São Paulo day 4

Oh I'm so in love with Brazil. I can't begin to explain how much fun and eye opening today was. I didn't know these people 4 days ago and now I'm already dreading leaving them in just a few more. Maybe I'm speaking too soon, maybe tomorrow we'll all fight and hate each other. As of this second though, I can basically say I've never had a more rewarding experience in my entire life. 

These people r kewl. 

Back to the first sentence - maybe I'm not in love with Brazil, maybe it's just this experience. And how can I not? I'm living - for free - in a beautiful, brand new hostel in the middle of the cutest neighborhood in São Paulo, with 20 foreigners all around my age, all of which are funny and creative and like to dance, AND we have all the free beer we could ever want. I love everything about what this is. I've even started to like the brief we were given and I'm believing in the message. 

Today the bootcamp lasted all day. The first half of the day was spent arguing with each other about concepts and choosing the word "adventure" over "game" - then we realized we were being dumb and were missing the whole point of this - to have fun and to bring people to the game. I know I've never explained the brief and I don't think I will until I have time. It's complicated. Anyway, finally we split into smaller groups and I made my team play the arm tangle game as a way to destress. This turned into me teaching Ninja. Suddenly, the whole group was playing arm tangle and ninja for hours. After the nightly lecture, everyone got involved, including the CEO of Naked (the ad agency who's running this show) and Fefa, one of the higher ups in Naked. It was incredible. So much laughing and basically at one point I was on the floor rolling around trying not to cry because I was armless, had one leg, and I was head butting the guy next to me. 

The last two remain in Ninja. Felipe (on the right) won by chopping off Fefa's head. 

Later we learned how to samba and I continued my streak as the whitest girl alive. 

The lecture was two women who own a company called Instamissions, basically they challenge people on Instagram to follow the prompt they suggest for that week. It's gotten so popular that company's sponsor certain weeks. They gave us one at the end that was "take a photo of doing something the Brazilian way". This means...well I don't know how to explain it other than by giving examples: if your car loses a tire in Brazil, you don't get a new tire, you use a shopping cart and fashion that into your fourth tire. Or if you're at the back of the Starbucks line, you fake sick to get to the front. Things like that - kind of weaseling your way out of things. I came up with this - which admittedly is not the Brazilian way at all. But i liked that it showed one of the walls here and also the cute beer bottles I've now consumed at least 36 of. 

I just finished a long talk about hazing with two Brazilian guys. I thought I've heard some crazy fraternity hazing stories. These guys' universities don't even have fraternities, but if you live in a house off campus you'll get hazed your ENTIRE first year there. Examples include being forced to drink till you throw up into a bucket, then you freeze the bucket and turn your barf into lollipops, which you must eat at every party until it runs out. You know, nice kind stuff like that. 

I'm off to sleep and to dream about barf pops. Ciao!