One Crazy Week

It's been a week since the last post, mainly due to the fact that I had a couple of job interviews scheduled and needed to do a LOT of prep work this week. It was beautiful weather outside all week but I was holed up and didn't get much chance to enjoy it!

I've never really had to prepare for job interviews before. I was commenting to a friend from Australia (who now lives and works in Philadelphia) that the nature of job interviews, and especially consulting interviews, is very different between North America and Australia. Back home it is much more focused on 'fit' and prior experience, whereas here there's a lot more emphasis on specific interview techniques - group interviewing, case interviews, etc, etc.

Anyway, the interviews were fine - not spectacular, but not awful - and I should hear the results later this coming week.

So, having become sick to death of the apartment, Brenna and I decided to go exploring again yesterday. Brenna has been reading the New York Times' series "36 Hours In..." which gives recommendations for places to visit in different cities. In Sao Paulo, they recommended visiting the historic Luz railway station, a nearby park called Praca da Luz, and several cool bars that are also in the vicinity.

We walked there from our place (about 45 minutes) and spent an hour or so walking through the train station and the park. The station is nice - reminded me a little of Piccadilly although not on the same scale - but the park is great. It's full of different sculptures and eclectic pieces of Brazilian art, as well as many groups of old guys sitting around playing guitars and singing. We decided it would be a great way to spend a day / picnic, so we'll probably head back at some point.

We stopped at Bar Brahma, which was on the way back to our apartment and highly recommended by the NYT. It definitely earned the recommendation. It has a neat model - basically they only serve two types of beer, Brahma Regular or Brahma Dark. There's a guy who is constantly walking through the restaurant area with trays of beer, so instead of ordering from a waiter or going up to the bar you just flag the guy down. Actually, you don't even need to do that most of the time - the bigger difficulty is preventing him from putting a new beer down on your table when you're not looking. In this way he reminded us of Zach...

The other neat thing at Bar Brahma is they have a live band of three old guys - one accordion, one guitar and one violin - who wander through the place and serenade you at your table. They were pretty hilarious. We asked for some Brazilian music (in French, not Portuguese - fortunately one of them was from Paris) and got a rendition of The Girl from Ipanema - classic!

After that we walked home again and spent the evening chilling out, which was much needed by me.

More Classes, Ana and Sundays

If my International Supply Chains class on Tuesday was a great start to B-School at FGV, the first of my two classes on Thursday - Living The Entrepreneurial Challenge - was not quite so inspirational.

The main problem is that it seems to be just be a revision of subject matter that I already covered at Queen's in either Kelley Packalen's class or Elspeth Murray's class (or both). The course outline was not distributed prior to the first class, so there was no way to come to that conclusion without actually turning up.

In the first half of the class, questions like "What characteristics do you think are important for an entrepreneur?" were followed by "Do you think these can be taught, or are people born with them?". It was very deja-vous. Then for the second half of the class we broke into groups and did exactly the same paper-airplane construction exercise that we had completed at Queen's in December. So I'll investigate options for either switching or dropping the class.

Fortunately, I think the second class on Thursday afternoon - BRICs and the World Economy - is going to be much more fun. The prof is really engaging, and the content seems to be an interesting mix of micro- and macroeconomics with emphasis on how they are impacted by (or impact) the four BRIC nations. There's also a really good set of readings, cases and assignments.

After spending Friday doing prep work for an interview that I have coming up this week, Brenna and I caught up with our Queen's classmate Ana for lunch on Saturday. She had just returned to Sao Paulo the previous week, and came to meet us at our apartment building which was very nice because it is a LONG way from her house!

We had lunch at a local restaurant that is one of Ana's personal favorites, and I can understand why. Apart from the spectacular surroundings (the whole place is essentially built around a living tree) they have a Saturday lunch special which is a buffet of about a million different types of traditional Brazilian pork dishes, rice and beans. In addition there is an incredible selection of desserts. I tried, but failed miserably, to sample all of them.

We were too stuffed to move after finishing lunch, so it was good that Ana's father came to pick us up and drop us back at the apartment. Hopefully we'll get a chance to see her again in a couple of weeks, and spend a weekend down at her beach house!!

Today was Sunday, which is rapidly becoming our favorite day in Sao Paulo. An amazing number of little markets open up all over the city on Sunday, selling different types of cooked food and fresh produce. So we had breakfast at a street market a couple of blocks away from home, and then a mid-afternoon meal at a market in a park up on Ave. Paulista. In between it absolutely poured with rain, which seems to be a feature of the weather here! Mostly sunny interspersed with torrential downpour.

First Classes at FGV

Yesterday I had my first class at FGV - International Supply Chain Management (ISCM)!

I have to admit, my expectations were fairly low based on the feedback that I had received from Queen's students who were on exchange to other B-Schools earlier in the year. It seems that Queen's really does earn its #1 position in the BusinessWeek MBA rankings. Fortunately, the class here at FGV definitely exceeded expectations.

There were some negatives - the biggest one being that many of the students don't seem particularly interested in participating. We were seated in a computer lab for the class, and most of the people that I could see from my seat were surfing the web or writing email for the duration.

To be fair, there are some reasons for this. The class is roughly equally split between undergrad and graduate students, and quite a few of the undergrads are only taking the course because it is required for their program. So they genuinely are not interested in the topic. Also, it is a strange fact that many students do not choose Brazil as an exchange destination with academic studies in mind! In any case, there is a noticeable difference when compared to the more engaged atmosphere back home.

On to the positives. The prof seems like a good guy and is obviously an established expert in his subject. He uses the case of Brazil to give specific examples of the complexities involved in ISCM (e.g., bottlenecks in bonded warehousing), which I find really interesting. The class format is good, the assessment structure is good and the assignments are based on cases and articles that seem really interesting.

During and after class we ran into some of the other exchange students, and discovered that what enthusiasm they lack for their studies they more than make up for in extra-curricular activities. So far I think we've signed up for an FGV party on May 23rd, a 10km run on June 1st, and made a promise to join them at a nightclub some time over the next week or two.

So all things considered, it was a good start to FGV life!

I have two more classes tomorrow ('Living the Entrepreneurial Challenge', and 'BRICs and the World Economy') so my fingers are crossed that they will be equally interesting.

Japan Town, Emo Punks and Cakes

What do these three things have in common? The best of each can be found just outside Liberdade subway station in Sao Paulo.

We had read that Sao Paulo boasts the largest population of Japanese people outside of Japan, so decided that we should go to visit 'Japan Town' in the Liberdade area, just south of the city center. Having figured out the subway system on Saturday, we jumped on board a train and made our way to Liberdade in time for lunch because we had heard about the great food vendors that gathered in the area on Sundays.

We were not disappointed. The crowd was huge and the food stalls sold some great food, although by no means authentic Japanese. The cuisine has kind've morphed with the local Brazilian food to become something very different and spectacularly good, if you don't mind a bit of grease.

A couple of things we had not expected:

- The subway station seems to be a hangout for local goth / emo-kids and it was pretty entertaining coming out of the train and seeing them all sitting around looking grumpy.

- One of the best cake shops I have encountered!

More photos here.

Virada Cultural

Brenna starts school here at FGV on Monday and I start on Tuesday, so the rush of posts will probably slow down for a while after this weekend!

Anyway, the last couple of days we have spent exploring more of the city, and trying to see some of the events for the 'Virada Cultural' festival that is on in Sao Paulo this weekend. It's basically a festival of Brazilian culture staged at multiple venues around the center of the city.

We decided to catch the subway down to the city center on Saturday morning, not that it is particularly far away but we wanted to figure out how the subway worked. We walked to our local station - about 5 minutes away - then descended the escalator and bought a ticket from a guy in a booth for R2.55 (roughly C$1.75). There's only one type of ticket you can buy - one trip, one way to anywhere on the system - so confusion is minimal.

We entered the main part of the station - large, clean and not very crowded - and found a map which told us exactly where we needed to go and what stations we needed to change trains at to get to Republica station. Within a minute a train arrived and we were on our way. Seriously, the subway system here is impressive - right up there with the subway system in Tokyo, which blew my mind at the time.

After arriving down town and getting through some crazy crowds of people, we spent most of the day wandering around looking at empty venues. It seems that this year's event was a bit of a disappointment and not nearly as good as last year! So, sadly the photos here are not particularly exciting.

Still in B-School

For all you MBA people:

Q: What do you do if you have an existing commodity-type brand in North America, but want to hit the high end of a "developing" market?

A: First pay George Clooney obscene amounts of money to advertise your product. A dubbed Portuguese-language version of this ad plays constantly on cable television here.

Next, open stores in all of the highest-end boutique districts in the most affluent city in the country.






Finally, try to stop your competitors from doing the same thing...

To be honest, I have serious doubts about the ability of large foreign companies to make much of an impact on the coffee culture here. The regular consumption of "expresso" is such an intrinsic part of Brazilian life, I can't imagine people will be very willing to change the way that they enjoy this ritual.

Parque Ibirapuera

Friday was our first day with no real administrative tasks to worry about, and was also a public holiday here in Sao Paulo. So we decided to take a longer walking tour down to Parque Ibirapuera - the largest park in the city and a place where people congregate on weekends.

We set off down our road, R. Bela Cintra, and discovered that the further west you go the more affluent it gets. On our end are mostly high-end apartment blocks, but at the other end are mansions set on massive blocks of land with elaborate security measures. Whoever sells electric fences in this city must be doing great business.

We turned down Ave. Brasil and realised the reason for the mansions - embassies and consulates are everywhere! The streets are mostly named for the embassies that are located on them, e.g., Bolivia, Estados Unidos. We managed to find Canada as well!

We got to Parque Ibirapuera and wandered around for several hours. The place is huge and very cool - lots of open space where people are playing soccer, volleyball, skateboarding, rollerblading, etc. Many, many street performers, and many carts selling different snacks including fresh coconuts which they will open up for you to drink the Agua de Coco. Also many monuments, lakes, statues and types of wildlife. Some pics are posted here.

It was an exhausting day of walking - about five hours in hot sun - so we got back and basically crashed for the evening.

Historic Sao Paulo

Once out of the Policia Federale we headed to the financial district (the picture is of one of the tallest buildings in the city - Edifice Italiano) which is also the historical center of Sao Paulo and spent about 3-4 hours walking between different tourist attractions. It was a really interesting Brenna-guided tour, and I have posted some pics here.

A few of the general things we have noticed:

- Despite the fact that we are constantly running into communication barriers, most Sau Paulitanos are very friendly and don't get irritated by it. There is a lot of smiling and weird hand gestures but we eventually figure it out and people go out of their way to be helpful. Part of this is probably that Sao Paulo is really NOT a tourist town - we almost never hear languages other than Portuguese being spoken - so I think most of the locals find foreigners interesting rather than irritating.

- The place is remarkably clean. This might be something to do with the areas that we have been frequenting, but there are a lot of trash cans and people seem to use them pretty diligently. You get weird smells coming up out of sewers from time to time, but that is no different to what you experience in a place like Manhattan.

- Exception to the note about the city being clean - graffiti! The stuff is everywhere, and I mean in really crazy places where you just wonder how the heck anyone managed to put it there. Sometimes it is just tags, but there are also a lot of really impressive murals around the place.

- There are quite a lot of homeless people visible on the streets. Definitely more so than in Canada, but actually less than in some parts of the USA that I have visited. During the day while there are lots of people around there is absolutely no problem, but I can understand why people are warned not to roam around alone after dark.

There's no social security system here, so you can imagine some people are pretty desperate. That said - I've been reading that crime rates in Sao Paulo have dropped dramatically over the last 5-10 years. You get the impression that this city is just exploding economically (in a good way) and so of course you would expect crime rates to drop as the wealth starts to get shared around. There is obviously still some wealth stratification to deal with though!

Bureaucracy Brazil Style

One of the outcomes of our trip to FGV on Monday was that we were given a bunch of forms to take to the Policias Federal (PF), in order to register ourselves as foreign nationals studying in Brazil. In all, there were seven items that the police required, including paying a moderately large sum of money to Citibank (purpose for that is still unknown because the form was in Portuguese) and getting photocopies of our entire passports (i.e., all pages!) notarized.

Sounds easy, but the pace of the bureaucrats that we dealt with (see photo of beetle from our later walk in the park), our own lack of proficiency in Portuguese and the time it takes to actually walk between so many different locations, ultimately defeated us on Wednesday. By around 1pm we had all the required forms and were left with the choice of taking a 30 minute cab fare out to the PF and hoping to get everything processed before their 2pm closing time, or doing some relaxing tourist stuff near our apartment for the afternoon. Discretion (and laziness) being the better part of valour, we put off our visit to the police until Thursday.

Wednesday afternoon was thus spent in walking around a local park, then venturing down to get more familiar with the center of the city. I've uploaded a couple of photos here.

So Thursday morning bright and early we finally headed to the PF. The taxi driver had no idea where to go, but after asking directions from a few of his buddies we were off, and he got us to the right place within about 25 minutes.

After making our way to the front of the line at the PF we were suddenly made aware of the existence of something called a 'CEP Code'. This is apparently the local equivalent of a post code, but was not something that we had ever encountered before at either our apartment building or at the university. It turns out that CEP codes do exist, but nobody except the federal government ever really uses them and most people have no idea what their CEP code even is!

So after realising that we were missing a vital piece of information - the CEP codes for both our apartment building and for FGV - the sequence of events went something like this:

- exit line;
- exit PF building;
- look for somebody who speaks English (not easy);
- ask them to explain what a CEP code is;
- realise that you need to call your apartment building and FGV to find out their CEP code;
- try and find a place that sells phone cards in weird industrial area (also not easy);
- find a public phone (ok this is easy, they are everywhere);
- call apartment and FGV and attempt to explain that you need to know their CEP code (to somebody whose command of English is fairly basic);
- re-enter PF building;
- re-enter line (now much longer);

Eventually we got it all figured out, then after submitting the forms and waiting for 45 minutes we were taken into a room to get our fingerprints done, given our foreign national form and we were free!!! It was really good to have that out of the way.

Citibank Saves The Day

One note that I forgot to mention in the previous post - our agent didn't accept credit cards and wasn't willing to wait a week for an international bank transfer to come through (this despite the fact that we had been hassling her for literally months for instructions on how to pay our rent!). Instead, we had to walk up to Citibank and extract the R4,950 (about $C3,300) required to cover bond, rent and agent commission for our entire stay out of an ATM!

All I can say is thank god Citibank are not very good at flagging unusual transactions, because they had no problem giving me around $C2,500 out of my account. We then had to carry this huge wad of cash back to our apartment block along a crazy busy street. Good thing Ave. Paulista (see photo) has banks on every corner, and as a result just about the highest concentration of police and security guards in the city!

First Days in Brazil

We spent most of our first Sunday in Sao Paulo comatose in our apartment, before finally venturing out to find dinner at a local restaurant. One thing we quickly discovered was that the area we are staying in is VERY high end - finding a cheap meal is not easy! But eventually we found a reasonable place on Ave. Paulista, our major local thoroughfare, and had some delicious Brazilian cuisine.

My opinion of Brazilian cuisine so far - I love it. It's not particularly complex - usually just a cut of meat that is salted and then grilled or barbecued to perfection. Add beans, rice and occasionally some vegetables and you're done. If complex spices and sauces are your thing then you might find the food a little bland, but personally I am really happy!

Anyway, Monday came around and despite having a week before classes started we figured we should get registration at FGV (our University) out of the way. We walked the ~1.5km to the school without too many wrong turns and eventually convinced the receptionist at the front of the building to let us in, despite a major language barrier! Having overcome the entrance obstacle, we found that the international office was very well organised and the friendly English-speaking guy there had all of our access cards, course schedules and other forms ready to go. Full marks for making a good first impression!

So with that out of the way, we spent the rest of Monday and Tuesday getting comfortable in the local area. It is an interesting part of Sao Paulo, apparently known for attracting very wealthy residents. Sitting by the pool on the roof of our apartment building (by the way, the blog banner pic is a panorama from said roof) in the evening, we were amazed by the number of helicopters landing on rooftops nearby! We were also very aware of the huge gap between the rich and poor in this country, with some people driving around in Mercedes while others are only able to afford a Fiat.

On the subject of traffic, it is completely nuts. We have learned that traffic signals are basically irrelevant. The only safe time to cross a road is when there are no cars, because most of them completely ignore rules about giving way to pedestrians! We've already seen a couple of traffic accidents, with one pedestrian who had obviously been hit by a car while crossing the road. One interesting thing is that the accidents immediately turn into a big group activity, with lots of passers by stopping to help anyone who is hurt. The picture is of the usual scene during a business day immediately outside our apartment building.

Getting to Sao Paulo

Ola!

For those of you who are sticklers for punctuation, the 'a' in 'Ola' should have an accent on it, but I am still figuring out how to generate latin characters on my laptop so bear with me for now. Also, the 'a' in 'Sao' (as in 'Sao Paulo') should have a different kind of accent on it; needless to say that is way beyond my capabilities so just imagine that it has a little squiggly line above it.

After several false starts, we finally left Kingston on Friday afternoon and had an overnight stay in Toronto to catch up with friends. On Saturday morning Brenna heard from our real-estate agent in Sao Paulo that she had, in fact, finally booked our apartment and would meet us at 'The Advance' flats on Sunday morning. So that was great news, at least in theory, and we were heading to the airport on Saturday evening feeling reasonably confident that we had everything sorted.

It was good that FGV made a point of telling us that we needed visas - there were a couple of people literally turned away in front of us at the boarding gate, because they didn't get their tourist visa. Brutal!

Anyway, the flight was direct from Toronto to Sao Paulo and remarkably uneventful given that it was Air Canada (who I have to admit have been growing on me lately). Just enough time to watch a couple of movies, eat a couple of meals and sleep for a few hours before touching down in Sao Paulo at 10:15am local time.

Immigration was really smooth - no questions asked at all - and our bags were waiting for us as soon as we got through. We walked them through customs with no questions asked, and within 30 minutes of touching down we had completed our entry formalities and were at the point of needing to navigate our way to our apartment building.

Once again the Sao Paulo airport came through for us. The woman at the tourist information desk spoke fluent English, gave us a map and then directed us to a place where you pre-pay your taxi fare. The woman at the taxi booth also spoke fluent English, and helped us learn a few basic words ('Bom Dia' - 'Good Morning') while waiting for our MasterCard to go through, which it eventually did. The taxi driver did not speak any English, but the booth attendant had printed out the address and directions for him, and we had pre-paid so there were not any fare issues. Within 30 more minutes we were pulling into 'The Advance'.

At the apartment we ran into our first slight hitch, which was that our real-estate agent was not there waiting for us and the people at the front desk had no idea who we were. Fortunately Brenna had written down the agent's cell phone number before we left, and after about 20 minutes the people on the desk managed to get through to her. Another 10 minutes and she arrived at the hotel, we signed our contracts, and then moved into the apartment.

All things considered, our travel could not have been much smoother and we were feeling really excited to explore the area around our home for the next two months.