In 2 weeks, like today, I will be on a plane heading out to Belo Horizonte. The 3 month pre-assignment period went by a lot faster than I expected. There is still so much to do. After checking my todo list, I realized I'm in better shape than I thought. The travel logistics are taken care of. My visa and tickets are ready. I leave from JFK on Friday August 10 at 10am. I have a layover in Panama city then straight to Belo Horizonte. In BH, the transportation to the hotel is all set. We will be staying in the park flat apt.
One of the biggest unfinished items on the todo list is learning Portuguese. I am probably half way done, but I never thought learning another language would be so challenging. I guess I always took it for granted. Back home, everybody speaks 3 languages before the age of 5, and we usually speak all 3 at once. One of the typical sentences you would hear in Lebanon is "Hi (English), Kifak? (Arabic for How are you) Ca va? (French for you're ok?)". So learning a 4th language as an adult is a totally different story. I realized I can speak it a lot better than I understand it, so I will be having one way conversations with people, where I speak and they listen. For those who know me, this couldn't be more perfect :) Hopefully, I can be done with all 30 lessons before August 10. If not, well, there's always the 20 hour plane ride.
Another thing I did was book my hotel in Rio. 5 of us so far changed their ticket on the way back, to spend a couple days in Rio post assignment. Since we are going to be there on a holiday weekend (We are going to be in Rio starting September 8 and September 7 is Brazil's Independence day), hotels are filling up really fast and are ridiculously expensive. I will be staying in a hotel RIGHT by the beach:
And according to the hotel website (which can mean nothing), this is the view from the room:
Until Next time
Nada #ibmcsc Brazil
One of the biggest unfinished items on the todo list is learning Portuguese. I am probably half way done, but I never thought learning another language would be so challenging. I guess I always took it for granted. Back home, everybody speaks 3 languages before the age of 5, and we usually speak all 3 at once. One of the typical sentences you would hear in Lebanon is "Hi (English), Kifak? (Arabic for How are you) Ca va? (French for you're ok?)". So learning a 4th language as an adult is a totally different story. I realized I can speak it a lot better than I understand it, so I will be having one way conversations with people, where I speak and they listen. For those who know me, this couldn't be more perfect :) Hopefully, I can be done with all 30 lessons before August 10. If not, well, there's always the 20 hour plane ride.
Another thing I did was book my hotel in Rio. 5 of us so far changed their ticket on the way back, to spend a couple days in Rio post assignment. Since we are going to be there on a holiday weekend (We are going to be in Rio starting September 8 and September 7 is Brazil's Independence day), hotels are filling up really fast and are ridiculously expensive. I will be staying in a hotel RIGHT by the beach:
And according to the hotel website (which can mean nothing), this is the view from the room:
The team is discussing the things we want to do over the weekends. We have a pretty nice guide of the places we need to visit around Belo Horizonte. We're also trying to coordinate a trip to Iguazu Falls. That place looks gorgeous so hopefully it works out.
We are also doing some real work in between planning for all those trips. On Monday, we have our first meeting with our customer. We want to introduce ourselves to them and get to know them better. We also welcomed a new person to our team. John from New Zealand will be joining Vinod, Michael and I. I will write more about that next week.
Until Next time
Nada #ibmcsc Brazil
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