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.