Oi! Tudo bem?

Hi! Welcome to my blog! I'll be your guide for the evening.. haha.. and, since this is the first post, I guess I'll give a little intro...

I've always loved to travel. When I was younger, and even now, while I had the goal of becoming a pediatrician or something health-related, I secretly always had a dream of becoming a flight attendant. They just seemed to have it all, you know? The cute uniforms, perfect makeup, ability to speak different languages, some sort of respect/dignity, and above all, you just knew that they had seen the world.

I'm sure, though, that being a flight attendant is a lot of work and, like any job, has it's ups AND downs. Besides, I love the sciences and hope to have a profession in that realm. So, I'll scratch off flight attendant for now + put it on the shelf, pursue a science career... and maybe be one of those elderly ladies who comes out of retirement to suddenly become a flight attendant?

Anyway, I digress. Point is, no matter what profession I pursue, I want to travel.

However, I can't be certain that I'll be able to find a job that'll allow me to travel - - Which is why I decided that I wanted to study abroad sometime during my college years.

I started looking at potential study-abroad locations already during my first semester in college, and thought that Germany would be a good choice, since Germany is pretty well known for their good research in science, particularly pharmaceuticals (which is what I was interested in). So. I signed up for a German class for my second semester in college.
Let's just keep this short and say that this ended up being a little traumatic for me. Eagerly, I went to the first class and was:
1. Surrounded by upperclassmen and graduate students (INTIMIDATING!)
2. Surrounded by people who already knew some German (It was a BEGINNER'S German class, though!! DOUBLE the intimidation!)
3. I know it's a good teaching technique, but the teacher was speaking in German the ENTIRE time (Even on the FIRST DAY!)
4. Hearing German in person... it sounded SO foreign to me, not too pretty, either, so it just sort of turned me off.
Needless to say, I was SCARED. Besides, the class interfered with my OChem lab, so... let's just say that I dropped German for the practical purpose of fulfilling credit for my major.

After this, though, I just decided that I wasn't interested in Europe. Along with my childhood dreams of becoming a pediatrician, I also had this goal of someday working with Doctors Without Borders, or some other charity organization that goes abroad to help citizens of other countries that are REALLY in need. The areas of the world that I was interested in were SouthEast Asia, Africa, and Brazil. So, I started looking up programs that went to these locales.

The only program in Africa through my school was in Ghana, and my mom wasn't EVER going to let me go there.
I wanted to go to Thailand (I must admit, mainly because of the temples, elephants, and FOOD), but the protests that have been recently occurring in Thailand didn't really appeal to me or neither of my parents.
So, I decided on Brazil.
And... seeing that it's very difficult for science majors to receive credit while studying abroad during the normal semester, I decided to study abroad during the summer.

Brazil has been on my mind for a while... And I know that I'm going to sound naive, mainly since I've never been there and haven't done that much research AT ALL on it, but... here are some of my main reasons WHY I want to go to Brazil:
1. I've never been to South America
2. Portuguese is such a beautiful language
3. Many Japanese people immigrated to Brazil, so I feel that I'd have SOME sort of clutch if I felt lost (identity-wise) in Brazil
4. Many OTHER people have immigrated to Brazil, and I'd love to see what kind of mixed culture has been "brewing" in Brazil / Being "mixed," myself, I'd like to see what kind of culture dynamic is in Brazil
5. The weather and beaches (Hey, SOcal girl, here. What you gonna do?)
6. I want a change/ new experience.

My experience begins when I fly from LAX to Brazil on June 19th, then come back on August 2.

I'm super excited.