Noticias Principas... I would appear to be going to Brazil!
 
From reading some of the blog entries here, the cocktail of emotions I went through on receiving the 'congratulations' email seem to be fairly run-of-the-mill... A minute or so of utter shock, quickly followed by excitement and a complete inability to sleep.
 
The selection day itself seemed to go pretty well for me, though to avoid disappointment I'd managed to convince myself that there were definitely enough people better than me on the day to keep me off the programme. I'd been surprised enough to accepted onto the selection day... As far as I'd heard, nobody I knew had applied for the programme and I'd only found out about it through the freak occurence of actually having read the college student bulletin.
 
The whole idea of the programme has really attracted me from the start. Travelling to far-off countries is surely something everyone wants to do; meeting a whole group of like-minded (and also not as I'm sure the case will be) people my age; throwing myself head first into a completely alien culture and new language; and the opportunity to see businesses abroad, something which really intrigues me. To be honest I don't think the programme could suit me better if I'd designed it myself!
The business and culture aspects tie in really well with what I'm hoping to end up doing with my life- I'll be studying Economics and Journalism at university once we're all back from our respective countries- I expect this experience of a foreign powerhouse economy to prove itself invaluable in Economics. On the Journalism side, the PMGF seems to be very much orientated towards sharing our experiences with a wider audience.
 
On a side note, learning Portuguese is a brilliant excuse to neglect revision through the early summer months and for that, British Council, I must thank you!
Languages have never exactly been a strong point of mine... 2 years of German at school made me a pretty good shot with a ruler and rubber, whilst 3 years of French gave me a rudimentary knowledge, though I'm sure not sure where a monologue about "le weekend dernier"'s camping trip to Aberystwyth will ever come in handy again.
So i'm not exactly confident of becoming a fluent Portugese speaker any time soon... As for 'Noticias Principas' I switched the language on facebook. Top news!
A 'learn portuguese' CD is on it's way from a bloke on ebay, so hopefully i'll be able to expand on my vocabulary of how many minutes ago someone "gosta do teu" my status.
 
Hope you enjoyed my first stab at blogging. To be honest i'll be pretty chuffed if you read this far ;)