Pictures: Finally!

So I'd like to first apologize for the huge and inexcusable delay for posting the photos. I can't use the excuse of "limited internet" access as some who are in rural areas (as I am in the 3rd biggest urban city in the world) buuuuut (in my defense) every time I tried the internet connection fell in the middle of the process and I gave up as I yelled at the monitor and pounded on the keys.

So without further ado, this is a little of São Paulo and the Environment Week/ Event:





Downtown São Paulo (the walk from the Ecoar office to the Municipal Market)


("Ouro" means Gold= this guy is literally a "walking billboard" for a shop that buy and sells gold- human billboards are very common downtown São Paulo)

The Municipal Market

The Municipal Market (Inside)- It's enormous and the food is unbelievable!


I ate THE BEST MORTADELLA SANDWICH EVER here!!! Seriously about 15-20cm of meat!!!





The Environmental Week event at the Market (there were a bunch of stands from different NGOs and also governmental entities)


Paper Recycling Stand and Public School Children
- Public schools in Brazil are not like those in Canada, budgets are ridiculous and resource limitations can range from a lack of chalk to a lack of a classroom roof. Basically any parent that earns a bit over minimal wage tries to put their kids in private schools (which can range from 300 to 3000 bucks a month). So any incentive that gets public school kids out of the classrooms and into other types of learning environments is definitely rare and awesome!




This is my colleague Luciano giving his very informative, provocative and downright frightening presentation about climate change and its terrible effects on the planet and its disfranchised populations. Despite being very nervous, Luciano gave an unforgettable speech! :)

This is it for now, I have a million more pictures and stories to share and I promise to get on it this week! Hope you're all having an amazing time!

São Paulo

So despite having lived in Sao Paulo for more than half of my life, I have seen more places in the past two weeks than I in the 13 years I spent here.

Last week was "Environment Week" and I got the pleasure to help out in an amazing ecological fair in the Municipal Market, a place I had no idea even existed.

I had an absolute blast. I got to help out in a few stands, and talked to a lot of public school kids about the importance of recycling and ecological preservation. The kids were halarious and didn't skip out on the opportunity of making fun of my outdated vocab. What happen was that when I was taking pictures one of the girls said that my camera was "da hora", which the direct translation means "of time". I understood that she was asking me if the camera had a clock, so I said no, looked at my watch and said "it's 3:20". The girl looked at me for about 5 seconds and then turned to her friends and blasted out laughing saying "yoooo the "Tia" ("aunt" or way kids call older people) doesn't know what "da hora" means!" I was super embarassed but shook it off and asked the girls to group together for some more pics.

***If anyone knows how to add pictures to this blog please inform your fellow technologically challanged intern here!

Anyways, I had gone down to the fair with one of the workers from Ecoar (the NGO I'm working in) Luciano, who despite being the qualified and intelligent professional that he is, was very nervous before giving his lecture on the consequences of climate change. I tried to take his mind of it with a few dumb jokes and since I haven't been able to figure out how to upload pictures yet I figured I share one with you guys:

So before the global financial crisis the CEO of an IT firm would sell SOFTWARE
As times got tougher he began to sell HARDWARE
And by the end of the crisis the poor man was selling TUPPERWARE

Yes I suck at jokes, but hopefully this got a few chuckles out of some of you! :)

What is your culture?

Is it something that you are born with or into? Acquired by osmosis or by selective and conscious choice? Is it likes and dislikes? Similarities and differences?

When I was seven years old I moved to Vancouver with my mom. Surely a seven year old’s conception of culture is not very profound, but that was at that age that I felt that I had to begin to form some idea about it. I was quickly awarded the “Brazilian girl”, which never really left my side, but like I said, it was hard to understand what that really meant. So I lived in Canada for the next eight years, proudly embracing my South American label. It was never something that separated me from my peers, but it was the way that I distinguished my uniqueness.

To my naive surprise, when I moved back to Brazil at fifteen, I quickly received a new label: “a Canadense” (or the “Canadian girl”). I was furious! I didn’t want to be the “Canadian girl”. I had spent my entire life trying to reaffirm and reflect the country marked on my birth certificate, and when I finally returned I realized that I had no idea of what it meant to be Brazilian and I had never even tried to consider what it meant to be Canadian.

For the next four years I searched for my true nationality, and to be quite honest I didn’t get really far. At times I would clearly share passions, beliefs and customs but at others I would feel completely lost. It was not until I moved back to Canada, and to be more precise, until I began my first International Development course that I realized that the importance of nationality and culture is very relative and situation-specific.

So what is my culture? Well I am better on snowboard than on a surf board, I love samba but can’t dance if my life depend on it, I love novelas but reminisce about Save by the Bell and Degrassi episodes and despite being a Sao Paulo FC fanatic I have been more times to the BMO than to Morumbi (the largest stadium in Sao Paulo).

So am I Brazilian-Canadian or Canadian-Brazilian? I prefer to consider myself a citizen of the world. I have officially given up trying to define or limit myself to any culture or passport I hold. If culture is denoted by collective attributes, I’m sure I can both fit in and out of Canadian, Brazilian and perhaps even other cultures.