First week in Brazil!

Hi everyone!

We just finished up our first week!! It was crazy busy and took place all together (the 83 ETA’s who are now scattered around Brazil, the Brazilian Fulbright Commission, and our ETA mentors) at a hotel in São Paolo’s business district. We didn’t get to catch much of the city, but it’s only a one hour flight from Curitiba – and our all-day sessions and workshops inside the hotel were extremely interesting and valuable. Some of the highlights from those included workshops on teaching writing from an American professor from Arizona, a quick crash course in Portuguese led by the commission, and our mentors helping us to define our Fulbright experience and share things to do both in and out of the classroom for our side “passion projects.” To give some context, we teach/lesson plan for 25-30 hours a week, and are supposed to devote the rest of our time (<10-15 hours) to doing something we love or are interested in, in a way that engages and connects with the community. This can be anything, which is really exciting!

Below is kind of a random assortment of other things I’ve learned/seen in this first week! If you want my new WhatsApp number, send me an email!!

The traffic in São Paolo is absolutely awful. People are only allowed to drive their cars 4 days a week (they have cameras and monitor what license plates are on the road), so wealthy people will have more than one car or use helicopters. There are helicopter landing pads on top of most buildings including our hotel!

We visited the Afro-Brazilian museum at the Ibirapuera Park, where we had a fantastic tour guide who told us many myths from Afro-Brazilian religions (all of the gods/major figures were female!)

We all left São Paolo this morning, and other than the (many) of us who will be in Rio for Carnaval next week, we won’t see each other until our midyear conference in July. Luckily we have a Google drive to share lesson ideas and lots of plans to visit each others’ cities or meet up for a half-marathon in Florianopolis (we’ll see).

Now settling into Curitiba in our first AirBnB in a neighborhood called Batel & feeling so excited to finally be in my city, meet my host professor, and find more opportunities to practice Portuguese. My co’s are all sleeping now and I may do so as well. Tchau! xx