Day 3:Seaweed

5.15.2015 Day 3 in Brazil

Today is the day we got to see this new country in the daylight! After 35 hours of traveling yesterday....you could say an actual bed felt pretty good after all of the chairs and airplane seats we attempted to sleep in. We woke up and had breakfast at our hotel. There was an assortment of cakes, breads, pastries, fruits, sausage, quiches, eggs, delicious fruit juices, and some strong coffee. We headed to a town called Novo Potropolis. We walked around a park and all around the town looking into different shops and restaurants before grabbing our first Brazilian meal. It was buffet style with a lot of vegetables, meats, and dessert! We loaded the bus and hit the road to go visit the Tramontina factory. On the windy road we saw pretty views from the window of our bus. Once we arrived we went into a small classroom where the Brazilian students, the CEO of Tramontina, and his employees greeted us. We watched a couple videos to get a background of the company and then we took a tour of the factory. We saw how the raw materials were melted and then how they were moved, molded, pieced together, and packaged up. This branch of the company manufactures the all of electrical products. So they had an assortment of different types of light switches, outlets, plug ins, etc that we could look at. Among all of us and the Brazilian students we are divided up into 6 different groups all of which have different topics. We sat in these groups and asked the CEO questions that would help us with our projects. The Brazilian professor was nice enough to translate everything from Portuguese to English for us. We took notes on all of these questions and then we actually went to a Tramontina retail store to look at and buy their products. After working up an appetite we then went to go grab dinner. It wasn't a restaurant where you ordered off the menu or went up to a buffet. The waiters kept coming around and asking us if we wanted to try all these different foods. We said "sin" and "por favor" for as long as we could until we just couldn't eat anymore! But we weren't finished yet..... Then they came around with TWENTY THREE different types of desserts. I think it's safe to say that we are going to be eating pretty good here in Brasil. We then took the bus back to Gramado and got some sleep before Day 3. On the bus at the beginning of the day Cody told us something that I think is going to hold very true during this trip. He told us we need to be like seaweed. He used this analogy because seaweed survives because it sways back and forth and goes along with the currents and the waves of the water. We need to do this on our trip because not everything is going to go as planned, and not everything is going to be comfortable for us. We just need to sway whichever way Brasil moves us.