Florianópolis/ABRAPUI

In early May, I had the opportunity to travel to Florianópolis for the first time. Not only did I get to attend the ABRAPUI conference, but I also got to visit a BEAUTIFUL city!

So, first, about the city. Florianópolis is a city in the state of Santa Catarina, in the South of Brazil. It is composed of one main island, a continental part, and surrounding small islands. The first night I arrived, I stayed in a great hotel in the continental part and got to see (though not cross) the beautiful bridge connecting this part to the main island. 

I spent the first couple of days with my Fulbright coordinator, Andressa, and her family traveling around this great city. I'd heard many things about Florianópolis already, including how beautiful it was, but I really could not believe how BEAUTIFUL it was! Words don't do it justice! As it is partly an island and completely surrounded by beaches, you'll find beaches of every type. Soft sand, hard sand, no sand, only sand, rough water, calm water...you get the picture. Check out one (and probably my favorite) of the beaches that we went to:

As you can't really tell from this picture, this beach is famous for having huge sand dunes. I wasn't brave enough to try sandboarding, but I did run down the dunes a time or two (or eight). 

From here we visited more beaches, went to some points that overlooked the city, and had a great Italian dinner. We spent a wonderful weekend seeing as much as we could of the city!

Come Monday, the real reason we'd traveled to Floripa began, the ABRAPUI conference. Most of the presentations at ABRAPUI (Associação Brasileira de Professores Universitários de Inglês) focused on the use of technology as a tool to teaching language and literature. Professors from all over Brazil and abroad attended and presented. Attending the sessions not only provided a lot of useful information, but gave me a little boost to change and improve my own teaching style and activities, which is always needed. Here we have some of the students and professors from UTFPR who were in attendance (and some of whom presented!):

In addition to attending several sessions, some of which were of professors from UTFPR, the main reason I attended this conference was because Andressa was doing a presentation about the Fulbright ETA program along with some other professors participating in the program. I got to meet the coordinators and hear about the experiences of ETAs living in Uberlândia, Tocantins, and Goiânia, And, as a bonus, the ETAs from Goiânia were also there! It was great to hear about everyone's experiences and get to spend some time with some other ETAs. 

Luckily, it wasn't all work for us even after the conference started. We still got to see some city sites, and went out to a great dinner on a beautiful lake on the island. Having fun with some professors after a hard day's work:

All in all, can't say enough good things about this city and this experience. Thanks to Andressa and everyone else who made it possible for me to go!