Sao Paulo

 I have worked for a company called Gistia since 2017. They were one of my first bookkeeping clients. The owner, Carlos, is great at finding and growing employees across his business, and I am the lucky beneficiary of a lot of mentoring from him. He has a lot of entrepreneurial knowledge and has given me great advice on how to grow my business over the years. In the meantime, his business grew to the point where the finance work was more than I could take care of with my part time schedule, so I brought Alexandra Knell on with me. We are the finance department together. I've had weekly calls with Carlos for years and have loved the depth of work that he trusts me with. 

The company has grown to about 30 people, the majority of them living in Brazil. They hold annual retreats to help build company culture since everyone works remotely but had cancelled that several years in a row due to Covid. 2023 is the year that they brought it back, and Carlos wanted me to be there in person. I was very doubtful at first. It seemed like a big deal to leave my family and jaunt off to a South American country by myself to hang out with a bunch of people I've never meet in real life. But then they offered to pay for Alexandra to come too, and that sealed the deal. An all-expenses paid trip to a fancy hotel in Sao Paulo with one of my best friends in the world? I couldn't say no to that!

Aaron had a work trip to Chicago the same week. The timing worked out great- his arrival and my departure were close enough that I picked him up from the airport, and he drove himself home, leaving me at the airport. All the flights out of Tucson to Sao Paulo were red eyes with layovers. I landed on Friday morning, waited around a bit for Alexandra's flight to land, and then we caught an Uber to the hotel. 

By the time we got there, everyone was already gathered in the conference room. It was great to meet so many people in person! We spent most of Friday getting product and industry updates and doing some teambuilding exercises. 

There was a picture of a complicated lego creation in the hall. I had to go look at it and give the team instructions on how to recreate it from memory. It was hard!

This is the hotel restaurant where we had breakfast every morning and lunch one day. It's aptly called "Terraço Jardins" which translates to "Terrace Gardens."

The honeycomb drips onto the fruit! Fanciest thing I have ever seen.

The only thing in the entire restaurant that didn't taste good was this cashew fruit. In retrospect, it may have been there just for decoration. 

We headed to a pizza place with the team for dinner that night. Somehow it evolved into everyone teaching each other magic tricks and the types of figure tricks everyone learns in elementary school. 

It turns out that I can talk to Alexandra all day for two days straight and not get bored of it! I did talk at least a bit with every person there and got to know a few people really well. The Brazilians were so happy to tell us about there hometowns all over Brazil and tell us which foods we had to make sure to eat while we were in town. 

On Saturday morning, those of us who were not too hungover and wanted to explore met in the lobby. We walked up and down Paulista, which was kind of the main strip through the nice part of the city. There was so much to see! We saw at least 3 groups of people filming music videos. 

Things I want to remember:

-Victor diligently translating all the Portuguese for us

-The street vendor who had tattooed the whites of her eyes black and was selling cute mini terrariums

-Learning about Amaia and Julia being female engineers in the VERY patriarchal Paraguay. They are both super intelligent- Amaia is working on her PhD in Electrical Engineering- but they struggle to find jobs just because they are women. Carlos hired them immediately after learning they survived engineering college in Paraguay as women because his wife is from Paraguay and knows how much grit that must have taken. 

Everyone should find a friend like Alexandra. Or better yet, find Alexandra and be her friend because she's just the best.

We saw at least 3 groups of people filming music videos on Paulista.

The world has thousands of McDonald's... but there is only one Mequi 1000! Apparently this was the 1,000th McDonald's ever built. There was a live DJ, photo booth with a line because it was so popular, and a stand selling McDonald's Merchandise.

I'm lovin' it!

A cool satyr statue in the park across from the art museum. This city was so green!

One of the coolest places we went to was Beco Do Batman, or Batman Alley. It's a part of town that is covered in graffiti (much of it batman themed, at least originally) and full of street vendors and artsy stuff. 

Fabricio tried to help me improve my reenactment. I don't think either of us have what it takes to start life as vigilante crime fighters.

We tried to convince the guys to take a group picture by the cow graffiti next to the butterflies but were not successful.  

We had been told that we should find some brigaderos to bring home to our kids. They are a common Brazilian treat, a kind of chocolate ball. There were a couple of girls in beco do batman saying "brigadeeeeeeros! brigadeeeeeros!" We went up to buy some. With our Spanish we were able to sort out how much they cost. Right as they were handing them to us, Alexandra said something like "thank you, my kids will love these!" The girls looked at each other and then back at us and said "Marajuana." So that's the story about how we almost bought the Brazilian equivalent of Pot Brownies for our children! We kept our shopping to grocery stores after that. 

There were people selling coconut water all over the place! They whack the top off with a machete and hand it to you with a straw. It was delightful.

Still carrying my dear coconut

We popped into an art gallery and found this one that I relate to as a bird owner

Coconut was empty but I was enjoying carrying it around still

For lunch/dinner the group congregated at a live music bar called Todos os Santos. I tried Feijoada, the national dish of Brazil. It was delicious but I didn't love the venue- it was LOUD. Like you had to yell right into someone's ear for them to hear you. Alexandra and I snuck back over to Beco do Batman with some people who had missed it earlier that day and explored a few other parts of town for the rest of the day.

The next morning Alexandra and I explored some more sites with Anthony and his wife. We searched for an evil eye for their new house and took an uber to Parque Ibirapuera. 

A raspberry tart and something that had chicken in it! Not knowing Portuguese made ordering things extra exciting.

I made friends with some birds

It was interesting going around that day with no Portuguese speakers. We wanted to go to an old cathedral that the internet said was cool, but thanks to google translate we were able to hear from our uber driver that it was a super sketchy part of town, and he would drive us by it but didn't feel comfortable letting us out. After driving by, I think his advice was solid. He took us to another area that had a good place to eat for dinner. 

I wish I had taken a picture of my fish with banana sauce that I ate at a different restaurant- I ordered it because it sounded weird but it was soooo good!

This trip was wonderful and I still can't quite believe it happened.