Monday, August 21, 2006

One week after & intro to SP

It's been a week since I arrived here in Sao Paulo, but really feels as I have been here for a while already. I feel at home in our house, the other guys that live here - the national team of AIESEC in Brazil and Filipe and Piret from the regional board - are great, I know already a little bit around the city. The basic places like my work place, local AIESEC office (AIESEC Getulio Vargas), way home, where to buy food etc.

Today I even managed to find my way to the Ibirapuera park alone; met up with other trainees and enjoyed a jazz concert there. Finding the place was fun :D...I had the directions and bus numbers and everything, but still I had to practice some Portunol (the mix of Spanish and Portugese) to find the right bus stop, to take the bus to the right direction, to get off at a right place...etc...I could make myself more or less clear to the person I was talking to, but the challenge was to understand the response...was funny :D, I enjoyed :D:D

A few words about Sao Paulo:
It's grreattt!!
It is huge cosmopolitan city, with more than 10 million (probably a way more) people from all shapes and sizes - you can see here people with roots from Europe, Africa, Asia, Americas.

While in Ecuador I stood out as blond European, here's not much of a significance - you can see many blond people here as well as people from all other places!! Mixture of nationalities!! One can never know if a random person on the street is Brazilian or not, because their looks vary greatly and even I myself could pass for a Brasileira (IF I spoke Portugese...with proper accent of course!!).

Everyone seems to love it here - the trainees, the AIESEC people, everyone else I've talked to.
They say it's the best place in terms of food: you can find better Italian food here than in Italy (no offence Italians, that's what I have heard)!

Life never stops here, one has enormous opportunities here in terms of entertainment, going out to clubs, museums, shopping etc.
It's the heart of business of Brasil, and maybe even in the whole South America. It surely is the largest city in South America.
People say that SP is not Brasil :) - it's soooo huge, diverse, cosmopolitan...like a NYC...and people here have respective life style.

Paulista Avenue is one of the main streets - they even call it the Wall Street of SP -, and that's were I am also going to work. Most other trainees also work in the neighbourhood. Imagine, how the surroundings of my work look like at day time: endless number of skyscrapers, 4 lines of cars on the streets (at least, or maybe 6, havent counted actually), businessmen and -women on their daily tasks rushing somewhere, holding a briefcase/laptop, wearing nice suits, dresses...I guess you can imagine!
Banco Real office is 17 storeyed building on Paulista, they say there's around 4-5000 people working in this building alone!!! Beats the largest companies in Estonia.
Earlier I thought I'd like to try living in a huge city like SP, and here it is - all open for me to discover. I am happy that I ended up in Latin America, so far (Ecuador, Colombia, a bit of Panama and now Brasil) I love it!!

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