California There I Went

This summer I will being going to live in Sao Paolo, Brazil to do an internship with my older brother’s company baby.com.br. Brazilian visas are expensive and obviously only valid in Brazil. I wasn’t very eager to pay for a visa that I’ll only use once but what other did I have?  Well most people don’t have any other options, but I’m not most people.

I was born in Quito, Ecuador and after some research I learned that Ecuadorians don’t need a visa to travel to Brazil.  The only issue was that in order to travel to Brazil as an Ecuadorian I would need to renew my long expired Ecuadorian passport. In order to renew my passport I would need to travel to either Phoenix or Los Angeles to visit an Ecuadorian Consul. After looking at the cost of flights I learned that I could either get a Brazilian visa for about $200 or I could fly to California and renew my Ecuadorian passport for about $200.  I chose the latter. 

I had a great time in California getting to know my grandma better, visiting other family members, and visiting Oakley.  The highlights of my trip include:

 (1) renewing my passport,

 (2) being told by Oakley that they might bring me with them to Azerbaijan in order to close a deal in Russian, and 

(3) dinner at Selma’s Chicago Pizzeria.  

It was a great trip.

Helping Someone More Stressed Than Me

I had just arrived at Long Beach Airport.  I was stressed that I had forgotten something and that I wouldn't

 accomplish all that I needed to.  I was only going to be in California for two days and I only had one day to renew my Ecuadorian passport or my trip would be in vain.  With only a few weeks left in school it was a real sacrifice to take a weekend away from school for this trip; I needed everything to go smoothly.  I called my dad to tell him that I had arrived safely and while I was on the phone a saw someone who seemed to be even more stressed than I was.  She was holding a young baby and trying to pick up her stroller that had fallen.  I could tell that she was just stressed and this was the cherry on top.  After several failed attempts to pick up the stroller I left my bags and helped her pick it up.  It was simple.  It really required almost zero effort from me, but you could tell that it was just what she needed and that she was grateful.

Russian One More Time

About a week later a got another email from Oakley.  They asked if I could translate a small 3-fold brochure for them.  Compared to what I had just done this looked easy so I accepted the job.  Well it wasn’t as easy as it looked and there was a lot more in that 3-fold brochure than I realized.  One of the hardest parts about it is that there was very little repetition, whereas the first translation job I did had a lot of repetition.  Ten hours later I was finally done. 
I learned a lot from this experience, but first and foremost I learned that translating is brutal! As fun as it was I would not was to translate for a profession. After all of this hard work not only did I walk away a little richer, but I can also say that Oakley is a $2.1 billion company, and I am their Russian translator.