WEEKEND!!!! - Days 7, 8, and 9

Alright, so I totally forgot to write this with everything that has happened in the last few days.

First off on Friday we finally had the presentation of the group cheers, which went pretty awesomely. It was a lot of fun, and all of the cheers were pretty amazing.

After the cheers we went straight to a nice little bar a couple blocks from our hotel, to what else see Brazil whoop on Colombia. It was a fun night, I had a Caipirinha which is a mixed drink made from lime, sugar, and Cachaça (which is a sugar cane 'rum') it was pretty good though the lime pulp was way too muddled throughout the drink.

After a few hours of eating and drinking, and basically just talking (including an impromptu to soccer lesson by Joseph) we walked back to our hotel. It was an amazing night, filled with the sounds of city life, fireworks, and celebration from the locals of Brazil's recent win.

A good end to a good day.

Saturday was a lazy day for us here in Blumenau, we decided to go shopping at a new mall about 10 minutes taxi from our hotel. It was a cool little mall, mostly clothing stores. Though after wandering for a while I found the coolest pair of Brazilian shoes ever, they are beautiful and I love them. 

Besides that we mostly hung around the hotel, we got pizza and just had some team bonding which ended up including a 10pm order of fries, card games, and 20 questions.

Today!!!!

...was a pretty good day, I went wandering around Blumenau with Amanda, Joseph, and Jackie while the other members of team Blumenau decided to climb a mountain. It was actually really cool to see the city so sleepy, filled with families and dogs. It made me feel like I was so much more into the city, not just a tourist but an actual member of the community. Besides that we wandered, found a run down little playground for 5 year olds (we had fun, don't judge), got into the oldest train engine in Blumenau, and pretty much just saw the city. I am really falling in love with this place, maybe a permanent move is in order...

The Day of MEAT!! - Day 6

The morning and afternoon at Senai was pretty normal played some soccer, used some fun games for teaching English. An especially awesome part of the day was when one of my students gave my this Dream catcher that he made with his own two hands! 

How amazing is this thing? It is beautiful. 

Alright other than that really awesome moment it was a normal day, had a lot of fun with the kids and learned some stuff myself!

After school however we decided to go to a nice dinner to say a nice big goodbye to Meg who is moving on to another location in Brazil. The place was called Ataliba and was a churrascaria, which is basically a Brazilian Barbecue. The type of restaurant this is is one in which they keep bringing meat on giant skewers to your table and slice you off a piece at a time. It was fricken delicious, so much meat and other fantastical things. We ate and just talked for at least an hour, most likely more before zooming back towards the hotel where all of use hung out for a few hours, including an adventure that involved everyone getting face masks made from a wild scientist concoction of beer, sugar, toothpaste, and two separate lotions. It was weird to say the least, but we washed off by dunking our heads into the very cold pool water.
That was it for today, it was amazing and time still seems to be going slowly. I feel as if I have been here weeks already and it hasn't even been a full week! I love it here, and I know that many more good times are to come. 

Teaching Days!!! - Day 4 and 5

So to recap the previous two days....
On day three we finally had our students (project groups) in class for the first time, and it went really well. We had a lot of fun and I was able to get to know them a lot better. It was so much fun having 2+ hours with these students that I have been talking to for the previous couple of months on Facebook, seeing them work in person was just a great thing to witness.

We decided on our team name, Super Matthew's Squad! Which I love that they wanted to name the team after me, I almost cried in the middle of class! After that we had a snack, and then went back to our classroom where we started working on our team cheer, which is going to be fricken awesome!!! Especially with my awesometastic students involved!! 

When class was over we moved on to the auditorium for our very first assembly, where we danced and sang and made fools of ourselves. It was awesome, we played a giant game of Simon Says where two separate students won, a boy Juan Marco and a girl who I have yet to meet yet. 

After assembly we headed back to the hotel, and went to the mall to watch team USA lose in futbol and eat some grub. Since I was feeling slightly under the weather I was mostly in a fog, and was so happy to get back to the hotel and pass out.

Today however, or day 5 as it were...we went to school like normal after breakfast and a quick trip to the mall, where I had this delicious chicken and cheese filled Coxinhas, which was amazing. 

After the mall we went to school! Where while we waited for the classroom keys around half of the students and three other students decided to kick around a soccer ball (and any US friends that are reading this, you have no idea how good these kids are with kicking a ball around. It is amazing.) and just goofing off a bit. 

Once we arrived in our classroom we did some small activities to get us pumped up, before we each made a four corners drawing, where we had to draw our dream job, favorite food, favorite place, and favorite tv show/movie/book/etc. Which I believe went pretty well, my students seemed to enjoy it at least! Once this was finished I asked my kids to take me on a tour of the school, and to tell me about their favorite places on campus. The campus is awesome, they took me over to this little forest that was exceptionally beautiful, a place one of my students told me has almost one of every plant found in Santa Catarina (the state I am located in). 

Eventually we found ourselves located in the "Blue Mushroom" before our snack of the day, where we did this weird game called Suitcase, where we had a few different articles of clothing that we had to quickly change into and run in a circle all the way around to our team partner where we had to strip them off and then our partner had to repeat the process. Needless to say my team (Colleen and I) won hands down because we are amazing!

Then we received our EFL groups, and we went back to my classroom to get to know each other better. Did a general ball toss, what we want to receive from the program, name, etc. went on to animals and colors when Mort decided to join in. After that we did the selfie game, where you draw yourself and then randomly give them to other students and you have to find who it belongs to in the class.

Then we had an awesome assembly! We had so much more improvement from the other students then the day before, the stage was filled to the brim with everyone trying to dance and sing together (we broke a mic) and everything was hot and sticky but amazing and fun. 

Opening Cermony!! - Day 3

The day we have all been looking forward to has finally arrived! The opening ceremony, otherwise know as the day we officially meet our students and the school welcomes us!

I started the day with a small breakfast (with this awesome tomato, cheese, ham, and bread lasagna type dish), and then my team went and had our first official team meeting where we talked about the grading, attendance, and our future EFL students. After the meeting I just hangout until Jordan, Steve and I decided to head toward the mall for some lunch before heading off to Senai. After wandering around for a little while we decided upon a place that sold Pastel's, which are this delicious stuffed and fried empanada style food. It was amazing, so good and probably so, so bad for you. After finishing off my fried deliciousness we gandered our way back to the hotel and got ready for the bus ride to Senai.

Once we arrived we met our local Brazilian coordinator Susana, who took us on a small tour of the school. The campus is exceptionally cool, spread out, and just plain beautiful.

Once our tour ended Susana took us to the room that the opening ceremony was going to take place in. Where after a few minutes of waiting around and chatting one of my students turned up (Luiz), we started talking and then he decided to pull out an awesome present for me. He gave me this awesome Oktoberfest keychain, and metal beer mug that I cannot wait to drink from, they are pretty awesome gifts.

Students then slowly started trickling into the room and the opening ceremony finally started! 

It was fantastic, Blumenau is a German settled area, heavily influenced in both the food and it's traditions. During the opening ceremony we had the normal pomp, with speeches and whatnot but then they started an awesome entertainment. It started with a dance performed by two students in Lederhosen, and then slowly morphed into singing by the students and a conga type line with a majority of the people in the room joining in. We also had some awesome music played by three older gentleman, one playing a trumpet, one a accordion (which one of my students told me is called an saxaphone in Brazil), and the final instrument...which while the name escapes me in Portuguese, translates roughly into "The Devil's Violin" and it the greatest instrument I have ever seen, made of a long post with a spring on the bottom, bells, a drum, and a Cymbal on top...it was amazing.

Once that was finished and done with the ceremony had some more speeches, concluding in Susana giving all the American coaches gifts! Then we had a German food type tasting 'party', where we continued to get to know our students among others. 

The Day of "Incrível" Exploration - Day 2

After having a refreshing night of sleep after the 24 hours of travel, I woke up showered and got dressed while my roomie decided to dry his hair and break the electricity of our room...anyways... I then headed towards the restaurant for my first Brazilian Breakfast where I stumbled upon our special guest for the week Meg Barritt (who is the program director of US-Brazil Connection) eating breakfast with the rest of my team. I had my first taste of Laranja which is Brazilian Orange juice, but it is much more fresh tasting and has what I can only describe as a non-processed fell to it. Along with my juice, I had fresh watermelon (which had a slightly gritty feel to it) Papaya, scrambled eggs, some kind of sausage in a tomato-esk sauce, and a delightful little pastry type of bread.

After talking some we decided to head out on the city, to get to explore our home for the next month. We headed out and visited the mall just down the road from our hotel, which was not actually open yet but we were for some reason allowed to go inside and wander anyway. After the mall we mostly went around the streets just seeing what kind of stuff was where, and I have to say that this city is beautiful. It has such a air about it, I can't describe it very well but it just seems to be alive, even when it is very uncrowded. Along the way we stopped at the Catedral Sao Paulo Apostolo, which was an amazingly modern and traditional blended type of architecture. It was awe inspiring to behold, beautiful stained glass, marble floors and solid stone.

From there we gandered around until we grew bored of doing that and decided to relocate ourselves to the little german village in Blumenau. Along the way we actually stopped at a basketball sports center where we met Tiago Splitter of the San Antonio Spurs (how cool is that?!?!) who was way too fricken tall!

Upon arriving at the small german enclave we were greeted to a traditional tourist destination, little shops (which were surprisingly affordable) places to take pictures and the works. We wandered around for a small while, shop to shop, picture stand to picture stand, until we decided to eat at a very good outdoor restaurant. Where Colleen, Jordan, Amanda, and I decided to grab a different food each and chow down together. We had a delightful Cheddar and filet mignon pasta, a Linguica risoto (Portuguese spelling), and two different kinds of "Rosti" which was this amazing baked hash brown pasty thing, it has a filling (in our cases a linguica and a four cheese version) which was topped completely in shaved potato and baked until golden brown and crispy. It was amazing food, but the Linguica risoto was hands down my favorite.

Once finished eating we headed back toward the hotel, a small stop at the store for milk (which was nasty) and other things and then back for a few hours.

Myself and a few others ended up at the mall where the gentleman above was painting live in his store, it was amazing to see art come to life close up and personal, once finished browsing and longing for some awesome shoes we headed towards the church once more where we picked up Colleen and Jackie from mass, where on our way back we found the awesome street man found below.

 That was pretty much the rest for our exploration of Blumenau, four of us went down to a pizza place named after the godfather (the movie) where we had a pretty delicious pizza, and then we came back to the hotel and played Apples to Apples for a few hours, now I am here writing this! Boa Noite everyone!

The Day of "Interminável" Travel - Day 1

After waiting, and waiting, and WAITING (and maybe waiting for good measure) for the day to finally came to head to the beautiful Blumenau, SC, Brazil,  I boarded Delta flight DL53, Detroit Metro to Sao Paulo...

After a (relatively) short 10.5 hours in the air, which consisted of Texas Hold'em, Sudoku, and chess (which I kept losing at miserably) half of the new Robocop movie, and the entire "The Breakfast Club" movie we landed at the oddly built Sao Paulo airport, where we had a 5 hour layover (which included a horrible hour and a half in a baggage claim line) in which we sat, talked and rested in this awesome little restaurant called "Balloon Comfort Food" and while I didn't eat anything other than an Animal Cracker given to me by Colleen, the food one of my other group members ordered smelled amazing. Around 11 am we checked our bags (horrible hour and a half of hell) and then headed onto our small plane to Navegantes, which is about a half hour outside of Blumenau. We were greeted by loud cheers and smiling faces in the form of some of our Brazilian students, and the lethargy we had only minutes ago been feeling disappeared amidst joyous laughter and hugs. I finally met 5 of my awesome Brazilian students, one of which gifted me the coolest Brazilian Soccer styled scarf (which I am sure will make many an appearance on this blog soon) and a chocolate~cashew candy bar, which I am super excited about. After about 30 minutes of hugs and photo's we got into our van, and headed out.

After a small tour of Blumenau with our awesome Brazilian coordinator Susana, and our futbol crazy driver we arrived at our hotel. We decided to clean up and unpack a bit before having a group dinner in the Hotel restaurant, which while overpriced was quite nice. My Filet Mignon sandwich was very good, and the fries were very fresh (fyi: Brazilian Ketchup, spelled catsup, is delicious. It isn't as sweet as our familiar american Heinz brand but it tastes of fresh tomatoes and has a very nice tart ending). After our group dinner we headed our own ways, ready to rest up for a day of fun in Blumenau tomorrow! Boa Noite everyone!