Exchange Student Program Brazil

Brazil is a land in which the past collides with the future. Cows lumber across multilane 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 today is a country where you can travel between centuries in a matter of hours. 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.