Please look at the photos in the Week One Album! :)

July 19, 2014

Hello everyone!!! I have safely arrived in Sao Paulo, Brazil! I had a very easy flight. It was a red eye flight that was 12 hours and 30 min. Fortunately, I slept for 9 straight hours (if you have ever travelled with me, this probably does not surprise you haha).

For the remainder of the flight I became friends with Eduardo, a Brazilian who had just finished a year and a half business program in San Jose, CA. Eduardo was a huge help! Besides giving me restaurant recommendations and safety advice, he helped me perfect some phrases in Portuguese. For example, "Do you speak Portuguese?" is "Voce fala Ingles?" and "I need to go to the hotel" is "Eu preciso ir a para a hotel".

Once I arrived at the airport, I picked up my bags and met Geraldo, my driver from the airport. He was very easy to find because he held a sign that said Deloitte on it. I felt like a celebrity! As we drove to the hotel, the language barrier began getting larger and larger. Luckily, my dad's best friend, Charlie, gave me a Portuguese-English pocket dictionary as a bon voyage present and it was SO helpful!

At the hotel I met my roommate, Ashley, from Boston. Our next door neighbor was Dan, who was from the Princeton office. Ashley's buddy, Enrico, was nice enough to let us join their dinner. We went to the mall and ate at a nice Italian restaurant called Adiamo. I ordered penne with lemon sauce and filet mignon, which began my amazing food experience in Brazil. After dinner, Enrico helped us get SIM cards for our phones and got us a great deal! We would have been so lost without him.

Later that night we met up with the other global interns, whose flights got in later, and went to see the nightlife in Sao Paulo. Kelvin's buddy, Hugo served as the tour guide for the night! As we got out of the taxi, I happened to run into my friend from USC's younger brother! He was the first non Deloitte person I saw in a city of 11 million people. Such a small world!

July 20, 2014

Today, jet lag set in and I woke up around 12:30 PM (8:30 AM Los Angeles time). We went to a different mall for lunch, which was located in Brazil's World Trade Center (so cool!). I ordered a salad (which I forgot was not safe in Brazil because you don't know if the water they cleaned the lettuce with was clean or not - oops!) but luckily, I was okay! :)

For dinner, all of the Sao Paulo interns and I went to a Brazilian steakhouse called Barbacoa. It was one of the best steaks I've ever had! <3

After dinner, we got dessert at..... drumroll please...... Applebee's! Yes it was the same Applebee's that we have in America, but the delicious brownie sundae made up for the lack of Brazilian spice ;) After our filling meal and dessert, we went back to the hotel and hung out by the pool. John from Atlanta brought a frisbee (great idea) and we had an amazing time laughing at ourselves as we tried to have a frisbee throwing contest! (Let's just say we should stick with accounting) The 8 of us got along really well right from the start!

Here is a list of all of the interns and their home cities:

Ashley - Boston

Charlie - Costa Mesa

Dan - Princeton

Kelvin - San Francisco

Jessica - Portland

John - Atlanta

Yagmur - Seattle

Tchau!