Everybody says traveling is fun, and it is, but getting to your destination is certainly its own journey. 3 flights. That is how many flights it took to get to Brazil, with a total travel time of 22 hours, the Saturday after finals week. However, traveling with 2 of your close friends, with an additional 2 tripmates makes the experience worthwhile and comforting as you never go through anything alone. Navigating the airports between layovers is fun, and we had a stop in Lima, Peru, which made the layover more interesting. Though, flying internationally with multiple layovers makes having a checked bag a little stressful, as the protocols can be different for re-entry and re-checking bags. Altogether, the long journey to Brazil was smoother than expected. 

Hitting the Brazilian ground running, we arrived at 6am, met our host Lorena, and got taken back to the hotel. We landed in the South of Brazil, in Porto Allegre, a medium sized city that felt reminiscent of any usual American city. However, the climate was pretty different, being in the southern hemisphere, with high humidity, frequent rains, and tropical vegetation. We arrived during the transition from fall to winter, so the weather was relatively temperate and enjoyable, though the sky was gloomy pretty often. Funnily enough, the frequent rains made it feel like we never left Pittsburgh.

The hardest transitions were cultural and linguistic. Brazil, as opposed to the rest of South America, speaks Portuguese. The best way I can describe Portuguese is by saying Spanish is similar to English in the same way Portuguese is similar to Spanish. Regardless, learning a new language is hard, and truthfully, I should’ve started learning Portuguese two or three months before the trip, instead of two or three weeks before. Something as easy as going to the grocery store becomes surprisingly more difficult when you cannot understand the cashier and the cashier cannot understand you. In Brazil, despite the tap water being clean, it was recommended to only drink bottled water, so my friends and I ventured to the local grocery store, Macromix. It was similar to a Costco or a Walmart, but without the clothing section, and the variety of snacks and foods was overwhelmingly vast. Everything looked delicious, but we focused on getting bottled water and some snacks for the site visits and downtimes. We thought checking out would be easy, and that was our mistake. As we approached the clerk, with our minimal Portuguese knowledge, there were some cultural obstacles that we weren’t expecting on top of the language barrier. None of us knew what a CPF number was (it is a Brazilian ID number), and we weren’t sure how we were going to validate our parking given we didn’t have a car. Remembering that Google Translate existed and with a great amount of help from the clerks and stares from other customers, we were humbly able to take our water and snacks back to our hotel. We immediately started practicing Duolingo after our adventure. 

Brazilian food is deliciously glutenous and cheesy. Their staple dish is Pao De Queijo, which is literally cheese bread. Additionally, Brazilian Steakhouses are just steakhouses, and we went to quite a few of them, which was wonderfully and fatteningly delicious. The variety, quality, and quantity of meats was breathtaking. Nearly all restaurants we went to had buffet style servings which meant that there were always options for everyone on the trip. Even at the pizza place we ate at, there was a buffet that had sushi and other appetizers, and the pizza itself was served like a steakhouse with waiters coming around with different varieties of pies, ranging from regular pizzas to dessert pizzas to even serving pizza with chicken hearts. The chicken hearts were delicious, but we all looked like out of place Americans as everyone else there ate pizza with a fork and knife. The food is definitely something I’ll miss after the trip, but I’ll savor it for these weeks. 

The true reason for visiting Brazil was to learn about the energy infrastructure of Brazil along with its sustainability principles and other technological areas of operation. The first site visit we went on was a semiconductor company called HT Micron, which is based in South Korea. HT Micron made us sign an NDA so all I can say is that they’re a cutting-edge semiconductor company that showed us how involved and cool making all the different chips and electronics that make up the world around us really is. All the site visits so far have at least had some Brazilian coffee laid out for us to enjoy, and while I don’t usually drink coffee, their coffee was very delicious. Plus, it certainly straightened out some of the jetlag and travel exhaustion I was feeling. We also visited a company called Sirtec on the same day, and they handle the set-up and maintenance of electrical distribution systems in the Porto Alegre area. Before both of these visits, we were introduced to our partner school, Unisinos, a large Private Jesuit University. Its campus was vast and its facilities modern. The layout of the school was large toroidal building surrounding a lush, yet hilly courtyard with paths stretching out in all directions. They reached out back to our hotel, towards the highway, and further back into Unisinos property. The staff was very friendly, but inclement weather left the campus relatively barren.  The next visit was an all day tour and presentation by Certaja, where one of the Unisinos staff worked for many years before. One of our group members was Brazilian, which led to him becoming a translator for us during their presentations and tours. Certaja does many cool things with sustainability and the electrical grid. They have their own EV recharging station, they have a warehouse full of distribution transformers, and they use digital twin technology of their own grid system that allows them to run simulations of their systems to test performance without implementing those changes in real life. They also have their life monitoring station where they can see a majority of their networks and send out field engineers to maintain and fix their systems if they go down. Due to heavy and enduring rains, their field engineers were hard at work. Our next visit is to a highly anticipated wind farm which is very exciting. Brazil has been a great time so far, and I can’t wait to see what other adventures are in store.

*These blogs are backdated between the end of April and the middle of May due to extenuating circumstances*