A little bit of everything.

Hello everyone,

I know I'm a little (well... maybe a lot) late but here I am.
My name is Paula. I'm 21-years-old and I was born in São Paulo. I came to Londrina in 2008 to start college and now I leave alone in a really small apartment. I decided to major in English after living in Grand Rapids/MI for 1 year, where I gratuated from Kenowa Hills High School. It was a pretty challenging experience going to a foreign country not knowing much about the language and having to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on my very first week at school.

So, my exchange program gave me a whole new idea of what the USA is. Most of what we know about the USA we learn from the movies. What the cities and the schools look like, how people dress, typical food, what sports are practiced the most, American customs and so on. I learnt that not everyboy is rich, as we usually tend to believe; that cheerleaders do exist, as sometimes we think that it's just a Hollywood thing; that there's a McDonalds in every corner and a church in every corner as well (at least in Grand Rapids); that I love American junk food, especially chocolate chip cookies and brownies; that the senior prom is a really big deal; and that we Brazilians know much more about the USA than the Americans know about us.

One thing I really loved about the USA was: the school. It's really different from the type of education we usually have here in Brazil. Here in Brazil the public education is not a government's priority and it has to improve a lot, not only on the education itself but also on the infrastructure. In our high school you're not able to pick any different subjects as you would like. Everybody has the same subjects, therefore we don't change classrooms. We study with the same classmates throughout the years, there's no seniors and juniors and freshmen together in the same classroom. Sports are not a big deal and we don't compete against other schools. Private schools here offer a very good education, which in my case I found to be more difficult than the American school I attended.

I think our cultural life here is pretty agitated. Londrina is a fairly big city so there are many things to do, nice places to go. Of course Londrina can't be compared to São Paulo City or anything, but it's good enough to me. It's hard to talk about this because our customs are really different from region to region, city to city, person to person.

Ok. I think now I've finally caught up with the rest of the guys... =)
That's it for now!

(: