Check out some pictures...and just to clarify, that's Greg (a former Hinckley intern who got hired on after his internship) handing the flyer to the chick in the bikini, not me. I'm innocent! :)
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Back to Rio
I got back from Maringá Monday afternoon, and the next day I was already on my way back to the airport for another flight, this time back to Rio. Azul was participating in a tourism convention there, and I tagged along to help set-up (aka-working for free to lift heavy boxes). I didn't get to check out much of the convention but what I did get to see was pretty cool, and got me excited to go travel around the rest of the country. Instead, I spent the week caravaning around the city on Azul's bus with Greg, another American working for Azul, and some girls they hired to dress up like stewardesses to help us do promos and hand out flyers at restaurants, malls, and, YES, the beach. It doesn't sound like hard work, but I am exhausted!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Maringá Country Festival
UPDATE - I ADDED A NEW VIDEO SO YOU CAN SEE/HEAR WHAT A BRAZILIAN COUNTRY MUSIC CONCERT IS LIKE!
Azul was sponsoring a country music festival in Maringá, Paraná and needed someone to go set up our material so they sent me. When I landed, I just chuckled to myself, laughing at the fact that I was in the middle of nowhere, by myself in Brazil…going to a country concert. I hate country music. Anyway, the festival organizers paid for my hotel this time. During the day, I was treated to a delicious traditional feijoada lunch and some acoustic performances from the bands. Then at night, I got to hangout backstage with the bands –unfortunately I had no idea who anyone was, or it would have been even better. We got free drinks, free dinner, and VIP front-row seats. I had never heard Brazilian country music before, and had no clue as to who these bands were, but I actually had a pretty good time!
An added bonus to the trip was that one of my good friends from the mission lived about an hour from there in a city called Londrina. So on Sunday I took a bus to his house, and ate a little churrasco with his family. He showed me around town, then we just went back to his house and reminisced about the mission and looked at all his pictures. It was great to see him again after 3 years, and to swap battle stories from the mission field. I always love being reminded of my mission, and it’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to come back to Brazil.
The bus ride back to Maringá turned out to be kind of an ordeal though, but that is starting to becoming sort of commonplace in my travels… It had rained so hard in Londrina that tons of tress had fallen all over the city, and the power had been knocked out. So when I got to the bus station, the whole place was completely dark. I had to wait until 8:00 at night to get the next bus, and it wasn’t even a direct bus. So because of the rain, and the indirect route, a 1 hour drive turned into a 4 hour bus ride. Blah! All I wanted to do was get back to the hotel, Skype with my family and girlfriend and get in the jacuzzi. But no! I didn’t get to Maringá until midnight. On top of that, I was stranded at the bus station because I had used all my cash to buy my bus ticket since there was no power for my debit card to work. I figured I would just be able to find an ATM to withdraw money to pay for a taxi back to the hotel. But since I was in the middle of freaking nowhere Brazil I couldn’t find an ATM that accepted my card. Luckily, I remembered that I had grabbed a card with the hotel’s number on it in case of emergencies, and they sent a cab for me. I made it back to the hotel at 1am. Did I mention I had to wake up at 4am for a 5:40 flight??? As bad as it sucked, I just had to laugh at the whole experience. Just one more story to tell!
I slept for about an hour and a half. I was pissed I had to wake up so dang early. Then as I ws flying back to Sao Paulo, I watched the sunrise over the cloud cover, and it was one of the prettiest things I have ever seen. Suddenly I forgot about how upset and tired I was, and was just glad to be alive. But, now I’m sitting in the Campinas airport, back to being pissed off again. I get off the plane only to find out that Azul’s bus back to Alphaville just left, and the next one isn’t until 9:30. Great, 3 hours in the tiny Campinas airport is exactly how I wanted to spend my morning after sleeping for an hour and a half….awesome.
An added bonus to the trip was that one of my good friends from the mission lived about an hour from there in a city called Londrina. So on Sunday I took a bus to his house, and ate a little churrasco with his family. He showed me around town, then we just went back to his house and reminisced about the mission and looked at all his pictures. It was great to see him again after 3 years, and to swap battle stories from the mission field. I always love being reminded of my mission, and it’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to come back to Brazil.
The bus ride back to Maringá turned out to be kind of an ordeal though, but that is starting to becoming sort of commonplace in my travels… It had rained so hard in Londrina that tons of tress had fallen all over the city, and the power had been knocked out. So when I got to the bus station, the whole place was completely dark. I had to wait until 8:00 at night to get the next bus, and it wasn’t even a direct bus. So because of the rain, and the indirect route, a 1 hour drive turned into a 4 hour bus ride. Blah! All I wanted to do was get back to the hotel, Skype with my family and girlfriend and get in the jacuzzi. But no! I didn’t get to Maringá until midnight. On top of that, I was stranded at the bus station because I had used all my cash to buy my bus ticket since there was no power for my debit card to work. I figured I would just be able to find an ATM to withdraw money to pay for a taxi back to the hotel. But since I was in the middle of freaking nowhere Brazil I couldn’t find an ATM that accepted my card. Luckily, I remembered that I had grabbed a card with the hotel’s number on it in case of emergencies, and they sent a cab for me. I made it back to the hotel at 1am. Did I mention I had to wake up at 4am for a 5:40 flight??? As bad as it sucked, I just had to laugh at the whole experience. Just one more story to tell!
I slept for about an hour and a half. I was pissed I had to wake up so dang early. Then as I ws flying back to Sao Paulo, I watched the sunrise over the cloud cover, and it was one of the prettiest things I have ever seen. Suddenly I forgot about how upset and tired I was, and was just glad to be alive. But, now I’m sitting in the Campinas airport, back to being pissed off again. I get off the plane only to find out that Azul’s bus back to Alphaville just left, and the next one isn’t until 9:30. Great, 3 hours in the tiny Campinas airport is exactly how I wanted to spend my morning after sleeping for an hour and a half….awesome.
MY FIRST BUSINESS TRIP
Three days before my trip, I saw on the news that some druglords in the slums of Rio shot down a police helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade. How crazy is that?! It's like something out of a movie...but it's real life. It freaked me out a little, but I was assured that I would be safe if I stayed near the beach.
Azul was sponsoring a surfing competition called the Rio Surf Pro Internatioanl, and I was asked to go help at the event. So basically I got a free trip to Rio de Janeiro for wearing an Azul baseball cap while watching people surf. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it! The competition was on Praia do Arpoador which is right in between the famous Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, which was pretty sweet. Saturday it rained all day, and the beach was completely deserted. But on Sunday, the sun came out and so did the entire population of Rio. I have never seen such a crowded beach! Not to mention the massive amounts of gross, old men in speedos and women wearing bikinis way too small for their body type. Sick. Monday, before I flew home I went for a ride up Corcovado, where the famous Cristo Redentor statue is. That was very cool – easily one of the most dramatic and stunning views I’ve ever seen. The trip to Rio was worth it just for that!
Azul was sponsoring a surfing competition called the Rio Surf Pro Internatioanl, and I was asked to go help at the event. So basically I got a free trip to Rio de Janeiro for wearing an Azul baseball cap while watching people surf. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it! The competition was on Praia do Arpoador which is right in between the famous Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, which was pretty sweet. Saturday it rained all day, and the beach was completely deserted. But on Sunday, the sun came out and so did the entire population of Rio. I have never seen such a crowded beach! Not to mention the massive amounts of gross, old men in speedos and women wearing bikinis way too small for their body type. Sick. Monday, before I flew home I went for a ride up Corcovado, where the famous Cristo Redentor statue is. That was very cool – easily one of the most dramatic and stunning views I’ve ever seen. The trip to Rio was worth it just for that!
CULTURE SHOCKED!
Since I had previously spent two years in Brazil, I definitely did not think I would experience culture shock at all. But São Paulo is a totally different world, and now that I’m involved with the business culture instead of the everyday culture, I’ve had a lot of changes to get used to. Back on the mission, whenever my comps and I would see something out of the ordinary (which, honestly was almost every day!) we would hum the first couple of lines of the Brazilian national anthem. It was kind of like that movie Blood Diamond where they say “T.I.A. – this is Africa.” It wasn’t the most subtle or polite thing ever, but it helped us to stay in a good mood!
Luckily, in Sao Paulo things aren’t so strange. It’s an enormous city, and has almost everything American I could want. A medium pepperoni pizza from Domino’s may cost me $20 instead of $5, but at least I can get one! The part of the city I live in, Alphaville, is just as nice as any big city in the States. Despite that fact, I was still surprised to realize that I was experiencing culture shock.
Case and point -grocery shopping! I’ve lived on my own before, but always relied on canned chili and easy-to-make sandwiches. Even in 1st world Brazil I don’t have that luxury, but I never thought grocery shopping would be so hard! I walked around the block and went into three grocery stores without buying a single thing. Nothing looked appetizing, and I didn’t know how to cook any of it. It was a little overwhelming! My mom reminded me that she felt the same way when we first arrived in France. I finally settled on soda, bread and butter, rice and a roast chicken. But I never thought grocery shopping could be so hard!
Luckily after a few days I finally had some time to explore my neighborhood, and I found a ‘centro commercial’ and a mall that has a bunch of restaurants, juice bars, gelato, and a food court. My savior! I was especially happy to discover a place called Taco Villa that serves traditional Mexican food. But apparently traditional Mexican food includes enchiladas topped with ketchup and a side of fries. Later on I found some legitimate restaurants, like an Outback Steakhouse –I’ve never enjoyed a steak so much in my life!
Luckily, in Sao Paulo things aren’t so strange. It’s an enormous city, and has almost everything American I could want. A medium pepperoni pizza from Domino’s may cost me $20 instead of $5, but at least I can get one! The part of the city I live in, Alphaville, is just as nice as any big city in the States. Despite that fact, I was still surprised to realize that I was experiencing culture shock.
Case and point -grocery shopping! I’ve lived on my own before, but always relied on canned chili and easy-to-make sandwiches. Even in 1st world Brazil I don’t have that luxury, but I never thought grocery shopping would be so hard! I walked around the block and went into three grocery stores without buying a single thing. Nothing looked appetizing, and I didn’t know how to cook any of it. It was a little overwhelming! My mom reminded me that she felt the same way when we first arrived in France. I finally settled on soda, bread and butter, rice and a roast chicken. But I never thought grocery shopping could be so hard!
Luckily after a few days I finally had some time to explore my neighborhood, and I found a ‘centro commercial’ and a mall that has a bunch of restaurants, juice bars, gelato, and a food court. My savior! I was especially happy to discover a place called Taco Villa that serves traditional Mexican food. But apparently traditional Mexican food includes enchiladas topped with ketchup and a side of fries. Later on I found some legitimate restaurants, like an Outback Steakhouse –I’ve never enjoyed a steak so much in my life!
ARRIVING IN BRAZIL
The last time I was in Brazil, my Dad was picking me up from my mission in Recife, a city on the Northeast coast. This time around, I’ve found myself in São Paulo working as an intern in the marketing department for Azul Airlines, a brand new Brazilian airline founded by legendary JetBlue founder David Neeleman. I graduated in May from the University of Utah with degrees in Political Science and International Studies. As a political science major, I had the great opportunity to get involved with the Hinckley Institute of Politics. I spent my last winter interning in Washington DC, and spent the summer with Attorney General Mark Shurtleff’s U.S. Senate campaign. The HIP also happens to have connections at Azul, and since I had recently decided to go to business school to get an MBA in international business this was the perfect opportunity to help me get in to the grad school of my dreams!
My journey, and I do mean journey – or maybe ordeal is a better word – began at 8am as I left my parent’s house. I then flew to JFK where I had a 5 hour layover, and those are NEVER fun. I finally got on the plane at 9pm, and promptly sat on the runway for another TWO hours before taking off. Azul had arranged for a taxi to pick me up at the airport, and two of my former mission companions were going to meet me at the airport in Sao Paulo. Well, since my flight was two hours late, the cab driver gave up waiting for me. One comp didn’t make it because of his sick, pregnant wife and the other didn’t get the flight information in time. AGH! It reminded me of my mission, when after telling us that it wouldn’t be like The Other Side of Heaven and that someone would be there to pick us up, we were stranded in the Sao Paulo airport clueless and alone for an hour before some weird-looking guy with no ID told us he was here to pick us up. Fortunately, this time around I was an experienced traveler and I spoke the language fluently! So I found myself a cab – and then began my fantastic, two hour cab ride through rush hour traffic in a city with a 20million+ population and a terrible highway infrastructure. Finally, 26 hours after I left my house in Salt Lake I arrived at my new apartment in Alphaville.
Just when I thought my ordeal was over, the receptionist tells me that there was a misunderstanding and that my apartment wasn’t ready! So I waited around for another hour or so for my new boss to show up, then we drove over to a hotel and I slept the day away. The next day I started work, and got settled in to my apartment only to realize that my cell phone was about to die and I left my charger at the hotel the night before. On top of that my new apartment didn’t come equipped with wi-fi like I expected, so I felt completely disconnected without my cell phone or an internet connection. Luckily when I went back in the morning, they still had it. NOW my ordeal was finally over. It totally sucked while it was going on, but I already am looking back and laughing, so it’s all good!
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