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.
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