The GCT programme really lived up to it’s promise. For me it was the first trip to Brazil and I had altogether a very good time. I stayed with a very nice host and I think that the buddy system is a perfect help to get into the cultural transfer part of GCT. It was such a warm welcome and such a unique experience.
The brazilian organization team made a very nice programme for us but I will only outline the highlights:
Unit 1: Welcome
It startet all with a welcome cocktail in the brazilian university FGV. The building is already very different from the university in Germany and we discovered everything with a healthy degree of curiousness.
Unit 2: Language barrier
Some of us had already made the experience that not everyone in Brazil speaks English. Fortunately our hosts had the good sense to give us a short Portuguese lesson, where we learned the most important expressions, the common vocabulary and the worst but most efficient insults ;-)
After that we felt prepared to handle all kinds of situation in daily brazilian life.
Unit 3: Lectures
At university we heard lectures about brazilian economy and got a short overview over Brazil’s history, told by famous and significant paintings, of which I found some hanging in the Pinacoteca do Estado do São Paulo when I went there one week later.
Both lectures gave us a better idea of the country from different perspectives.
Unit 4: Enterprises
We visited several enterprises from very different domains.
At Embraer we saw in the production halls the Becoming of an airplane and could follow many steps of the producing process.
The nice woman who showed us around at Natura did everything she could to make the informations for us easy to understand. She managed to give us some of the enthusiasm she herself felt for the cosmetics producer and gave us an impression of how it is to work in an enterprise which seems to be perfect in terms of products, employees and use of daylight in the production halls.
When we visited a cooperative that gathers and sells garbage as raw material we got a very different impression of business in São Paulo. It was located beyond a motorway bridge and is supported by a students’ organization of FGV that provides managerial knowledge for this kind of companies. There was no skyscraper and no visitor’s information desk beyond that motorway bridge and there we realized how the culture of a foreign country can be so similar and different at the same time.
But that’s what cultural transfer is all about: seeing, experiencing and comprehending completely different types of living and working to diminish prejudices and biases.
And speaking of cultural transfer: I learned my most agreeable lesson when it came to brazilian food.
Unit 5: Restaurants and host familie’s kitchens
The organization team as well as the host families did their very best to introduce us to typical brazilian food. In São Paulo’s restaurants we got to know Feijoada and Farofa, some of us tastet home made Tapioca and we enjoyed Brigadeiro with coffee in a very nice place in the neighbourhood of Pinheiros.
Not to forget the dishes we tried at our host’s homes, mostly prepared with the indispensable ingredients Requeijão or leite condensado.
We as Germans were quite impressed by the amount of beer brands Brazil has to offer, but of course we didn’t say no to a freshly opened coconut or an original Caipirinha.
Howsoever, Brazil is a country worth it coming back. At least in four years, when everyone will get crazy about an event which couldn’t be more brazilian…
- Susanne Jackson, participant of GCT 2010 (FGV-Mainz)
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