CONCERTS

The good thing about living in a big city as Miami is that you know all the good bands are going to make a stop here. I was very very lucky to get tickets for all the concerts I wanted. After 10 years I finally saw one of my favorite bands: The FOO FIGHTERS live last year teaming up with WEEZER.
After that our concert season started, we went to AEROSMITH and LENNY KRAVITS, FIONA APPLE, COLDPLAY, the surviving members to Freddy Mercury: QUEEN, the legends of rock The ROLLING STONES and the best band ever: PEARL JAM, they are my favorite band and finally after 14 years I got to see them from up close. All these pictures are from the Pearl Jam concert in Las Vegas.

MIAMI HEAT 2006 NBA CHAMPIONS

LET'S GO HEAT!
Finally after 18 years, Miami's basquetball team THE MIAMI HEAT won its first NBA title. I was lucky enough to get tickets for the final of the Eastern Conference, an amazing game, it is a great show they put on: cheerleaders, fire and everything with the "White Heat" theme. This team has a lot of the best playes on the NBA, like Dwayne Wade and Shaquil O'Neal, they are amazing to watch, what a show!
So here are some pics from the NBA final in the American Airlines Arena. After the Heats won everybody went crazy on the streets, us included, honking all over and cheering up for the Heats.

CULTURAL NIGHTS

We found out a good way to getting close to our home countries by preparing "Cultural Nights": we get together at somebody's house and one country offers its typical food, drinks and music. So far we have had Brazilian Night, Mexican Night, Peruvian Night and hopefully soon Argentine night. Very fun to share what your country has to offer.

For Mexican Night we had a lot and a lot of food: Tacos, Enchiladas, Chilaquiles, Tostadas and a lot of Tequila. It's very nice to find a cuisine with so much variety in taste, ingredients and also with so much joy for spice food like our peruvian food.

On Brazilian Night they also made a lot of food: starting of course with Caipirinhas, Feijoada which is rice and beans with pork, Pastel which is a fried meat empanada, amog other things. They tried to teach everybody how to "Samba", but it is so dificult to get it right, also they have this "Forro" music wich is very nice.

For Peruvian Night we made of course the only and unique PISCO SOUR, Papa a la huancaina, Arroz con pollo, Chicha and Mazamorra morada, also I made a power point presentation of Peru showing Machu Picchu, Colca Valley, The Amazon and Lima. All this was just before the cops arrived and threw everybody away from the apartment but the party was almost over anyways.

THE AIESEC TRAINEES: THE BEST OF EACH COUNTRY

El programa de pasantias de AIESEC es muy conocido en Kraft Foods a nivel mundial, viene siendo una parte importante del reclutamiento de talento joven desde 1989. Alrededor del mundo hay aprox 75 trainees de AIESEC, aqui en Miami somos 16 trainees trabajando en departamentos como Marketing, Logistica, Ventas, Finanzas, Operaciones, Exportaciones y Recursos Humanos.

Los paises de los que venimos: Argentina (2), Brazil (2), Colombia (1), Costa Rica (1), El Salvador (1), Guatemala (2), Mexico (3), Peru(2), Venezuela (1) and India (1). Tuve la suerte de encontrar un muy buen grupo de trainees, todos nos hemos hecho buenos amigos y casi siempre salimos en grupo, sea a la playa, al gymnasio, a conciertos, discotecas, cine, a almorzar, etc. Lo bueno de esta diversidad cultural es que siempre tenemos muchas cosas que compartir de nuestras culturas, experiencias personales y al final del dia uno regresa a casas sabiendo algo mas de cada pais.

A pesar de que somos latinos y hablamos el mismo idioma, hay muchisimas cosas en las que somos diferentes y otras que somos muy parecidos.

Diferentes: desde las cosas que comemos, las palabras que usamos para nombrar las cosas, por ejemplo “Casaca” en Peru es un abrigo pero en Mexico es chamarra y en Argentina campera, o la palabra “Enamorada” que senciallamente somos el unico pais que la usa, todos los demas usan “Novia” cosa que tomo tiempo acostumbrarme a usar. Pero como siempre decimos tratamos de hablar espanol estandar, osea con palabras que supuestamente todos entendemos.
Tambien hay muchas cosas que en nuestros paises se repiten: el apego a la familia, la religion, la forma de manejar “a la latina”, la inpuntualidad “la hora latina”, la realidad social de nuestros paises, la informalidad de nuestros politicos y la falta de orden en las calles, pero a la vez todos tenemos las mismas ganas por siempre mejorar como profesionales y salir adelante dia tras dia.

HURRICANE SEASON

One difficult part of living in Florida, is the Hurricane Season, we are close again Caribbean, Florida, the Golf of Mexico and Cancun. to this period starting in May and resuming in November. I experienced already the whole season, to be honest is no joke. Hurricanes can be devastating if the city is not well prepared. How does this starts? Very simple, the whole Caribbean area is a low pressure zone which accelerates the formation of tropical storms that afterwards become Hurricanes, which means trouble for all this zone,

Hurricane Dennis was the first hurricane that came within Florida, although it was a category one, we were not allowed to go out to the streets or wander around.

Hurricane Katrina was the big one, started out with string winds, you could actually see the sky moving over your head, when it was time to get home things started to get ugly. I could hear the thunders roaring, the string rain, everything turned a littler bit blue and that’s when we knew we were at the eye of the storm. We got a lot of fallen trees, energy polls, broken windows, very chaotic scene. However New Orleans got the worst part as you might know, the city flooded and millions of people lost their home.

Wilma came out of nowhere, all of a sudden we heard on the news that a storm was going to hit Cancun and we were next. For three days Wilma passed through Cancun before hitting us, we were lucky again, even though we got a lot of wind, rain and pretty much the same devastation as in Katrina, Miami held on for five days without electricity.