Two Worlds United Programs in Brazil for High School students
Overview |
Brazil
is a land in which the past collides with the future. Cows
lumber across multilaned highways, battery-powered TVs
blare in the jungle, and some of the world's most
sophisticated music emanates from the sorriest ghettoes.
In Brazil's modern metropolises, skyscrapers surge toward
heaven, while only blocks away lie beaches of such
astonishing beauty they can only be called paradise. Hot
spices, hot rhythms, hot climes combine to produce a
multicultural mélange of elements as diverse as animist
cults, and Carnival.
Some observers have characterized Brazil as an adolescent
struggling to find itself in the face of an enormous but
chaotic inheritance. Long called a sleeping giant, Brazil
is just now waking from a hibernation that has, with a few
notable exceptions, kept it politically and economically
dormant for most of the 20th century. From its birth as a
Portuguese colony with unlimited promise, it has steadily
transformed from unwieldy empire to ambitious republic to
repressive dictatorship, progressing into the democracy it is today, supported firmly
but cautiously by the world's major powers.
Brazil today is a country where you can travel between
centuries in a matter of hours. Two Worlds United students can experience
the Amazon rain forest, whose indigenous people live as
they did 5,000 years ago; 18th-century historical villages
where you'll find horses hitched to posts; 19th-century fazendas
(ranches), with cowhands still riding the range;
fashionable 20th-century cities such as Rio de Janeiro and
São Paulo, where international trends set the style; and
Brasília, whose avant-garde sculptured buildings proudly
face toward the 21st century. Some tiny villages, such as
São Tomé das Letras in Minas Gerais, that seem
otherworldly—it's not for nothing that Brazil has a
reputation for some of the most famous UFO sightings in
the world.
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TWO WORLDS UNITED
Admissions Dep't.
Tel: 1 (805) 581-9191
Fax: 1 (805) 581-6079
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