Portuguese for Strangers (extrangeiros)

Hi guys!
Well, I just thought I’d give you an update on my class situation. When we first met with Maria Helena, she had wanted to arrange a special Portuguese for Foreigners class for Barbara, Lourdes, and I, but that didn’t work out, so we’ve enrolled in the UFMG course, which happens to be at the same time as my cinema and music classes. Bummer. If I don’t take the Portuguese class, I don’t get grant money, and the advanced class was only offered at one time. The intermediate 1 class worked with my schedule, but it was in the city center (a half hour bus ride from school) and they were only going to go over the indicative tenses (not subjunctive), and subjunctive is what I need to review. So, this morning I dropped my two conflicting classes, and went to Portuguese instead. While I am disappointed that I don’t get to take the other classes, this may be a blessing in disguise, because the Portuguese class is going to be my easiest one by far, it won’t assign long technical reading, and the professor, Henrique, is really fun. He taught the basic class during the summer, so I haven’t had him as a teacher before, but he went on a lot of field trips with us and I like him a lot. He’s 24 (there’s a student in our class who’s 27, so that makes Henrique not the oldest), speaks English really well (and Portuguese, of course), and is very flamboyantly gay. I think I’m going to learn a lot in his class because he’s easy to understand, there are only 9 other people, and we’re going to practice conjugating verbs. Yay! Not that I love making verb charts, but it’s how I learn best, and I desperately need to review the subjunctive tenses.

Sunday was Father’s Day, which I wasn’t expecting here in the middle of August, but the upside of it was that Claudia made moqueca de peixe for lunch/dinner (we usually eat the same thing until it’s gone, and she cooks in bulk), and it was really delicious. It’s fish in some sort of tomato-y sauce with other stuff (I know, I know, that’s really descriptive) and I think it’s my favorite Brazilian food so far. Pão de queijo from the snackbar in Fafich comes in a close second though. Mmm, it’s hot and cheesy and only costs U$.30... Yum. However, not all the food is great - Claudia had me try something yesterday called “Romeo and Juliet”, which is where you eat goiabada, which is a gelatinous sweet made out of guavas, with fresh cheese. The flavor wasn’t horrible, but the textures together were too much for me, and I don’t love goiabada to begin with. She loves it, but Carolina doesn’t so I don’t feel bad not sharing her enthusiasm.

Salamão and Fernando are leaving this weekend, I’m really sad to see them go! We’re going to have a going-away party for Salamão tomorrow night, because he’s leaving Belo on Thursday to spend his last couple days in Brazil with his parents, who live in Betim, which is nearby but not that near, and Friday night Fernando is singing again so we’re going to go see him and say goodbye then. They’ve both been so helpful, I really hope that people in Spokane are as helpful to them as they were to us. I know for sure that when I get back to USF I’m going to go out of my way to assist the Brazilians, and any other exchange students, in any way I can - having people who want to help you when you’re in a foreign country really makes a huge difference. I mean, look at Bea - I mentioned to her that I was trying to find a place to live, and her family has taken me in! I’m going to try to be a lot more hospitable when I go home, it’s amazing to be on the receiving end of it.

Speaking of Bea’s family, I have to talk about her parents a little bit. They’re great, and they’re hilarious. Her dictator-missing dad also loves to sing karaoke, and he’s quite serious about it, and his favorite sentence in English is “the book is on the table.” After lunch he lays down on the couch and snores for 20 minutes or so, and in his spare time (like every evening) he watches old American movies on TV. Old westerns, the original Superman (that was last night’s feature), really bad 70’s movies - you name it, if it was made in the US before 1985, he’s probably seen it. He went a nutritionist earlier this week, and now he’s on a diet, so all the cheese and butter and packaged food in the house is light now. I didn’t realize this at first, and had some really disgusting cream cheese. I hope the light food does its job soon so that we can go back to real food. I could probably buy my own full-cal cream cheese, but I don’t want to make anyone feel bad. Maybe I’ll lose weight too, who knows.

And then there’s Claudia. She is a character. Her favorite adjectives in English are “delicious,” “lovely,” and “pretty beautiful,” and she uses them all frequently. She crochets, and I do to, but I don’t really like crocheting around her because she always tugs at my hats to try to make them flat, give me suggestions about how to hold my crochet hook, and asks me why don’t I make a bag or a poncho? She means well, I guess, but she’s very controlling when it comes to crocheting. The other night, after we made chocolate chip cookies (which turned out well, except for being pretty burnt and crunchy), I was teaching Barbara how to make a crocheted flower. Claudia noticed, and asked Barbara what she was going to do with said flower. Barbara replied, “Oh, I don’t know, I just wanted to learn to make it.” Claudia pursed her lips and suggested making a scarf or a bag instead. Barbara politely declined, and I went about teaching her the flower. After she finished, Claudia asked to see it and Barbara handed it over. Claudia made a noise like you might make if you opened up a present you were expecting to be a giant chocolate cake, but it turned out to be a raspberry. It was a noise of thinly veiled disappointment, after which she proceeded to point out all the holes and inconsistencies. Let me make a disclaimer - this flower was the first thing Barbara had crocheted in several years, and the thing she made then was half a scarf. Now, her flower wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was recognizable and really not bad at all, considering. After Claudia left to get some shirts that she’d appliqued flowers to to show us (she’s a big fan of showing me clothes she’s appliqued, and I’m keeping a close eye on all my tops), we proceeded to crack up while re-enacting the noise. It was hilarious. She’s a nice woman, just a little bit of a crochet nazi.

Another thing I’ve been noticing lately is that living here is different from living in the US in a lot of ways, but in others it’s really not. This is the longest I’ve been out of the US, and I’m really starting to see the effects of cultural imperialism, or neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it. I’d learned about the huge influence that the US has abroad in class, but now I understand it a lot better, living it. With very few exceptions, the only movies on TV are made in Hollywood, McDonald’s is everywhere (although Starbucks is only in São Paulo), and the TV in the Xerox room is perpetually set to a Beyoncé concert (I think they’re looping the DVD). Almost everyone who has a college education speaks English, and Claudia is obsessed with garage sales, which she’s seen on TV but which don’t happen in Brazil. I’ve been trying to think about if there are any major cultural influences like this in the US, and I can’t. There aren’t other countries that we idolize, and with the exception of cars and some luxury goods, I think most of the products we buy come from companies that originated in the US. That’s not to say that Brazil doesn’t have its own culture, it certainly does, but the US is big here too. It will be interesting to spend next semester in El Salvador, and see if the US has the same sort of influence there that it does here.

For something completely different, Ava, the German Shepard, is in heat right now and Chico, the dachshund, has been doing his best to get romantic with her. Unfortunately for him, she’s about three times his height and the physics of that aren’t working out so well.

That’s all I have to say for now, good night!