This summer, I've come to São Paulo, Brazil to join the community around the Escritório Modelo ("Model Office", or a legal office that both provides pro-bono legal services, and acts as a training ground for future legal professionals) of PUC-SP, (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo) which consists both of the people the office serves, (low income people in the Lapa prefecture of SP) as well as the legal interns and lawyers that make up the office.

My work this summer has no connection with my research last summer -- my research last summer primarily focused on politics, social psychology, and images/aesthetics on the internet, while my work now is primarily involved with civil law. I decided to spend my six weeks in the Escritório Modelo because I'm generally curious to learn about Brazilian society and its systems, and because I resonate with the mission of the office, which is to provide cross-disciplinary aid to oppressed communities, which goes beyond mere legal aid into community organizing efforts and community education.

This picture below is of the one of the streets that I take to get home. The shapes of the trees are obviously striking, especially for someone from a city with no palm trees, but if you look close, you can see an inconsistency between the two street signs. I assume that the street signs were initially mass-produced, as a similar sign exists at every intersection, so maybe this sign was a replacement that was individually ordered at some later point. Funny enough, the misspelled sign actually aligns with the phonetic character of the Dutch surname that gives its name to the street -- in fact, Portuguese doesn't use the letter W at all besides in words of foreign origin, but the locals pronounce the W/V sound as a Dutch speaker would when saying the name of the street. When I'm in NYC, where I grew up and where I now go to school, I don't really find myself having thoughts like that one -- I think that being in another country makes me much more curious about *how things work*.