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!