing the Oscar Meyer Weiner song :P The museum is really cool looking. It has a huge eye outside, and these interesting cones around the outside. Made for some good pictures ;)

Check it out!

Whooooaaaa....

Then we headed back for the movie. We needed student cards to get in, so Lette used my Uvic card and Igor used my “borrowed” card from USP. But they didn’t really check anyways. Too bad, because if they asked we were going to say Igor was from Belarus and didn’t speak Portuguese. Haha. The movie was pretty good. However, there are some parts that are in French, and some in Latin. Normally, these parts would have English subtitle… but not in Brazil! The whole movie had Portuguese subtitles! So for the French and Latin parts I had to try and read the Portuguese subtitles. I actually managed to understand the basics of it. I was the only one who was lost though, because Rita could understand the French. Honestly I don’t think I missed much. After the movie we pondered for a while on the way home. We stopped off for pizza near Igor’s house, and got some interesting toppings. One had chicken and corn and peas, and was really good! And we had some chocolate pizza as well, which isn’t quite as good as the banana pizza I had. The chocolate pizza still had cheese on it, and chocolate and cheese don’t go together well in my opinion.

On Monday morning Rita and I slept in. I got up around 9:30 and had some breakfast. Then I read some of Rita’s book on social entrepreneurship. It’s very interesting actually, and I borrowed it from her to finish it. Igor’s Mom made a fantastic feast for lunch, with meat, fish, veggies…mmmm. Then we headed back downtown. We had a few hours to kill before I had to catch the bus to the airport, so we went and saw X-Men 3. It was pretty good, though I think they missed a huge opportunity to introduce a moral dilemma, but I won’t get into that. The movie ended at 5:00 and the bus was supposed to come at 5:05 so we ran to the stop. But I caught the bus with plenty of time and made it relatively uneventfully back to Sao Paulo. At the Sao Paulo airport, they did the announcements in Portuguese and English, but in Curitiba it was only in Potuguese so I had to listen closely to the numbers. When I boarded the plane I double checked that it was indeed going to Sao Paulo, and it was.

Rita arrives tomorrow in the afternoon and hopefully we can get our bus tickets to Rio and do a little toruing around the city. Then on Wednesday I have a couple meeting and then it's off to Rio!

On an interestering side note, Tuesday is the first Brazil game in the world cup. I was told not to schedule any meeting for that day, because nobody would come :P All of Brazil stops when the soccer is on. But Brazil has to win. I mean not only is the entire population behind them, they even have the architecture on their side!

[This column cheers for Brasil]

Also, I found this particular sign at the university to be particularly amusing:

When in doubt... Run into the wall!

That is all. ;)

P.S. Rita, how did you end up in ALL my pictures??!!!