Fazenda Santo Antonio da Bela Vista

In my former life (read: last year) field trips consisted of yellow buses, exhaust fumes, rowdy children, hovering parents, and smelly lunches. No longer. There are definitely frustrating parts of teaching here, but field trips is not one of them! Traveling to Fazenda Santo Antonio da Bela Vista was hands down the best field trip experience I've had in my seven years of teaching. To start with we travel on buses like these:

These buses are air conditioned, plush, and spacious.
We also travel with these:These are monitors. Monitors are people hired to supervise and entertain groups of children. Monitors are very popular in Brasil-you find them in restaurants, hotels, stores, shopping malls, and on field trips! The company we work with organizes the buses, the schedule, the groups and supervise and entertain the children during the trip. For anyone who has ever organized a field trip (it is usually us teachers) you understand how helpful this is! Additionally, having the monitors negates the need for parent chaperones. As a parent, I sympathize how nice it is to spend the day with your child on a trip-but as a teacher, more people=more chaos. Traveling with just the students and just the monitors is so. much. better.
The coffee farm was great! It was beautiful and really interesting to see how coffee is traditionally harvested and roasted. Coffee was once the cornerstone of Brasil's economy so the trip was an important part of our students' understanding of Brasilian history.
Two other parts of this field trip that were totally unique to Brasil:

Bodyguards traveling with studentsand

Not one, but two stops by the police just to check that we had all the appropriate documentation for our students. These stops were about a half an hour each and made us arrive back to school very late!

Our day ended with a great lunch. Traditionally lunch is the biggest meal of the day in Brazil and a field trip is no exception. We (students included) were given a choice of spaghetti and meatballs, beans and rice, chicken, and salad. Notice the real silverware (knives!) and tablecloth on the table? I love how meals are treated like an event EVERY day-not a pit stop.
I really had a great day with the students-they learned quite a bit and I walked away with plenty of freshly roasted coffee. A total success!