We began our language studies with a wide range of books.

On particular book was called “Grupos”.  It was basically conversations written in Portuguese on one side and English on the other.  The idea was to learn to read the conversations quickly, thereby improving one’s knowledge and pronunciation.  Being of a competitive sort, my sister and I also spent a lot of time trying to say it the fastest.    We might have no idea what the words meant, but at least we could say them quickly.

We were quite upset when it was decided that, perhaps, comprehension was more important than speed and our races ended.

One particular conversation in the book included a woman speaking to a guest in her home.  After asking if the guest liked the coffee she said, “My daughter made it.  She’s eligible for marriage.”

A useful phrase if one is a closet Mrs. Bennett trying to get her daughter married off.  With four daughters, my mom might have found the conversation useful if we hadn’t abandoned the book in favor of better ones.

The main problem with Portuguese, though, is that a lot of words sound the same.  (Yes, yes, I know English has to, too, and two, etc…  But I found English so much easier, I learned to speak it as a baby).

Three particular words were Sol, Sal, and Sul, meaning Sun, Salt, and South respectively.  The danger, of course, was to ask someone to pass you the sun at the dinner table or tell someone to go salt to Uruguay. 

Two more words that sound alike are the words for soda pop and cold (as in sick cold).  My Dad fell into their trap when he asked a waiter if he had a cold while trying to ask for pop.  The waiter gave him a funny look.

And we never did get that pop. 

In America, people dream of white pickets fences.

In Brazil, people dream of high cement fences embedded with glass and topped with razor wire.

Or, perhaps of barred fences topped with spikes, or a swirl of barbed wire.

My Dad says because they can’t lock all the thieves up, they lock everyone else up instead.

When it came time to choose a house to rent we had a choice between two.  One was in a neighborhood and had a lemon tree.  The other was part of condominium and the back gate opened onto a long courtyard with a pool and basketball/soccer court.

We forewent the lemonade in favor of the condominium and promptly moved in.  The house was slightly reminiscent of a prison.  The front of the house was cement with two small barred windows high in the wall. 

On one side was the gate that led into a roofed garage area.  Bars went up and ended in spikes.  Bars came down and ended in spikes.  Getting locked out of your house could be deadly if you tried to break back in.  On the plus side no one else could break in either.

It was a bit annoying that you couldn’t pull into your driveway without unlocking a padlock and undoing the chain.  After making it past the first gate you still had to contend with the front door, which was also barred.

As you can imagine, hearing someone knocking on our door was a thing of the past.  Instead, people clapped outside the gate to get your attention.

We became quite grateful for our barred house when there was a prison break shortly after we moved in.  Although the info varies, around seventy men escaped from the prison.

For days, the sound of helicopters searching for the escapees left us very glad for our barred door, our gate, our chain, and our padlock.

In Brazil, we quickly learned the prayers for protection were not a mantra to be taken lightly.

Brazilian homes are also empty when you buy them.  As in NOTHING is left in the house.  We were fortunate in that our kitchen still had a sink.  Cupboards and appliances were gone, but we did have a sink.  There were also built in cupboards in the bedrooms, which was highly unusual.  Most Brazilian homes have bureaus.   

Not so fortunately, the cupboards were painted a particularly weird shade of orangey-browny-yucky-yellow.

We shared common walls with the houses on either side.  Our hallway bordered the neighbor’s hallway.  Since there was not insulation and the walls, ceiling and floor were all cement, the house echoed. This was unfortunate since it wasn’t only our echoes we heard.

Our house was haunted.  Often we would hear the clicking of high heels and we would all be sitting still.

Okay, so maybe that is a slight exaggeration.  It just might have been the neighbor’s heels we heard clicking up and down the hallway.

  All in all, though, our fortress was very nice.

And secure.  Quite, quite secure.

 

 

 

 

Brazilian cuisine is not extremely exciting.  I mean, yes, they do eat chicken hearts and feijoada, a bean dish that contains such delicacies as pork feet and snout. 

For the most part, though, they eat rice and beans (sans pig snout most of the time).  The rice is plain white rice and oil is added while it is cooking.  Beans are brown beans that have been pressure cooked in water.  The beans in the unflavored bean water are then poured over the rice and that’s your meal.

Without salt, it is little more than an exercise for the jaws. 

We were forced to embrace it.  According to missionary friends serving a guest anything other than rice and beans is an insult.   

Salad in Brazil is not tossed.  Instead, the vegetable are cut or shredded and arranged on a platter.  There is no dressing.  Eventually, the wife of another missionary taught us to make homemade French dressing which was the only kind of dressing we had.

We tried to do things properly when having company and so adopted the Brazilian way of having a salad.  We arranged our carrots, beets, avocado, etc…

It was until we’d had several groups of people over that a lady finally took us aside and informed us that avocado was, in fact, a dessert.  It should be served with sugar and not in a salad.

We rallied—although we never did look upon avocado as a dessert.  We removed it from our menu.

Next on the foods to be chopped was the Jell-O.  In the States, Jell-O is considered a side dish.  However, in Brazil, it too was a dessert and only a dessert. 

I can only imagine what our guests thought as they came to the Americans’ house.  Probably something akin to what we would feel if we were guests in someone’s house and found chopped cake in the salad and lemon meringue pie as a side dish.

Of course, there probably is a recipe for cake salad somewhere out there, but it is not something I necessarily want to try.  Nor is feijoada or chicken hearts, although according to my braver sisters chicken hearts aren’t that bad.

I’m quite willing to take their word for it because I never did bring myself to try one.

Have you?

Moving a family of six from one country to another is not for the faint of heart.  There is, after all, quite a lot of junk involved.  I say this fully cognizant of the fact that some of the aforementioned junk was mine, and, therefore, precious.

Honestly, however, moving from one place to another does require the taking of some items.  Clothes to say the least and household items.  Blenders and blankets are useful things, and when moving to a foreign country it is important to have something familiar.  Even if it is only a kitchen mixer.

First, we looked into a shipping container.  However, after adding up the various bills involved, we decided it would be cheaper to buy wood, build a boat, hire a crew and sail down ourselves.

Not being of a nautical turn of mind, we discarded the plan.

So having eliminated the sea we were left with land or air, or a molecular disassembler which then sends the molecules zipping through the air to another molecular reassembler.  The latter option may have been the wisest course but, upon looking into it we discovered it hadn’t yet made the leap from Science Fiction to reality.

We were now down to land or air.

The route to Brazil was long and through multiple places where robbery was the default pastime.  We looked into the price of an armored truck and started military drills.  However, an army of a middle-aged couple and four girls was hardly likely to strike fear into the hearts of any would be robbers.

We had one choice left.  Air.

Since the price of suitcases was high we began to shop at thrift stores to find enough to move a family of six.

Our collection was broad and worthy of any art gallery.  It included a bright orange suitcase.  A delightful neon pink suitcase with a frog sticker.  My carry on was tweed and hard on the bottom and soft on the top.  I have never again seen such a suitcase.

Not being picky we also took suitcases other people offered.  One was a heavy monstrosity with no handle.  Not perhaps the best combination, but then we couldn’t afford to turn any away.

In this imaginary gallery would also stand a statue of my mother and oldest sister, who packed and repacked the suitcases in a valiant effort to get right to the weight limit and not an ounce more—or less.

In the end, there were twenty-four suitcase, six carry-ons, five purses that weighed enough to make Goliath fall over, a briefcase, and a partridge in a pear tree.

 

Have you ever made a long move?

Have you ever lived in a foreign country?

 It’s practically a proverb in my family that if something awful can happen, it happens to me.  It is my destiny and my curse—if I believed in such things.

 It was a few months after arrival in Brazil that I sat on my bed doing my school with no idea that destiny was peering at me from behind the door, or to be more precise my knee.  Yes, that is correct.  My knee.

I was scratching the back of the knee when I felt something on it.  After looking at it I determined that whatever it was had legs and a body and its head—well, I didn’t want to think about where its head was. 

I had, of course, heard of ticks.  But I had never had a tick.  I wish I could say I handled it calmly and rationally.  I suppose I did if one considers screaming and borderline hysteria to be calm and rational.  At the time, with a tick sticking out of me, it seemed my only option.

My parents had left for the day and I was home alone with my three sisters—two older and one younger.  I threw myself upon the age and perceived wisdom of my older sisters looking to them to save me.

My sisters with all the wisdom of their advanced years had heard vague stories of what was to be done with ticks.  Upon consultation, they decided that they’d heard something about using matches.  Although such a method exists the important thing is to remember you are supposed to blow out the matches before you put it up to a person’s skin. 

They’d missed that memo and were busy applying lit matches to the back of my leg when we heard someone clapping (the Brazilian way of knocking on a door). 

They went to speak to a man from the church and I was left to contemplate the wisdom of allowing them to continue their not-so-tender ministrations and wonder if all the screaming had left the man wondering if a murder was taking place.

After two or three matches they concluded that perhaps the matches weren’t working.  It was possible even that the tick was dead.

I did not take the news well plunging further into hysteria.  I wasn’t sure what was worse.  A live tick or a dead tick.  At least, you could get a live tick out. 

The mad scientists who had taken over my sisters’ bodies then decided to try another method.  Tweezers. 

Then they had the following conversation.

“Did we get the head out?”

“Hmm, I don’t know.  Maybe.  I hope so.”

“Oh well, it’s time for our language lessons.  We have to leave now.”

I didn’t go for that.  There was no way on earth I was going to take a two mile walk to language lessons with a tick head roaming at will throughout my bloodstream.  My sisters then concluded they had most definitely gotten the head out and that I would recover. 

I did survive.  But mentally, the specter of ticks would continue to haunt me.  I love my sisters but my trust in their doctoring skills was out the window and any ache or pain I have might, might, just be a result of their shoddy quackery.

Have you ever had a tick?

Is there a story you found traumatic at the time that you now find funny?

 

Life would have been easier if the Tower of Babel had never happened.  A lot easier.  Of course, a lot of people would go out of business, including the inventors of language tapes.  Which might not be a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong, language tapes introduced me to the Portuguese language.  Unfortunately, the introduction was like the introduction between characters in a very polite British movie, where everybody bows politely and says, “How do you do?” with just the right enunciation.

In real life, nobody talks like that.  In fact, it sounds far more like, “howdayado.” 

When we began the language tapes, carefully copying each perfectly enunciated syllable, we had no idea that it was actually a lesson in futility.  So we began the tapes.   I was twelve years old and we would be moving to Brasil in a year.  I learned lots of very interesting phrases.  “Where is the bathroom?” and “I’d like to order a beer”.  Not perhaps the most useful phrase for a twelve-year-old, but I digress.

My parents flew down to visit before the move, clutching their smattering of perfect Portuguese and prepared to use it.  One phrase they’d learned was, “Thank you.”  In case you didn’t know, Portuguese is a masculine/feminine language so “Thank you” changes based on whether you are a man or woman SAYING the phrase.  My Dad missed that minor fact so his entire month of his visit, he thought it changed on TO WHOM he was saying it. 

Therefore, my father became a woman to the women and a man to the men.  Paul spoke of becoming all things to all men but, perhaps, not to this extent. 

Fortunately, he did learn the difference before the whole family moved down.  The most useful phrase we learned from the tapes—and the one we used most often—was, “I don’t speak Portuguese.”  In fact, we got so fluent at saying it that no one believed us.

If someone told you they didn’t speak English in fluent English, would you believe them?

Have you studied a foreign language?