Day 12

Baking home! I really appreciate this amazing trip. Mostly because I met so many new friends. And as a foreign student myself, this trip is amazing, since I had the opportunity to talk with other girls deeply. Not just discussing the class contents, but talking more about daily life. I learnt from this trip. Although I missed the flight in Washington and the TAM airline missed my package, I went back home, safe and sound.
Yazheng

Day 11

Today we first visited a cow farm seeing them how to generate biofuels. It was a fancy farm and the technology using to generate biofuel is great and green. But I felt sorry about the cows. After visiting the farm, we came to Itaipu Dam finally. It was so grand that I was never thought it that huge. I had been to The Three Gorges Dam when I was a little girl, maybe I knew nothing at that time, so I thought the Itaipu Dam was much grander than The Three Gorges Dam. We first saw the whole part of the dam and then we went into the dam and saw the control center. All the concrete was beautiful. At that time, I did not regret choosing Civil Engineering as my major.
Yazheng

Day 10

Finally we arrived at Foz Do Iguaccu. Today was the most unforgettable day of my Brazil trip. We went to the bird park and Iguaccu Fall!! Both of them were wonderful!! And I did a lot of my first time in Brazil. First time to visit a bird park and first time to see a waterfall! Going into the park, we saw many kinds of parrots. One of them was able to learn what we just said. It said "hahaha" so real that I thought it must be a Chinese girl saying that.  I loved the movie Rio, so I was so excited seeing tucans! And I was so closed to them. They were beautiful! In the afternoon, we went to the 7wonders of the world, Iguaccu Fall. We had a ride in Iguaccu river, we travelled just between Argentina and Brazil. When we traveled under the fall, we just drove into the fall and all of us got so wet! After that, we saw the waterfall, it was awesome and grand. Before sunset, we went to a place where we could see Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil at the same time. It was beautiful, and it was fancy to stand in one country to see another country, let alone seeing two different countries at the same time. For dinner, we went to a buffet where had Brazilian traditional show. It was a wonderful night.
Yazheng

Day 9

Today we visited the Shree Renuka Sugars LTD. The company was founded in 1998 in India. And the sugar production of this company ranks  fifth in the world. The company owns 11 mills, 7 in India and 4 in Brazil. Mainly products of the company are sugar, ethanol and power. The raw sugar production of the company is 1,000 tons per day. Hydrous ethanol is generated 450,000 liters per day, and anhyrous ethanol is generated 300,000 liters per day. After the presentation, we had a coffee break, we tasted the coffee and tea. I thought both of them were added sugar in them, because both of them tasted so sweet. And the flavor of the tea was just like a kind of Chinese medicine. We then visited the ethanol plant, although it smelled bad, it was worth to visit it. Because we could see all the parts of operation. We had lunch at the company with their staffs. I knew that they had 30 days for vacation among which 10 days with pay. It is really great, because in China, usually we just have 5 days for vacation.

Day 8

Today we visited the University of Parana. We  visited two departments of the university. One is focused on hydraulic research, and the other is focused on biofuels. First, we visited a model of the dam building on the Parana river. It was amazing, by imitating all the structures and terrain, they could analyze how much electricity the dam could generate. I was wondering how they imitated the climate condition, while after asking that, they said they did not consider any environmental impact. Then we visited a group whose focus was generating biodiesel from microalgea. I was not familiar with this part, but one thing was really impressed me, which was that the only emission of the progress of making biodiesel was O2. I thought it was amazing. How could they do that. I thought I would spend more time on this interesting research in the future.

Day 7

We traveled 5 hours to Curitiba today and visit a modern art museum of Curitiba. The first impression to Curitiba was that this was a young and vibrant city. The museum was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, who also designed Brazil new Capitol Brasilia.  The museum looks like a shape of eye. And cloud could be reflected on the glass of the structure, which was beautiful. I thought Oscar wanted us to find the beauty in our life, so he designed the museum as a shape of eye. After our visit, I bought some gifts to my roommates. It was really worth to come here again. After we checked in, I took a shower and had a really long call to my mom, then slept happily.
Yazheng

Day 6

Today was the most exciting day of the first week in Brazil. We were going to have rafting and hot spring. It was my first time doing the rafting thing. Although it rained all day, I still felt excited and happy. Our people were separated into three groups. We were trained before going into the water. We stopped several times to take photos. And we jumped into water from a rock, which was really cool! Actually, when I was standing on the rock, I was afraid to jump. However, when I jumped into water, I felt amazing. We should experience more, right? After the rafting, when checked in a hot spring resort. It was a wonderful place. The food was good, the scenery was good the swimming pool was also good. It sounded like every thing in there was great. People danced after dinner, which made me feel about the passion of Brazilians. It was really worth to experience all those things.
yazheng

Day 5

Today is a free day for us to tour Florianopolis by ourselves. It was so luck for me to wake up without alert. I felt better after breakfast but I still decided not to hang out for long just in case of being worse of my cold. I went to the shopping center to buy some fruits, I went there directly not even using the navigation. I thought it was just the intuition of a girl finding the shopping center. On the way to the shopping center, I passed by a park, which was really beautiful, and some boys were playing skateboarding, which was cool, and reminded me of myself when I was a teenager. Knowing nothing about Portuguese was so bad. I would like to buy a bottle of water, however, I bought a soda in the end. A good news was that I knew "com gas" means soda, "sen gas" means water. I would not make this mistake again.
yazheng

Day 4

Today we were toured the city Florianopolis by Rodrigo and Daniel. It is a beautiful sea town. we visit a church, passing by a famous unfinished bridge, visit beautiful beach, and sand boarding place, which was cool. I think people in Florianopolis must feel happy for their life. Because the scenery there is beautiful and lots of family fed dogs, which looked so happy on their face. I felt so sorry for that I did not finish the tour with everybody else, because I felt so ill. After a sweet sleep, I attended the presentation tonight did by professor Dr. Baltazar Guerra. He talked about the current situation about Brazil renewable energy. The emission of green house gas is little in Brazil because Brazil uses renewable energy to create electricity.
Yazheng

Day 3

Since it was so cold in Rio Grande do Sol, most of us gat a bad cold, and even worse, I heard in the breakfast that some of our group members had a cold shower last night. while the weather today was good, although it was still cold. Today we were going to visit the wind farm at Osorio. It was a beautiful place. On our way to the farm, cows on the grassland eating grass that view made me feel happy. After the presentation, I knew that the company operated not only Brazil, but also Spain and Canada. We watched the video sowing us how the windmills were set up, and I was impressed by that part since I am majoring Civil Engineering. We also visited the control center of the farm. When I saw those windmills, I was always thinking of Zhangjiakou, which is a city near Beijing. Because there also has a wind farm in Zhangjiakou. China is now using wind energy to generate electricity as well. After our visit, we had lunch, and it was my first time to try the Brazilian barbecue, which was not bad, especially the pineapple. And then we back to Florianopolis and would stay there for 2 days.

Yazheng

Day 2

Morning! I had my second breakfast in Brazil, the first one was on the plane. We were told that Brazilians usually had a light breakfast with some fruits and some bread. When I went down to the restaurant, it was true, no ham or bacon. However, I loved that kind of breakfast offering many kinds of fruits, the best part of that was there had my favorite fruit, papaya. I noticed that my American classmates ate little papaya. After talked to them, I noticed that it was some of their first time to eat papaya, so maybe it tasted strange to them.

After breakfast, we had a 3 hours bus trip to our first company visit, Tractebel Energia. We had a presentation first, and we knew that Brazil get electricity mostly from Hydro instead of fossil fuel. It was really good to the environment. Tractebel Energia is the biggest private electrical generating company in Brazil, which owns power plants including hydro, wind generators and thermoelectric. Tractebel Energia supplied nearly 8% of the electrical energy consumed in Brazil, which was really awesome. After the presentation, we visit the control center of the company. It was amazing to see that all of the generators were controlled so well and reflected directly to us by digital data. After visiting to Tractebel Energia, we drove to Rio Grande do Sol, where was much colder than Florianopolis.
Yazheng

Day 1

This is my first blog of the amazing Brazil trip. I had a really long travel to arrive at Florianopolis from Pittsburgh. During the trip, I fount out that Shangkun, Jing, Fowzia, Joseph, and me were in the same flight. How lucky was I. When we arrived at Sao Paulo, we played cards and had a great time. Thanks to Fowzia, Shangkun, Jing, and I did not miss the flight from Sao Paulo to Florianopolis, since the Boarding Gate was changed while we did not notice it. Having arrived at Florainopolis, we were picked up by Rodrigo and Daniel, both of whom were so nice. Especially, Daniel could pronounce my name perfectly, which made me even happier. After checking in the hotel, I met with my two roommates, Yu and Kim, both of whom are so kind. Before orientation, all of our group members met with each other at the lobby. And then, we had our orientation held by Ihor and Rodrigo. We learnt a few Portuguese words during the orientation, it has a lot of fun. After that, we had group dinner in a local restaurant. We talked about ourselves making us familiar with each other quickly. It was a wonderful night.
Yazheng