Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre was my first stop. This place on the North-east coast of Brasil is a relatively laid-back little city with a more tropical kind of a weather, though pretty balanced as I heard, neither too hot nor too cold. Recife is the capital of the Pernambuco state of Brasil.

The first day at Recife was a bit rainy🌧️ in the morning with dark clouds☁️ looming over the skies. It was indeed the season of rains there and Recife is well known for torrential downpours, streets flooding and such.

But soon things turned around and it became bright and sunny🌞 . The day was spent on a quick drive around the city, lunch at a lovely place and a walk around a nearby garden. There were some lovely graffiti painted on the walls there.

Recife is known for its lovely beaches🏖️ . The one that is right in the city, Boa Viagem is lovely but is teeming with sharks as I was told and warned, not a place to venture into for sure 😃 There are the other beautiful and happening ones that are a couple of hours drive from the city.

Got to visit one such location known as the Porto de Galinhas. This place is in fact made up of multiple little beaches. You basically are taken on a buggy ride to indulge in beach-hopping. Have heard of bar-hopping, but this beach-hopping was new! 😉Maracaipe was one of the most beautiful of them that I got to visit.

I visited Porto de Galinhas by booking myself on a locally arranged group tour. The most interesting part of this tour was that it did not have an English-speaking guide, only a Portuguese-speaking one. None of them, neither the people on the tour travelling along with me nor the folks at the beach in Porto de Galinhas spoke or understood English. Was fun to be using google translate to communicate back and forth 😀Few of the folks in the group also got into the habit of using google translate to talk to me 😉

The tour guide was very kind and helpful. She used to blurt out a long passage of instructions in Portuguese soon to realise that I hadn’t understood a wee bit of them and immediately would switch to type the same or speak it out to google translate and show me the translated text 😀

Explored the place and bought a few nice T-shirts as well. Had great fun.

Post all the fun, it was time to get back to work. Landed in the Recife office and was quite impressed by the place. On the 15th floor of the building with a fantastic view! Loaded pantry and lovely coffee, prepared by one of the Thoughtworkers who is a coffee connoisseur.

After looking around the office, taking some pics and having had some lovely coffee, it was time to get to work. The next days were full of intense sessions. Lots of interactions with the teams and discussions. Very draining, but interesting ones.

We also took a few Polaroid pics to clip them to the mural sort of board setup there, that you see in one of the images above. Great stuff and nice memories. After a week at Recife, the first leg of my trip to Brasil was coming to an end.

Here’s the Recife evening skyline from the office, what a lovely view!!

Final day in Recife - All packed up, checked out, loaded the luggage into the car and headed out with a few of my Thoughtworks colleagues to visit the Botanical garden in Recife.

From the garden, we headed to lunch at a lovely Pizza 🍕 spot. Then to a fancy coffee shop in ‘São Braz’ to finish off everything with a refreshing cup of coffee and cake 😀