A Great Ending to a Great First Week!

Hey all! Another week has flown by here in Brazil. The weather has been beautiful-- ~75 degrees and sunny everyday, with some nice cool breezes. Hopefully the great weather will hold up for the weekend, so I can enjoy some of the outdoor activities here in Sao Paulo. Before I start telling you about what I have done this week, let me finish telling you about what I did last week.

Thursday was a holiday here, the celebration of Corpus Christi, which is a Catholic holiday. Honestly, how lucky could I be-- coming to Brazil, getting to see different offices for IBM, treated to a happy hour my first day because some execs from the US and Scotland were visiting, AND a holiday!! Amazing!! I slept really late, exercised, then met David's babysitter and neighbor from when he was growing up in Minneapolis, for dinner at one of the most famous Italian restaurants in the city, Famiglia Mancini. Apparently, this family/restaurant group owns an entire street with different concepts of Italian restaurants. We ate at the family style restaurant, but they had a pizza restaurant, piano bar, chic upscale Italian, and an art gallery. Margaret and I walked around and checked out each of the places after dinner and planned to return in the near future. We had a blast eating all kinds of treats from grilled eggplant and fresh mozzarella, to pasta quatro formaggi and of course dessert. Margaret has been teaching English in Brazil for the past year and a half. She was previously teaching in a town west of Sao Paulo, called Londrinhas, but moved here at the beginning of the new year to teach at a different school. She clued me in on some of the key phrases that I would hear a lot, the Brazilian's love affair with salt (there is never any pepper on the tables, only salt!), and some great places that I must visit in SP before I leave. We became fast friends and made plans for next week. It was great to meet her!

Last Friday was Valentine's Day here in Sao Paulo. My prediction is that these days of love are a function of winter, or cold weather (at least Paulistos think this weather is cold). Cold weather --> need for cuddling --> lots of retail opportunities --> Valentine's Day. This is my theory, accept it or reject it. Unfortunately, my Valentine or non Valentine, since it wasn't V-day in the US, was not here. So I treated myself to a lovely dinner at my hotel. The hotel restaurant is fairly good, and the manager is quite nice. After eating there a few times during the week, we had become friendly and he offered to serve me some fish that wasn't on the menu. I, of course, agreed and had some delicious sea bass with roasted veggies. Healthy and devine!!

Saturday I explored the park around my hotel, Parque Ibirapuera. It is the equivalent to Central Park in NYC. You can see a picture in my last post of the obelisk in the middle of the park. Unfortunately, I left my camera in the US and had not received my borrowed camera from my manager yet, so I will have to go back to the park to take more pictures another day. They had some beautiful gardens and statues, but you will get more descriptions of this with images when I return :).

Saturday night, my IBM buddy, another HR employee here at IBM that they assign to give you advice and teach you about the company, Felipe, called me to go to a birthday party for another IBM employee. We went to a bar in Moema to enjoy some ciapirinhas, a local drink made with cachaca, a liquor made in Brazil with sugar cane, similar to rum with lots lime juice and sugar (kind of like a mojito minus the mint) and some live music. I had fun conversing with the other people there, learning a lot about the city, IBM, and what young people do on the weekends here. Not surpisingly, they spend a lot of time out with friends going to dinner, dancing, bars, movies, and the like. It was a lot of fun listening to the live band which played just about every American bar song, except for Living on a Prayer (my personal fav). Sunday, I spent the day sleeping off the lingering headache of a few too many caipirinhas, and watching season 1 of The Wire.

No, Frieda is not here. This is a picture of me sleeping in my apt in Ithaca, but it's pretty indicative of how I spent my Sunday.