Blog It Forward – Pedro Freitas

Oi pessoal!

That’s portuguese for Hey everyone!

I posted a blog for people to get to know the SAP Product Support Facebook and Twitter channels and after I posted it, it was moved here to the About SCN space. Just in case you’re interested, here it goes: The specified item was not found.

Anyway, I mentioned that because that’s how I ended up finding out about the Blog It Forward Challenge here in the About SCN space. I have to say, this is really awesome 🙂

I was blogged forward by Jitendra Kansal‘s BIF. I have never seen him before, never heard of him before, but I can already tell you he is a nice guy 😆 . Thanks for the invite JK!

If you want to get more details on the Blog It Forward Challenge, check out more info here: Blog It Forward Community Challenge

Like Jitendra, I’d also like to thank xMoshe Naveh (Old Acct), who started this really cool initiative! And if you want to join the challenge and you haven’t been tagged by anyone yet, list your details here for someone to invite you: Blog It Forward- Request to Join Table

Intro

My name is Pedro Henrique Nascimento Rodrigues de Freitas. I know, that’s like a whole train, not a name 😛

My first name is Pedro Henrique. Nascimento is my mom’s family name. Rodrigues de Freitas is my dad’s family name.

And that is pretty much how names are composed in Brazil.

For making things easier, I normally just stick to Pedro Freitas.

I’m 28 years old, and I live in the south of Brazil. I lived in France for around 4 years as a child…and for almost another 4 years during my higher studies. I got a masters in Information Systems there, in a city called Grenoble. Because of that I speak French…je parle bien le français 🙂 . And I also had the chance to live in the US for a year when I was a child, because of my dad. We lived in a little city called Towson, which is right next to Baltimore, MD. It was a great year for us, and I got to learn English as a child, which is much easier than as an adult.

By the way, cool story about the year I lived in the US…Michael Phelps was in my class. I didn’t know he was a swimmer, so when I was back in Brazil and saw him on tv in the Sydney Olympic Games the first thing I did was think to myself: Hey! I know this guy!…then I ran to find my yearbook from Dumbarton Middle School 1997/1998 in the States and there he was.

I have a younger brother. He is actually in the US right now, starting a Master of Laws at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. I’m really proud of him.

I started working at SAP in September, 2009. Almost 5 years now. Time goes by too fast. I started in Product Support, and I’m still here today. I changed teams though. I worked with SAP SCM (SPP and SNC) for 4 years and now finishing up my first year with SAP SD. This is the SAP Labs Latin America building in São Leopoldo, state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the south of Brazil:

There are a lot of things I enjoy doing, but I think the one thing I enjoy the most is travelling. These are the places I’ve been to:

As you can see, I still have to discover Africa 🙂

Other things I like include sports. I run, and I play basketball with a group of colleagues from work and football (or soccer for my north american friends) as well.

We have a running group at the SAP Labs Latin America, which I already blogged about here: SAP Runners

Here’s a picture of me and my brother enjoying a FIFA World Cup match this last June/July here in Brazil:

I’m the one in blue. As you may know, Brazil is the only nation to have won the FIFA World Cup 5 times. SAP made us a t-shirt here in Brazil and I took it with me to the Opening Match:

We were hoping Brazil would win at home, but that dream ended when we took a hard hit from Germany. I actually watched that match here at the SAP building I work in, and at some point we were happy for Germany when we lost, which was kind of crazy, but we really love working here.

And here’s my family…in Brazil family is a really big deal:

This one was taken on a trip to California we did together last year.

Fun Facts about my country Brazil

Starting with the flag…

There is no official meaning for the colors, but popularly green is to represent the forests and the yellow the mineral wealth of the country. It has 27 white stars. One for each state:

To give you an idea of size, I just found this really great website and I’ll share it with you so you can play with it too: MapFight – compare country size

If we compare Brazil to the US, you’ll see Brazil is bigger than the US:

If we compare Brazil to Europe, you’ll see my country is actually almost a whole continent by itself:

And if we compare it to India, as I think a looot of people who contribute here in the SCN are from India, well, we could fit India 2 and half times inside Brazil:

Maybe some of you guys should move here…we are a big country, but only 200 million people living here!

Usually abroad people tend to think Brazil is only soccer, samba, women and beautiful beaches…and I’m really happy we do have all of that! Yeah 😎

This is Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro.

This is a “Carnaval” parade, also in Rio.

But Brazil is much more than that.

For example, Brazil has a large oil company called Petrobrás. It is number 30 in the World’s biggest public companies ranking by Forbes. If you’re a Formula 1 fan, perhaps you’ve seen their logo on the Williams racing cars.

Another brazilian company worth mentioning is Embraer. Embraer is a brazilian aerospace conglomerate that produces commercial, military, executive and agricultural aircrafts. Embraer competes with Bombardier for the title of third largest airplane maker after Boeing and Airbus. A lot of major airline companies are in Embraer’s list of customers. If you have flown Jetblue in the US, chances are you’ve already been in a brazilian airplane!

The capital of Brazil is called Brasília. A lot of people don’t know this. They think it’s Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo.

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil and perhaps the largest in the Americas by population competing with New York at around 20 million people. It is also the financial center of our country.

Another thing people usually think is that we speak Spanish. I’m sorry, but we speak Portuguese. All other countries around us in South America speak Spanish, but we had to be different 🙂 …and Portuguese is the 6th most spoken language in the world.

I’m almost forgetting to mention Foz do Iguaçu. This city is famous for the waterfalls, you might know them as Iguaçu Falls. I’ve been there, and it is really nature at its best. It is a wonderful place. To give you an idea of the dimension here…I’ve read that Niagara Falls has 2 waterfalls, where as at the Iguaçu falls there are around 275 waterfalls. They are located at a border with Argentina, so there are some falls on our side and some on the Argentinian side. It is the second most visited place in Brazil after Rio de Janeiro. Have a look:

Another place we are often remembered for is the Amazon forest. You should know the Amazon forest is actually a part of 9 nations. The majority of the forest is contained within Brazil, with 60% of the rainforest, followed by Peru with 13%, Colombia with 10%, and with minor amounts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

Going back to soccer, as I already mentioned, we are the only nation to have won the FIFA World Cup 5 times. After winning it 3 times you get to keep the trophy, but the one we got to keep when we reached our third title was stolen. Can you believe it?

That’s the “Confederação Brasileira de Futebol” symbol, the Brazilian Football Confederation, which is on Brazil’s national team jersey. The 5 stars stand for each world title. We also have Pelé, who is known for being the greatest player of all time. You could say he is to football (soccer) what Michael Jordan is for basketball. We are great in football (soccer), however, unfortunately, there is not much money invested into other sports. That’s really a shame, especially considering we are hosting the next Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Some other fun facts I just found out about to share with you:

• Brazil has the helicopter fleet that grows the most in the world. São Paulo has the third largest traffic of helicopters in the world.
• The brazilian flag that is on the Praça dos Três Poderes in our capital Brasília is the largest flag displayed on a flag pole in the world. Due to its size it is damaged easily because of the weight of the flag and the wind and it is changed every month! Each month a different brazilian state is responsible to pay for the new flag.
• Around 1500 different species of fish have already been found in the Amazon rivers, but estimates predict at least double that number will be found. That is 15 times more than all the species of fish found in all of the rivers in Europe.
• It was a brazilian who lived in France that created the first poster ad for a film ever. His name was Candido de Faria, and in 1902 he made a poster for the movie Les Victimes de l’Alcoolisme, inspired in the work of Émile Zola.
• Joinville, a city more to the south of Brazil, hosts a dancing event every year which is in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the largest dance festival in the world, with around 6000 participants from over 30 countries.

And to end this section, I guess I have to let you know that it is not always sunny and hot in Brazil. In the southern states, like where I live, it does get cold. Really cold for us even. You see, in Europe all of the buildings are really prepared for the cold weather, you will almost never enter a building without a heating system in Europe. However in the summer, it is a pain, as most buildings don’t have air conditionning to make things cooler. In Brazil, it’s the opposite. We are prepared for the heat, but not that much for the cold. So we do feel cold, even though temperatures are not as rough as in Europe in winter time.

Right now, in Porto Alegre, the city I live in, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the most southern state of Brazil, just before Uruguay, it is 12 degrees celsius. That is around 53 degrees farenheint (to save you the trouble 🙂 ). It can get down to 0 degrees celsius (32 farenheint) or even a little less at night. So if you have a trip to Brazil, and it is to one of the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina or Paraná…and you are coming in June/July/August…best be ready for some cold weather.

Fun fact about my hometown

As I just mentioned, my hometown is Porto Alegre. It is the capital of the most southern state in Brazil. Here’s a map to give you an idea:

We don’t have the beach in Porto Alegre…there are some if you drive for about 2 hours. That’s really not far at all for us. When you live in such a big country, you tend to have a different view on distances. Usually for my friends in Europe everything is far, where as here we do pretty much almost anything by car. My father’s family is from a city called Uruguaiana. That is also in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, except Porto Alegre as you can see on the map is on the right side, and Uruguaiana is on the other side, on the left, on the border with Argentina. To drive there from Porto Alegre it takes a 700km drive. And we haven’t left our state! In Europe you could drive from Paris, to Brussel, to Amsterdam and end up in Dusseldorf if you drove all of that. So you would have gone to 3 different countries…while here I did not leave my state. Crazy, right?

We do have a river, it’s called Rio Guaíba. It is nice to have the river. People can go and enjoy their speed boats, sailing boats, jetskis, and so on…

That’s my dad’s sailboat. As you can see, he named it after his hometown.

Porto Alegre hosted the World Social Forum in 2003. And was a host city for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. We had France x Honduras, Netherlands x Australia, South Korea x Algeria, Argentina x Nigeria, and Germany x Algeria play here. It was really an awesome experience to have such an event in my home country.

The fun fact about Porto Alegre is that we have 2 big football teams (soccer). They both play in the first division of brazilian football (soccer). When I was younger, the team I cheer for, Grêmio, was doing better. These last years it is rival team Internacional who is doing better.

Grêmio wears black, white and blue…Internacional wears red and white. So you see, when you come here, you have to choose, blue or red.

When we are born, our families pretty much make that choice for us. You will always have someone from the family bring a Grêmio or Inter outfit as a gift.

Rivalry is really strong…so strong that both teams have the same sponsors, as brands are affraid of supporting only one of the teams and losing the other half of the state as customers.

At Grêmio’s stadium, for many years Coca-Cola was a sponsor and provided drinks. Did we have red and white Coca-Cola logos in the stadium? No way! They were all black and white!

Now Grêmio has a new stadium. And Internacional did some work on their old stadium. So you see, everything is reason for the fans to bother each other. Ours is brand new, theirs is refurbished 🙂 …you might also notice their logo above is a little smaller than Grêmio’s…I wonder who did that 😛

The 2014 FIFA World Cup matches were played at Inter’s stadium. So they brag about that now. I went to all world cup matches in their stadium, but to the Argentina x Nigeria match I wore a Grêmio jersey that looks like the Argentina jersey…for some reasons, like annoying the Inter fans who were there with their Inter jerseys, to not get into trouble with Argentinian fans as some of them were looking for trouble…but really, I was cheering for Nigeria, as you can see my friends with the green flag below 😉

Anyway, it is really cool to have 2 nice stadiums in our city. And the people here you could say are really patriotic about our state, as we will all sing the state’s anthem before matches. No one else does this in Brazil. People in other states don’t even know their state anthems.

This is Grêmio, and the Arena do Grêmio stadium:

And this is Internacional and their Beira-Rio stadium, which means “next to the river”:

Just one last thing about my hometown…this is the typical food from our region, you will laugh now when I say it: barbecue. But don’t laugh too hard, because this is how we make barbecue, or as we call it “churrasco”:

It’s not hamburgers…and we eat a lot of meat! We have all you can eat restaurants called “churrascaria”, where they will bring all kinds of meat to your table and you can choose which ones you want to try:

There are some chains of restaurants that offer this in the US, like Fogo de Chão. Here we have these kind of restaurantes pretty much everywhere, and we do it at home too, pretty much every weekend. It’s kind of a ritual to gather family and friends.

Fun fact about me

Well, I would like to believe there are many fun facts about me 🙂

The one I’ll share is that I collect Grêmio jerseys. That’s right, I am a really big fan. Don’t believe it quite yet?

Wait for it…

I have around 180 jerseys now!

It’s getting harder though. To get jerseys from the past, from the 80s, 70s…only other collectors have them, and they don’t sell cheap. So now I’m just choosing some I’d really like to have, like the one from 1985 when we still had no stars on the jersey, or the one from 1986, the year I was born, or 1987 the year my brother was born, and I’m trying to get these.

If you’d like to have a look, I have them on a website: Camisas do Grêmio

I still have to update the website with some jerseys I got recently, but you’ll have a pretty good idea with what’s already there.

Specific questions that were “Blog It Forward” to me by jitendra kansal

1) What makes you smile/laugh?

Doing something and then realizing that was really dumb. I guess that’s when I smile. When I hear someone tell a story just like that, of something really dumb they did, that makes me laugh 😆

2) Had you not been into software at all, where would you have been?

Probably one of the two following options:

1. Would have studied finance and would be working with the stock market
2. Would have had the courage/crazyness to drop everything and go travel around the globe

I think I won’t pursue number 1…but more and more I think I will almost definitely do number 2 at some point in my life.

3) What is the craziest thing you would have done in your life?

I guess the craziest thing would be number 2 above. Drop everything, work, family and friends and go on an adventure travelling around the world.

The craziest thing I have already done was probably pretty much doing that when I was 18 to go study abroad in France all by myself. It was a whole new life to me. That’s not really how things usually go here in Brazil…people will stay at their parents pretty much until they get married.

I just remembered another crazy thing now, a couple of years back I went to Las Vegas with some friends and we went to a gun store and got to shoot with an AK47. We had only seen those in videogames, and I was really shocked at how easy it is to handle a weapon like that. In Brazil the population is not allowed to have weapons, so that was kind of crazy for us.

Optional questions

If you could be a super hero (or are in your spare time) who would you be?

This one is easy. I’d be IronMan!

IronMan gets to fly wherever he wants to, that would make it really easy to travel the world.

Oh, and he always gets the girl too…so that’s a nice bonus.

If you were given by your work a full day every week to do whatever you feel like, what would it be?

This would be the best! I would want it to be Friday or Monday, in order to have a 3 day weekend.

That would allow to travel a lot more during the year, and get to know a lot of other places.

Be it places nearby, by car…or places a little bit farther by plane, a long weekend can do the trick for some places.

Which 5 things do you absolutely want to achieve in life?

• Retire at 40 (one can dream, right?) 🙂
• Visit at least one country in each continent
• Have a family and 3 kids (ok, if the wife wants 2, it will probably be only 2)
• Work in a strategic position in my company instead of a more technical one
• Have no regrets when I’m old? Thought about just writing in Drive a Ferrari, but let’s see what the future will bring 😛

Blogging It Forward

I’d like to blog it forward to the following people:

Fernando Bassuino

Kelly Ynoue

Christian Rosa

Leonardo Galski

Michel Bohn

Nuane Mazzarino

Thiago Costa

Caetano Almeida

Claudenir Araujo

IVANO RAIMONDI

Tobias Dolgener

The specified item was not found.

Dirk Schmaler

Catherine McKenna

Michael Shields

Gerard Magorrian

Eoin Hurley

Enrique Sosa Dominguez

Amber Naseer

Sinead Curran

Ann Marie Sinclair

Noel Connolly

Stephen Brennan

Ian Kehoe

Mateus Grings

Fabio Almeida

Marcos Fernandes

Emerson Rosa

Paulo Junior

Debora de Souza

and I would be happy if they could answer these:

• Which 5 things do you absolutely want to achieve in life?
• If you were given by your work a full day every week to do whatever you feel like, what would it be?
• If you were not in your current position, what/where would you be and why?
• …and if it is a colleague from North America, maybe you could explain to us why a game played with your hands got called football. Maybe someday that will change and it will have a new name, football will be used for soccer as in the rest of the world and the word soccer will die 🙂
  

I hope you will enjoy my BIF and feel free to comment or ask me any questions you’d like in the comments below!!!

Please remember to follow the Blog It Forward Chain in order to be updated when the people you “Blog It Forward” to post the links to their “Blog It Forward” blogs.