Welcome!
On this website, you will be able to find information about the Prosperando study tour and its organizing committee.ReCa(m)pinas
After the chaos of Rio de Janeiro and the tranquility of Foz do Iguaçu, Campinas felt most like Eindhoven to me. Especially in the northern part, where we stayed, the campus of UNICAMP has a prominent place just like the TU/e campus has.Even after we have been in Brazil for three weeks, some things have not ceased to amaze us, like the inability of people in the streets to speak English and the interpretation of traffic rules. I suspect that traffic seems to operate by diffusion. So much for smart mobility!
During our visit at UNICAMP we saw that this would be a nice place to study or work. The people over there were really enthusiastic, proud on their work and open for discussion. We visited a really nice mix of companies around Campinas, from fundamental physics to optics and wireless communication and from series production of innovative electric go-karts to mass-production of Chevrolet trucks. For each of the participants there were multiple things of interest.
Personally, I was pleasantly surprised by the Eldorado institute and their well-equipped measurement and qualification facilities. In spite of cabling challenges in, say, favelas, there is at least awareness of EMC (electromagnetic compatibility).
We spent our free time in Campinas mainly by relaxing (the men) and shopping (the women). Since there was not too much to do around the city, relaxing was mainly done at our nice hostel in the shadows of some trees. Some nice new stories were born, but these are better left untold here. Ask the participants if you want to know the details.
Written by Rob Mestrom
written on: 05-08-2014
Day 20:Don Julio Returns
After the nice tour through Holambra yesterday, most of the participants decided to spend the morning of this free Sunday in bed. Because breakfast was only available until 9.30, some of the smarter participants brokered with the more early birds about breakfast delivery service. Instead, a note was delivered requesting the deposit of a fee to the plant next to room 1. After payment, the people from not room 1 released their hostages, thereby providing at least a partial solution to the world food problem.Unfortunately, Campinas is not the more liveliest place to visit on Sunday and hence plans to go swimming had to be cancelled because no swimming pools were open (it is Brazilian winter after all...). Instead, some of the guys decided to follow the girls and go back to the Don Pedro shopping mall. After a bumpy bus ride the girls actually went shopping while the guys had some fun involving a remote control and a wall of televisions in the multimedia store. The record for worst kart score was also broken with an average speed of 12 km/h, which raised some doubts regarding the lap registration system.
The rest of the group stayed in the hostel and enjoyed their free time with sunbathing, chatting, drinking and outdoor wrestling. According to their intelligence agency, there was supposed to be a good Mexican restaurant near the hostel. Most of the group decided to eat there but the restaurant had closed down. Instead we ended up on a terrace that was so dark a pocket light was required to read the menu, although the Brazilian food was still nice.
In the evening, Bar 10 decided to challenge Don Julio and buy the necessary ingredients to produce homemade Caipirinha. Don Julio can best be described as the curse that, when you order an expensive drink, there is no doubt that you will spill it later on. Many participants have already suffered from Don Julio's wrath. Especially Tim, who, several nights ago, spilled his 15 Euro per shot of Don Julio tequila while talking too enthusiastically.
At the supermarket, the cashier was not too happy when the ingredients of the Caipirinhas were paid with almost 30 Reais of small coins, but at least the customers behind in the queue did not have to worry about lack of change. One member of the ReisCo decided to place a large order of 20 Caipirinhas, but this released the Wrath of Don Julio: the alcohol induced some local motion control issues and several of the Caipirinhas ended up as fertilizer for the grass.
All in all, despite Campinas being quite boring on Sunday, it was a good day where most of the participants enjoyed themselves and recharged their batteries for the travel to Sao Paulo and visits of Omron and Eaton tomorrow.
Written by Patrick Wijnings
written on: 05-08-2014
Day 19:Holambra
The day started with people still being amazed of the jokes told the night before whereas other people had gone to a club and had to recover from this. While driving on the highway, there was a traffic jam which again proved the difference in driving style. People were turning around in the middle of the highway to go back and avoid the traffic jam even when both roads had quite a height difference.During the trip through the small town of Holambra, it became clear right away that it was a Dutch colony. The latter because of the destruction of all the farms in the Netherlands in WW2. Farms which Holambra had.
The town has a lot of orange buildings and ornaments because the people who do use orange in their houses get a tax reduction. It was possible to buy clogs, stroopwafels and 'Delfts Blauw'. Unfortunately they also copied a Dutch mill (the biggest of South America) and a field of flowers which both made me ashamed that they all think Holland is like that. Even the local church was orange and the nearby restaurants sold "frikadellen" , "poffertjes" and more of the Dutch traditional food.
About two minutes after the start of the excursion at the cachaça Ranch, we were already trying and experimenting with liqueur and cachaça of different flavors including caramel, cinnamon and Jabuticaba (fruit). All of them were very tasty and had a strong smell. This lead to quite some people buying a bottle of cachaça which were manually bottled in front of us. At this place, we also got a good lunch served with the standard buffet ingredients: drinks, meat and salad according to one's likings. The total production of the brewery (except distillation) was done inside a single small shed where there he still had barrels that went back to 2009. Here it was only possible to produce in 1 season to avoid the sugar cane being wet and decreasing the flavor.
Between the excursions of the farm and the brewery, there was a city tour which was quite simple and not very extensive. However, it showed us the mills and flower farms which could also be seen in the Netherlands at a bigger scale (no offence to the enthusiastic tour guide though). It was fun to see it in Brazil as well and the information about its history and current situation was interesting and fun to hear.
The last part of the day was inside the Schornstein brewery that produces 70000 liter of beer every month with a 10000 liter production capacity in an older factory. This wasn't enough for them since they wanted to expand, because more is better. The rest of the excursion consisted of an explanation on how they produce the beer which was mostly an automatic process of mixing, boiling and fermenting. The dinner that followed was combined with testing the beer they brewed there. The beer was great and had a good taste. This final diner concluded the active part of the day for most people.
As I am writing the story I am enjoying the sun and nice temperature during our day off.
Written by Niels Vertegaal
written on: 03-08-2014
Day 18:Mariokart in practice
After another evening with a lot of Caipirinhas at 'bar 10', we started our day with a walk to UNICAMP. That is the university here in Campinas, which is one of the best (public) universities in Brazil. At UNICAMP we first visited the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where we were given three interesting presentations. The first presentation was about the school itself. The school has about 1000 students in total of which 600 at EE. Each year, 100 new students are accepted for the study Electrical Engineering while 2000 people apply for such a place. In 2013 the school achieved the 51st rank in the QS Top Universities worldwide. It even became 16th in the category of academic reputation. In Brazil, the graduate programs are periodically evaluated by the funding agency CAPES, which graded the FEEC with the highest grade 7. This makes FEEC the best graduate program in Brazil.
Over 2011, FEEC had a budget of 20.7 million US$ from external sources and 37.0 million US$ from the SP state revenue. The FEEC distinguishes between day and night courses; students that follow day courses are supposed to get their undergraduate degree in five years while night students need seven years.
Secondly, we were given a presentation by two members of the UNICAMP E-Racing team, the electrical formula team. This student team participates yearly in the Formula SAE project, the biggest student engineering competition in the world. As one of us is a part of the Eindhoven University Racing Team (URE), we shared technical characteristics and discussed differences and similarities between the Campinas and Eindhoven designs. Until now, the UNICAMP E-Racing Team has won all SAE competitions they participated in.
The third presentation dealt with Ekion, a startup with the vision of becoming a world-class supplier of systems and components for the electric vehicles industry. Ekion has developed, amongst others, new battery packs which were tested in electric go karts. This was the reason to start up a new company, Kartfly electric racing, where we would be able to test the electric Go-Karts later today. But before doing so, we spontaneously walked by the workplace of the E-Racing Team to have a look at their racing car of 2013.
After that, we walked to Eldorado, a private non-governmental non-profit organization with an impressive R&D department. At Eldorado, we first had a delicious lunch followed by a presentation introducing the company. Eldorado has 643 employees of which 469 work in Campinas. Later we had a tour through the impressive test labs, where standard qualification tests are performed such as electromagnetic compatibility and overheating tests for mobile phones.
After having a look at the amazing test labs, we finally went to Kartfly by bus. There we could test the electric Go-Karts for a special price. It was really amazing.
After testing the Go-Karts, the women and Rob went for shopping at the nearby shopping mall. We also finished our day with a nice dinner there. Some of us directly took a taxi to the hostel, others took the bus and enjoyed a city tour through Campinas while the last group of people stayed at the restaurant to go to the biggest disco of Campinas later on.
Written by Lisa Teunissen
written on: 03-08-2014
Day 17:Airplanes&Cars
Everybody was quite excited about the excursions of today, so everybody was at 7:30 in the bus. After a long two hour journey to Sao José and a change in weather from sunny to not so sunny, we arrived at the aerospace museum. The museum is part of a military memorial and all is done to keep it safe, so it was quite interesting to know that they had a power outage.The first thing visible were several aeronautical vehicles, 'Technological and scientific' ROCKETS and a small building. At the museum we got quite a lot of interesting information. For example: the Japanese people clean up their garbage after a world cup match and that Brazil had an economic crisis and therefore made an ethanol car. To prove for some skeptical people that it would work, they crossed Brazil (with a fuel truck behind it). By the way, the engineering guide uses gasoline instead of ethanol due to economic reasons in his bi-fuel car.
More interesting facts were told about Brazil, politics and relations between other countries. In the museum he told us about multiple combustion engines and about “Technological and scientific” rockets they make at a military base. After the tour we went to a shopping mall for a typical Brazilian lunch also known as “Wok”, which was very delicious.
The next excursion was at General Motors, where we found the first person who could speak a proper English. We got a nice informal introduction about GM with good snacks and drinks.
Next, we got to see the assembly line of the S10 and Trailblazer. Faster than our eyes could see, we went through the assembly line. It was noted that Brazilians like white cars. After seeing the car production, we went to the production of the Engines and gears, where mainly closed machines were spotted.
We went back to the hostel and searched for a vegetarian restaurant. 'Unfortunately', it was bankrupt, just like half of all the other restaurants. Therefore, we went to an Arab place. Our 'fluent' Portuguese again worked against us, as Duco got a mysteriously shaped sausage for dinner and Yuk Hang didn't get any food at all. However, he had a big-ass hot dog afterwards.
Fun fact: Did you know that if you wear a suit in Rio de Janeiro, you do not blend in.
Written by Ralph Roetman