Brazil trip

After the Memorial day trip to ND, I unpacked my suitcase and re-packed it to leave for Brazil the next day.  You see, I had my Brazilian work visa for a potential travel trip scheduled some time that summer, and work decided they needed someone to review a design ASAP.  Since I was the one with the visa, off I went.  Don't get me wrong - it was a fun trip.  But, traveling by yourself for work in a foreign country where you don't know the language doesn't necessarily mean you get to see all the hot tourist spots.  Highlights of the trip are below.  My apologies that it became almost book-like.  What happened to my really concise bullet points from back in the day?

1. An empty seat next to me on the red-eye to Sao Paulo.  At least I was able to get a couple hours of sleep since I went to work the morning I arrived after stopping by the hotel to take a shower.  I didn't ask, but I doubted work was willing to shell out $5000 for business class.
2. The food.  Some things were common with what we have here, but some things were different.  Popular things to eat and drink there include:  rice, beans, green salad with oil and vinegar, potato salad, pork rinds/cracklin', deep fried cornmeal cubes, yucca root, grilled pineapple with cinnamon, bananas, papaya ice cream, chicken hearts, palm hearts, guarana, caipirinha, fish, lamb, pork, beef, pizza, chocolate lasagna, and other things I can't remember.
3. German heritage.  Lots of people in Joinville (where I spent most of my time) have German heritage, which explains the potato salad and green salad with oil and vinegar.  Besides the main language of Portuguese, many people there speak German, and lots of the architecture has a German flavor.  The other large ethnic group in Brazil are Japanese Brazilians.  I'm told the Germans and Japanese immigrated after WWII.
4. Brothers and sisters (through Christ).  In a previous post I posted one picture of some of the ones I met, and I'll post another one in the picture portion of this post.  I had the privilege of a Sunday morning meeting, Sunday afternoon GM, and a BS on Wednesday evening.  Not many spoke English, so we did the whole translation thing.  I heard a couple stories about Uncle Henry.  One of the woikas told me that she'd never forget the last letter she got from him.  He had no way of knowing her struggle, but what he wrote in that letter was great encouragement.  He told her he had been a woika for 60 years, and his only regret was he didn't put more into it.  I'm thankful for faithful examples, but I realize we're all still responsible for our own personal relationship with God.
5. Lessons in trust.  All the hired drivers didn't know English.  When you arrive at the airport, you trust your co-workers made arrangements for there to be a driver.  You trust that your co-workers arranged for you to stay in a nice hotel.  You trust that the person holding the sign with the name of your company is the appointed driver.  You trust the driver to take you to the correct place.  You trust co-workers and friends will be at your hotel at the appointed time to pick you up for whatever evening/weekend activities are occurring.  I actually didn't find it too hard to extend all that trust, and I learned I need to have even more trust than that in Him for my soul.
6. Brazilian BBQ.  Yes, it's as good as they say it is.  No fancy sauces for these people - just some salt and meat.  The most common things I had were pork sausages, beef, and pork.  I had a little bit of lamb one night.  A proper BBQ uses charcoal or wood.  If you go to a churrascaria, they bring out all kinds of meat on giant skewers and cut off a piece for you if you want it.  The Brazilian favorite is picanha, which is a rump steak beef cut.  I had some good pork and beef ribs, tenderloin, bacon-wrapped filet mignon medallions, and much more.  Chicken hearts seem to be a popular appetizer there.  They keep bringing meat by until you're too stuffed to move.  I also went to a pizza place that had applied a similar concept.  They brought all kinds of pizza and pasta dishes by your table until you were full.  They do a lot of hard boiled eggs on their pizza.  I had a pizza flavor with corn at one point too.  They also know how to do dessert pizza with all kinds of fruit including bananas and strawberries, and several variations of chocolate pizza.  They put cheese on all the dessert pizzas, often with sweetened condensed milk and fruit.
7. Face-to-face with co-workers.  I finally was able to meet in person some engineers that I've worked with for more than a year or two by phone, e-mail, and instant message.
8. Brazilian greeting.  At work when they know you're American they give you a normal handshake, but in social situations the customary greeting of a hug and a kiss on the cheek is pretty standard.  It takes me a bit to get used to strangers invading your personal bubble and kissing guys you work with.
9. Hotel amenities (and lack of).  The waiter named Ricky at the hotel restaurant became familiar with my face.  They had some good stuff there - filet mignon, salmon, caramelized bananas, and fruit flambe.  There was also an included breakfast that had lots of pastries, fruits (fresh papaya was popular), cold cereal, toast, scrambled eggs, toast, bacon (cut in small bits, not strips), pepperoni sausage, several kinds of juice, cold cut meats, cheeses, granola, etc.  The only thing they didn't have was an exercise room.  By the end of the trip I was really craving some exercise because I wasn't willing to pay $18 to go to the high-falutin' health club in the adjoining mall.  A brisk walk just isn't the same as doing some serious exercise.
10. Estimated age.  At least three people asked me my age, and when I told them they were all surprised.  They had guessed my age to be 24-26 years old.  There is nothing wrong with that most of the time unless I'm trying to seem very old and responsible.
11. Things I threw away.  Socks:  6 pairs.  Shoes:  1 pair.  Underwear:  6 pairs (Why does underwear come in pairs when it's one article of clothing?).  Yes, they were all very holey or worn out.  This made room in my suitcase for souvenirs.
12. Engineer wives.  My co-workers there were married to ladies with an interesting variety of careers:  high school chemistry teacher, economist, civil engineer, and electrical engineer were some of the memorable ones.
13. Juice bar.  We went to one in Rio Claro and had some delicious smoothies.  If I remember correctly, I tried the acai berry smoothie.
14. Small zoo / animal park.  I got to see some interesting Brazilian animals.  One animal in particular didn't look like anything I had ever seen before.  It looked like a cross between a giant groundhog and a donkey or something.  I didn't try it, but I'm told that animal makes for good eating.
15. Motorcycles.  Driving one in Brazil isn't for the faint of heart.  Most of them drive on the dotted white line between lanes of car traffic, so you'd need to have your reflexes on high alert.
16. Shoe dilemma.  It's the same there as it is in the U.S. The stores only carry one or two styles in my shoe size.  I looked at some boots, but decided in the end not to get them.  Since it's winter there now (in the Southern Hemisphere), they didn't have their good sandal selection available.
17. Living dangerously.  I had some homemade potato salad that was really good.  I watched the ladies prepare it, and they made homemade sauce for it that included crushing the yolks of hard-boiled eggs, adding oil, vinegar, and maybe a few spices.  I though it looked like it would be pretty safe to eat.  I didn't find out until later, but apparently when my attention was wandering she had also put a raw egg yolk into the mixture.  I didn't get sick from that.  However, I did get sick one day.  I'm not exactly sure what the culprit was.  It could have been a place at the mall where I ate lunch (a buffet where you pay by the kilo), or it could have been some birthday cake somebody brought in for an afternoon snack.
18. Hospitality.  Compared to other countries, Americans don't have very good hospitality manners.  All the Brazilians were very gracious and gave me rides to places, invited me to dinner, etc.
19. Tetris marathon.  I couldn't sleep on the red-eye home.  My legs were too restless, so I settled for many games of tetris on the TV console thing.
20. Glimpes of the U.S.  On the return trip home the shores of Lake Michigan near Chicago looked just as beautiful as the beaches of Miami.  I saw them both from the airplane.  Did you know Miami is like right on the ocean?
21. Tourist location learning.  I learned Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro aren't the good tourist places to go.  My co-workers recommended Florianopolis and some waterfalls called Foz de Iguaçu.
22. The Amazon.  All of the Brazilians I asked about the Amazon said they'd never been there, and most of them weren't all that interested in going to it.  I don't know if that was some kind of southern Brazil snobbery or if most Brazilians don't have much interest in it.  I did not go to the Amazon on this trip.
23. Estimated nationality.  One hired driver guessed me to be Slovak or American.  I've never been pegged as Slovak before.
24. Being humbled.  I met with some motor control experts I'll be working with, and I learned that I don't know very much about electric motors and motor control.  That's what makes the job fun and challenging though.
25. Motion sensitive lights.  Sometimes it was creepy to have to step out of the elevator into a dark hotel hallway for 2 or 3 steps before the motion sensitive lights would turn on.  It also seemed customary to have to use your room key to keep the lights turned on in the hotel room.

That's probably way more than you wanted or needed to know about the trip.  Here are the visuals from the trip.

Countryside near Rio Claro.  I think the field on the right is sugar cane.

At a churrascaria - chicken hearts, Guarana, and a guide to meat cuts.

One of my project leaders (Sidney) and his son Theo.

Lunch at the yacht club.  Fish, mushrooms, white asparagus, rice, potatoes, potato salad....plus a few other things.  The glass with the stir stick is a caipirinha (limes, cane sugar, and Brazilian rum made from sugar cane mixed together).

 

An example of the German architecture in Joinville.

Bruno and his wife Bruna.  Bruno is a software engineer I work with.

Home made Brazilian BBQ pit.

I couldn't decide if the shower head thing was supposed to be a foot washer or bidet or both.  There was one in both hotels I stayed at.

Serious bug bites.  They weren't mosquitoes.  They were some other kind of bug you didn't feel until after they bit you and they drew blood.

Me at a celebration for a new product lunch with a bunch of engineers (some I work with, some I don't).

A few of the people I was in Wednesday BS with.  This family spoke German and Portuguese.

Street-side exercise area.

 

The pair of shoes I left there.  The outsides still were good, but the inside foot bed was starting to come apart.  They really like their laminate hardwood floors in Brazil.

A view of the city of Joinville when it wasn't raining.

Stuff Going On

I see everyone is busy just like I am.  I can tell by the anemic number of comments.  Thoughts for/from the day/week:

• Volleyball was super windy again this week, but the wind was more steady, which made it easier.
• I went kayaking Friday evening with a friend from work, and we saw all sorts of wildlife:  ducks, geese, muskrat, deer.....and some golfers.
• The free homemade salad mix from meeting man has some strange spicy greens in it, but I suppose I can't look a gift horse in the mouth too closely.
• I went to the massage therapist again today.  I had a "new to me" therapist - Danielle.  Apparently her philosophy is to use as much pressure as she can until her patient says "uncle" so she knows when to back off, and my philosophy is to take as much pain as possible until I can't stand it anymore.  I wan.  This made for a somewhat painful yet thorough massage session.  I think I will be feeling that in the morning.
• My reward for enduring the pain was a free laser treatment session afterwards to try to help ease the pain a little bit.  I learned there's something magical about a 830 nm laser that releases ATP in your body and can penetrate 5 cm into your body.
• I looked up a few details on ATP.  I wasn't able to get through all the chemistry and biology details, but creating and using ATP is a continuous process inside the body and is necessary for metabolism.  According to Wikipedia:  "The human body, which on average contains only 250 grams (8.8 oz) of ATP, turns over its own body weight equivalent in ATP each day."
• I may need to invest in some new furniture since I will be having company on a regular basis now.  The hand-me-down chairs and loveseat from many years ago may not cut it anymore, especially for some of my more elderly visitors.  That will really make the bank account squeak.
• I also need to buy new underwear, clothes, and shoes, but I just can't get motivated to do that when I would much prefer being outside working in the yard, biking, kayaking, playing softball, playing volleyball, or some other such thing.

That's enough for now.  Coming soon:  summaries of Brazil, WI, and Chicago.  Here are some nice pictures from the last couple of days.

Taken from my kayak - Bambi had already spotted us and was on his way out of there.

Wave from the high winds on Monday.

Gratitude Photojournal 2012, Week #25

Things I'm thankful for this week:

1.  Evening Kayak

 

2.  Friends (and a photobomber)

3.  Friday Lunch Walk

Miss(ed) Manners

For the last month or two, Kadmium has been fighting what seems like a perpetual cold and cough.  He told us yesterday that he thinks he might have/had whooping cough.  Apparently he heard/read recently that it has been going around in the county where he lives.  He hasn't been "whooping" all that much, but the internet did say that adults can get it and not know they have it, and your childhood immunization for it wears off unless you get a booster with your tetanus shot.  So.....I guess it's possible.

I don't usually do book reviews on here, but here's one I read recently that I recommend:  "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."  The title sounds weird, but it's probably not what you think.  It's the story about one lady who had cervical cancer in the mid 1900's.  When the doctors removed the tumor, they sent it to a lab that was trying to grow human cells (unsuccessfully) at the time.  However, these special cervical cells could be grown in test tubes and have changed the course of modern medicine.  Maybe only 1/3 to 1/2 of the book is about her life and the science of tissue and cell growth, and the rest is the story of her family and how they came to grips with their mom's cells being in every biology lab in the planet.  I found it to have a good mix of science, human interest, and patient rights that really kept me turning the pages.

I had to tell my boss this week that a mistake I made last year now could possibly cost my department $6000.  That's small in the grand scheme of things, but it's still not fun to have to own up to being responsible for that.

Tonight I made a chicken marinade that involved the usual vinegar, oil, and garlic, but it also had some mustard, oregano, parsley, and bay leaves.  It smelled a little bit different and I wasn't sure how it would taste, but it tasted better than it smelled.  I may even use that marinade recipe again.  My only struggle with chicken is that I haven't learned the trick to grilling it yet.  I always get paranoid about salmonella and end up overcooking it so that it's dry.  I have a meat thermometer, but it doesn't seem to work all that well, and the chicken pieces were pretty thin tonight, so I'm not sure how well it would have worked.  Tonight the chicken still tasted good, but it was a bit dry.  Now brats on the grill......I have the hang of those.  Much easier than chicken in my opinion.

This is an older story from a month or two ago, but I'll tell it anyway.  I noticed that a lady at work may have gotten her hair cut, so I asked her if she had, and she confirmed it was in fact true.  To try to be sociable, I ask who her hair cutter was, and we made a little small talk, etc.  It wasn't until a couple hours later that it occurred to me that maybe I was supposed to comment on whether I liked the cut or not.  It honestly didn't cross my mind to do that before.  It seemed like a pretty standard trim/cut with a little bit of layering.  It was tastefully subtle, and she still looked like herself, so I didn't think much about it.  Did I totally miss my cue?  Am I supposed to be polite and say I like it?  What if in some cases (not this case) I don't like it?  If I notice someone got new glasses, am I supposed to say I like them too?  All this manners/social norms stuff if very confusing.

It's kind of like commenting on someone losing weight.  If you comment, are you implying that you noticed they were a bit overweight before?  Or, do people like it when you notice because then they know their weight loss efforts are paying off?  I suppose it depends on the personality of the person for how they take a comment like that.

ND Memorial

I went home to ND for the Memorial Day weekend.  Highlights of the trip are below.  There may be some repeats with one or two of my thankfulness posts, but that's OK, right?

1. Seeing family - both immediate and extended.  Mom, Dad, Muggles, BIL-Dan, Geneva, Palt and Wearl, and a whole host of cousins and their families that are too numerous to name here.
2. One cousin - Riley - graduated from high school, so it was interesting to go to a graduation for the first time in more than 5 years.  Some good advice from the ceremony:  Find what you love and do it.  Life is too short to wear shoes that don't fit.
3. Playing air hockey with Wyatt (he's 3 years old I think).
4. A reminder of how teenage boys can be.  They're good kids, but their thinking ahead and initiative skills are still a work in progress.
5. Was in the house I grew up in that my parents don't live in anymore.  With all the decorating and addition changes and stuff, it doesn't even feel like the same house.  And that's OK.  Because home is where Mom and Dad are.  What is the same is the gravel yard that turns into a mud pit every time it rains.
6. I looked for the arbor day tree - as expected, it's not there.
7. Rode in the tractor while my cousin was air seeding soy beans using GPS technology.
8. Slower life pace there - which is a good thing I think.
9. Eating at Cafe Aladdin with my old friends Weeds, George, and Alley Cat.  I had forgotten how funny they are.  I think I laughed through the whole meal.
10. Tons of good food:  flank steak, Mom's homemade potato salad, BBQ shredded pork, steak from a corn fed cow, Scotcheroos, and so much more.  Mom's homemade potato salad has just the right ratios of mustard, mayo, pickles, and hard-boiled eggs in it.
11. Seeing some special non-relatives too:  Kathy, Curt and Vonnie, etc.

Some pictures from the trip are below.  They're not all-encompassing of the weekend, but they'll have to do.

The Gene part of Geneva and their son's dog Rio.

North Dakota fields....hard to beat.

Wearl and one of her grandsons.

The graduate

Hit and Miss

We played beach volleyball tonight in what seemed like gale force winds.  25-35 mph according to the internet.  Bump, set, spike was not always the best strategy tonight.

I was reading a magazine the other day that said the kind of cupcake you prefer indicates your personality.  Of the 6 or 8 they listed, my top choices were the chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting or the peanut butter fudge cupcake.  Allegedly the double chocolate is for intense people, and often deep thinkers like that.  If you get peanut butter fudge, that indicates adventurous.  That doesn't seem too far off.

On the radio last week I heard that your shoes say 90% of your personality according to some study in Kansas.  I'm not sure I completely agree with that one - I might believe 50%, but 90%?

This past week was pretty special.  A total of five sistahs came to visit (not all at the same time).  Three came Monday night on their way from Canada to Iowa.  One of them was cousin Windy, so it was nice to see her again.  The two in the area here came on Saturday evening, and one of them stayed last night too.  I admire the spunk and wisdom that a 75-year-old lady can have.  It's times like these when I'm thankful I have a cleaning service.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with my upcoming weekend.  I have a couple different options, and both of them involve spending time with good friends.  What to do.....what to do....

Why does it seem normal to want to go to bed at 9:00 PM on a Friday night, but I always struggle to get to bed by 11:00 or midnight on the other weekdays?

Gratitude Photojournal 2012, Week #24

Things I'm thankful for this week:

1.  Weekday evening kayak

2.  Sistah visits

3.  Flower garden blooms

Gratitude Photojournal 2012, Week #23

Things I'm thankful for this week:

1.  New Friends

2. Travel kit from work - thankfully it contains antibiotics for when Montezuma comes to get his revenge.

 

3. Family

Gratitude Photojournal 2012, Week #22

Things I'm thankful for this week:

1.  Sacrifice - "All gave some, and some gave all."  I happened to be in the right place at the right time to see this.  It came out of the cargo hold of the American plane you can see in the background.

2.  Family

3.  Travel to a new place

Gratitude Photojournal 2012, Week #21

Things I'm thankful for this week:

1.  Open Later Airport Restaurant - with those delayed flights, I was afraid I might have to subsist on vending machine food until I found this place.

2.  Old Friends - Weeds, George, and Alley Cat had me laughing all the way through our meal on Friday night.  It's kind of like that song says.  "Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle.  Because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young."  I searched pretty hard, but couldn't find a good picture of George.  Here is one that include Weeds and Alley Cat.  And, as a bonus it includes Suz, who I saw a few months ago sans picture.  Ananias also receives an honorable mention.  This was taken back when my "old" friends were "young".  ;-)

3.  Extended Family

Returned

Well people, I'm back.  Some of you know where I've been, and it appears some have been wondering where I've been.  I've been lots of places:  ND, Brazil, and WI all in the space of less than three weeks.  More posts are coming obviously.  I would have started tonight, but instead spent my time with some special sistahs who are passing through on the way from Canada to IA.  Maybe tomorrow the posts can commence.  Bye for now.