Sunday, March 11, 2012

School started a week and a half ago, on Feb 28 I think, and its been pretty good so far. Right now my schedule has five classes which are: Mechanics of Materials, Ecology for Environmental Engineering, Collection and Disposal of Solid Waste, Fluid Mechanics, and Portuguese. I am really looking forward to the ecology class, I've been wanting an excuse to take one of those for a while now. Sadly it only meets once a week, from 7-10 on Monday morning, but we do have a field trip in April so its a trade-off I can handle. All the others are about as interesting as they sound I guess. Mechanics of Materials and Fluid Mechanics will probably be two o the easier classes because I have to know a lot less Portuguese to understand whats going on, so I should come out of those OK. The solid waste class is taught Dr. Araruna who is the professor at PUC that is part of the exchange.

When I first arrived at PUC Araruna introduced me to an Iranian engineering professor that does a lot of structural work with bamboo. He offered to let me build a bamboo bike, so I said yes. Not sure yet how its going to work out, but I'm going to his lab on Monday to meet everyone and hopefully get started sometime soon. Should be pretty cool.

I forgot to mention surf class. We meet on Saturdays at a beach about a 20 minute bus ride from me. Yesterday was the first day in the water. It was cold. Other than the cold though, it was a lot of fun. The waves weren't very good so we didn't get a whole lot of opportunities, but they were probably good for the first day.

So Rio has been going well. Its really quieted down after carnaval and its been nice to have a set schedule again. 

3 comments:

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  2. do you get credit for the surf class or is it extracurricular?

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  3. Got any pics of your progress on the bamboo bike?

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