Premeiro Post

   So this is my first post. I am not a blogger by nature, I do not follow any blogs and I have never written one. This is out side of the chronicled journeys of Baby of course. For those of you who don't know this is my friends stuffed doll. Quite a good blog but I am getting beside myself.
   I have been here in Brasil for about three weeks now (I refuse to spell Brasil the silly American way now with the z rather than the s). Brasil in one word would be amazing. Things are different yet similar here. The people are all extremely friendly and they do have a lot of the things that we have in the States. The culture is different but isn't a far stretch from what I am used to. The food is amazing to say the least. You will never taste fresher and more flavorful fruit until you visit Brasil. The only complaint I do have about the food here is that they eat too much cheese... my bowls were having a hard time coping with the diet for the first week or so.
  I traveled with three other people here to Brasil. One boy, Joe, and two girls, Carrie and Katy. Between the four of us we have made plenty of friends and have done a decent amount of traveling for only being in the country for three weeks. I have plenty of pictures of my travels so far posted on my facebook page. Since I am assuming mostly family and friends are going to be following this blog you can just look me up there for now. Once I figure this blog thing out more I will post more pictures here.
  Just to give an overview of the program I am doing, I started by applying November of '09. This is when I first found out that I was going to go to Basil. The following semester I was required to enroll in POR 101. This was an elementary Portuguese language course. This last fall semester I took an other Portuguese course in addition to an online course on Sustainable Entrepreneurship. This Sustainable Entrepreneurship is what the whole program is based on. Northern Michigan University is working with another university in Illinois along with two universities here in Brasil, UFLA and UFRA (Universidade Federal Lavras da Amazonia and Universidade Federal Rural da Amazonia). The way the program works is they send Brasilian students to the United States at the beginning of this last fall semester. They will remain in the US until mid February. We arrived here in Brasil on the 6th of January and will not return to the US until mid August. Currently we are taking an intense Portuguese language course at UFLA. This course will last until February 11th for Carrie and myself. That weekend Carrie and I will be traveling to the north of Brasil to a larger city called Belem. This is where UFRA is located. Joe and Katy will remain here in Lavras to enroll in a semester at UFLA. Once the semester is over all of us will be doing an internship with a business. Carrie, Katy, and myself will do this internship in Belem while Joe will remain in the south in Lavras. This is also the reason why the Brasilian students who are currently in the US are staying until the middle of February. They have internships of their own and semesters don't match up exactly between Brasil and the US.
   But this is a lot of writing for now. All I wanted to do was give a brief overview for now. I plan on blogging more and explaining the rest of my experience if full. Hopefully you guys will follow along! I plan on using this somewhat as a journal for myself so I plan on updating frequently!