Mid-year Enhancement Seminar in São Paulo

*phew*

How's that for a sophisticated-sounding title of how I spent a week in July? ;)

Lisa took the week to go visit her mission, and I flew to São Paulo with all the other ETAs from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.  I ended up rooming with one of the ETAs from Argentina, and it was fun to meet someone new and talk about how different our experiences have been.  (It made me very grateful to be at a university with such great support and structure for the ETAs!)

The orientation overall was really good.  It was nice to take a break from teaching and just go...be inspired/motivated with fun new ideas and such.  (It was kind of like an English Teaching equivalent of general conference.) :)

Although I found the seminar mostly interesting and useful, it's not really worth blogging about in great detail.  But we did get to take a few fun excursions in São Paulo, which was fun.  Here are some of my favorites.

São Paulo soccer stadium and museum!

Not going to lie, this was probably my favorite thing in the museum haha.  It's a soccer game projected onto the floor; the ball rolls around and bounces of shadows.  It was so fun! (Okay, the info part was cool, too. but this is hard to beat ;)

 Beco do Batman (aka "Batman Alley") is a street covered with fantastic graffiti/street art.  It was covered in a BBC documentary some time ago, so it's very popular.  It was so fun to see!

[sorry I don't know why this one is sideways]

one of my favorites!

It made me laugh how many people we saw there doing legit photoshoots.  It's a cool place to go and I totally understand why they'd want to, it was just really unexpected :)

cute little Brazilian girl offered to take my picture when she saw me taking selfies haha 

The artists use amazing detail for how big these are!  This is zoomed in one that covered a whole wall.

São Paulo is way too big to see everything there in a few days (it's the 12th biggest city in the world), but it was still fun to spend a few days there!

Rio de Janeiro, Part 2

Since Lisa and I had both already been to Rio, our trip there was planned specifically for two reasons:  1) get me up Pão de Açúcar, and 2) find some cool art for Lisa.  I talked about number 1 last time, but getting Lisa art was surprisingly actually a big reason for going back to Rio.  I say surprisingly because probably most of the people reading this blog wouldn't fly to Brazil in search of a painting.  But Lisa loves Brazil and has spent so much time here but keeps going home without souvenirs.  Well, she's been wanting to buy some cool art lately (just for herself in general) and Brazil has some pretty incredible/inexpensive stuff, so we were all set to get lots of cool stuff during her trip here.

That turned into a bit of a tangent on Lisa's shopping experience in Brazil, but the point was to say that besides the things I posted about in Rio, Part 1, a lot of our time was spent exploring markets and just wandering around looking for fun things to do (since we hit most of the really cool tourist-y things last time in the city).  The exception?

The Theater!!!

Lisa and Kaitlyn and I went to the theater once or twice on our last trip and couldn't get in (don't remember why).  So this time, Lisa and I were pretty excited to go.  But...go figure, we stopped by and they wouldn't let us in (tours were ending early for a show that night or something?  I don't even remember).  We would have gone to the show, but they won't let you in for a show unless you're in a skirt or at least long pants--neither of which we had brought.

Well we finally made it back on our last day in Rio, and got to tour the inside!  It was worth the effort; I loved it! :D

We started off in a room that now also serves as a café of sorts.  (Sorry, a lot of these pictures are kind of blurry from the low light...and I just struggle with that camera.)  But here are some shots of the cool tile work all around the walls, as well as one of the carved wooden pillars.

The main entry way also had some spectacular workmanship.  Our guide told us where all the individual tiles and marble, etc came from, but....I don't remember it all.  (That's what I get for taking two months to post I guess haha.)  But it was really neat to hear about.  They put a lot of time, money, and effort into making this theater a work of art!

the floor.  those tiles are like 1 square centimeter each...can you imagine laying all those??

One of the cool lounge-y rooms:

And, of course, the theater itself.  So cool!  They had an orchestra from somewhere (I want to say London?) rehearsing while we were in there, so we got a free mini-showing of the concert! :)

We finally made it in! :D

After the theater, we checked out a nearby museum and also stopped into the library/museum.  They had a few small exhibits that were neat (old manuscripts, etc) but no photography allowed in the rooms.  We did get these two gems:

The first one pretty much speaks for itself; I just thought it was hilarious to have a sign for "Scape Routes".

The second one made me laugh though.  Lisa and I were taking selfies and stuff in the entry way on this cool staircase when a cute old worker came and asked if he could take a picture for us.  We said okay, and he told us to go stand up on the stairs.  He then spent the next few minutes taking several "artistic" shots of us haha.  Unfortunately my camera really does stink so a lot of them are blurry.  It made me smile though; he was so sweet and so excited---he kept telling us, "Do you want more?  I know some other good places to take pictures!" but we politely declined a more lengthy photoshoot ;)

Rio de Janeiro, Part 1

It's been way too long catching up on these posts, but I'm finally getting around to it.  I wasn't as good about documenting each day specifically, but the events in Rio are a lot more isolated anyway (churches, museums, famous landmarks, etc vs a whole bunch of similar-looking beaches :).   So I'm just going to upload pictures of stuff and try to write a bit about them. Enjoy!


Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain):
When Kaitlyn, Lisa, and I went to Rio in 2012, we only had a few days there, and we decided to do Cristo Redentor while I was there, and if they wanted to do Pão de Açúcar, they could do it after I left (I flew out a day or two before both of them).  Well they decided to do it, and thought it was so cool, Lisa and I made it a priority of our trip this time.

So our first day in Rio....we went up!  It was awesome.

The view was spectacular, but still hard to compete with the cute band of monkeys running around!  Look at his little face!! 

We were bummed to be going up so late in the day, but it ended up being great, because we were up there just as the sun was setting...

...so we got to watch the city light up.

What a beautiful city!

Parque Lage, Corcovado, and the Cristo Redentor!!

Fun fact:  Corcovado is the name of the mountain where the Christ Statue stands.  The name of the mountain is a reference to the "humpback" shape.  Kind of interesting. :)

Anyway, Lisa and I had already been up to the Christ statue last time, so we decided not to do it this time around (it takes kind of a long time to ride up, plus money, etc..and the views are arguably cooler at Pão de Açúcar anyway).  Instead, we went to a part of the park that surrounds the mountain.

There was some really neat plant life, including these cool mushrooms!

cool castle-y turret thing we played in for a bit

I love this picture.  Doesn't it look like such a magical place?  It sure felt like it!

After wandering around the park for a while, we found a trail.  It said it was about 2km and "difficult".  Well, we're from Utah and figured how hard can it really be (especially for only 2km)?  

The answer?  VERY. FREAKING. HARD.

Haha.  I'm pretty sure it was way more than 2km, and there were some crazy steep parts.  One section even had a chain bolted into a rock so you could use it to pull yourself up.  Man.  But...Lisa and I were on an adventure, so we continued. :)  Plus, we found out that the trail went all the way up to the Christ Statue, and we kept thinking "we've got to be getting close!", so we never wanted to turn around. 

Anyway, here are some pictures from our adventure:

Lisa took this picture and said, "it still doesn't capture how steep the trail is..."  Sheesh.

Crazy hair after a long/hard/unplanned hike, but we made it!

We almost didn't go in because it cost money, but it's like R$60 from the bottom (to catch the train) and only R$10 (about $3) once you're up there, so we figured we might as well enjoy the fruits of our labor :D

Beautiful sky!

The view of Pão de Açúcar from Cristo Redentor

And of course...what's a hike in Brazil without a few monkeys? :)

We didn't stay up at the top long because it was getting late and we knew the trail wouldn't be any easier in the dark.  Haha.  Thanks to a combination of promptings and good planning, we luckily had a flashlight with us (otherwise I think we would have died haha).  But it was a fun day of adventure, anyway! :D