Our days are drawing to a close in Sao Paulo which means a lot of homework! We have a group prentation/project due on Friday that's been taking up quite a bit of our time. Class on Tuesday morning involved a trip to Natura, which is a Brazilian cosmetics company. It's very cool because their entire business model is based on creating quality pro...

We ended our time in Rio yesterday with another cool and rainy day. It didn't prevent us from enjoying it, though, and we went to Marius, which is one of the best restaurants in Rio Like the churrasarias that have all you can eat meat, Marius has all you can eat seafood. It was amazing. The servers walked around with platters of lobster, crab, s...

Today was a "normal" day of class for the most part. Each day is set up with two sessions - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Our morning session focused on Brazilian law and how it impacts business. In some ways the system is like the United States but in others, it's quite different. An interesting tidbit is that the concept of non-...

We had our first day of class today. The a.m. session consisted of an overview of the program along with a lesson in Survival Portuguese. Seeings how we had already survived 3 nights, it was nice to learn how we could have done it better : ) There are 20 students in the class - 15 from Chicago (UIC and U of Chicago), a couple from UCLA, one from...

Yesterday we learned that the largest Gay Pride Parade in the world was in Sao Paulo today and that one of the main viewing areas was a couple of blocks from our hotel. The music was so loud that it rattled the windows on the 26th floor. According to the news, 3.5 million people came and there were 1400 police officers. It was really something t...

I'm the first to admit that day 2 started out pretty slow for most of us. We learned some lessons about Caipirinhas last night that were present for most of the day... After some time at the pool, we went to a Japanese restaurant. There's a large Japanese population in Sao Paulo and we were told that the cuisine was highly recommended. For some ...

We had a great trip - the flight was uneventful (which is good!) and catching a cab at the Sao Paulo airport was very easy. Our driver didn't speak English but gave us a vocabulary lesson during our 30 minute ride - we loved it! Like everyone says, there's concrete as far as the eye can see with favelas (slums) peppered in. Our hotel and its sta...