8/17/14

Today we woke up early feeling rested and rejuvenated. We hit the road for a 5 hour drive to Curitiba, in the state of Parana. Our tour guide Rodrigo pointed out that this was the third and final state that we would be visiting in southern Brazil. This was a nice thought because even though I didn’t get to visit Rio de Janeiro, I really did get to see a lot of Brazil geographically. Our first stop was the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, which was named after the most famous architect in Brazil. He is most famous for designing the nation's capitol city, Brasilia, which was moved from Rio in 1960 to increase national security by moving the capitol inland. The museum, also known as Museu do Olho (Museum of the Eye), was re-inaugurated in honor of Niemeyer, who donated and designed the eye-shaped annex of the museum at the age of 95. The best part of the museum, in my opinion, was the Niemeyer exhibit, which showed models of all his work along with descriptions of his professional accomplishments. 

After the museum visit, we made our way to the Miller Flats Hotel in downtown Curitiba, which had a very different vibe than Floripa. There were a lot of high school-aged kids hanging around the streets, who's style struck me as much more "hipster" than what we had seen in other cities. We went to a nearby mall, where we did some people watching and ate dinner. While in line at the food court, a Brazilian guy came up and asked in English if we needed some help ordering, and introduced us to his son who spoke nearly perfect English because he went to school in Canada. We found out that he is studying mechanical engineering at the Federal University of Parana, where we had our next company visit. His father was also an engineer, who happened to know the guy that recently purchased Heinz, so he was really excited to find out that we all study in Pittsburgh. Sadly, there was no Heinz ketchup in Brazil as far as I saw, and the packets were so hard to open that I went ketchupless for most of the trip.