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.