After 22 long, exhausting hours of travel, I landed in Porto Alegre, Brazil late Sunday night, ready to begin my new adventure!

We were spoiled our first night in Brazil, treated to homemade churrasco, the traditional barbecue of the Rio Grande de Sur state. Boy oh boy was that a welcome treat after airplane food. Most of the houses here have a specialized, indoor fireplace/grill designed for this type of barbecue and our hosts took great pride in introducing us to the culinary art of churrasco. Instead of a grill, they spear potatoes, bread, and meat on swords and then balance these swords above the flames, allowing the food to cook. There were at least five different, delicious cuts of meat (I mean, it is Brazil…), but oddly enough my favorite discovery of the night was pão de alho, a type of cheesy garlic bread. I considered myself a garlic bread connoisseur, but I now realize that I did not know true garlicky perfection until I tasted pão de alho. Our hosts assured me it is sold at all major stores in Porto Alegre and I fully intend on buy two or ten or ten hundred loaves to cook up myself! For dessert, I discovered another new favorite: sweetened condensed milk rolled into little balls called brigadeiro. 

On Monday, we began touring PUCRS (the university) and TecnoPUCRS (the science, tech, and innovation park where we’ll be interning), guided by the wonderful Professor Carlos dos Santos and Professor Luis Villwock.  Since Professor Villwock is personal friends of the CEO of Toth Tecnologia, the medical device company where I’ll be working, we even got a tour of the premises! It’s like a combination of the Bioengineering Instrumentation lab at Rice, with spare electronic parts and testing set ups everywhere, and a Silicon Valley startup, with video games and bright paintings of Mario Characters.

Unfortunately at this point, my blog is going to get little sparse, as I was out sick for the remainder of the week (I’m on the mend now, no worries!), but you can refer to Nathalie’s or Latané’s blogs for more detail!

I’m going to take up the remainder of this blog with a list of the top 5 most interesting differences between the U.S. and Porto Alegre. These are neither good nor bad, mostly just cool, small differences I’ve seen thus far.

1. Cutlery: In the U.S., the default cutlery is a butter knife. If you’re at restaurant and order steak, they’ll bring you a steak knife to cut the meat, but here the default assumption is you’ll be eating meat and so the default is a steak knife. At cheaper restaurants, you’ll get something similar to the American butter knife but with an angled, serrated edge
2. Quality of meat: even the cheapest of restaurants here has juicy, high quality cuts of meat.
3. Italian influence: Porto Alegre is clearly a city of Italian immigrants, with a pizzeria and pasta restaurant on every corner. A lot of people we have met here have close ties to their Italian ancestry (shout out to Bruno, one of the American SEED interns who helped us navigate the city our first week here!)
4. No climate control: I was expecting limited AC/central heating, but I was not expecting the lack of climate control. For better or for worse, the humidity outside is the humidity inside.
5. They love their dogs: I’ve seen a bewildering number of pet boutiques here, offering everything from high quality dog beds to grooming services. Even more telling: all of the dogs we’ve seen so far (pets and strays) have been very well fed and rather, er…chunky. It’s amazing and as a dog lover I heartily approve.