Live from Belo Horizonte

I went down for breakfast and there they were, the colleagues I am going to spend the next month with.  It is great how everyone knows who everyone is, even though we had never met before.  Sunday started at 10am with a neighborhood walk with Juliana.  She took us around, showing us where the supermarket was, the laundry place, the good restaurants...
Belo Horizonte is just extremly hilly.  And when I say hilly, I mean steep "you-can't-see-the-bottom-of-the-hill" hilly.
This is an example, and that's not even one of the steepiest ones.  Everytime we drive around, it's like riding a rollercoaster :)

After the walk, we all met to start the scheduled activities of the day, led by Daniel from CDS and Bruno from IBM Brazil.  We started by talking about things that surprised us in Brazil.  The main points were "very few people speak English", "oh my god those hills are huge" and most importantly "Brazilians are so nice".  After some more group exercises, (including human bingo that was pretty cool), we had pizza by the pool.

After lunch, we did something called a "timeline".  Each one of us grabbed a piece of paper and drew a line with important events that made you who you are and that led to you being part of the CSC.  It was really great.  It is so weird that after less than a day of being together, everyone felt so comfortable with sharing very personal information.  We are all from different countries, and come from very different background and yet we are all here, passionate about the same things! Same same but different.

After the timeline we did something called a photo scavenger hunt to explore the city.  You get a list of things (man with a hat, numbers, your reflection, a flower, a cab, a statue, a dog, a street bench...) and you should go out and try to take pictures with as many of these items as you can.  This was a lot of fun.  We got split into teams and I was with Maureen and Michael (Again).  I think the team got to see my extremely competitive side.. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but now they know :)
We won! :) and these were some of our best pictures:

                            A guy with a hat on a bench, a flower and a statue

                       The flower, the reflection, the man with the hat and the number 50 on the bill :) (GENIUS)


After that, we all went out to dinner.  They had a live band and they played Nossa!!! The song that I've had on repeat all day long for the past 3 month).  Eniko even got up and sang with them! It was amazing! This is only day one and I'm already loving it.

                                          Eniko, Sangita, Me, Jared and Paddy at dinner

                                          Mike, Daniel, Carolyn and Vinod

                                        Vinod, Andrea,  Carolyn and Toula

                                          The Kims

                                       
                                    Eniko singing Nossa with the band!

Nada
#ibmcsc Brazil