Blog Nr. 13: How to snare an elderly person in a café. (Or what I’ve learned after a year in Portugal, Part 1)

The temperature at which the standard Irish person starts to wobble in the heat. This particular photo was taken at 10:30 at night.

For my standards I think I’ve actually been quite busy recently. I’ve had a fair bit of design and illustration work on recently, most of it being a timely reminder of how babies start off in the womb. I’ve finished a project based around pregnancy development so for several weeks every time Joana walked into our shared office there was yet another icky close-up illustration of a fetus at week twenty-something on my computer screen. It’s actually been a nice reminder of everything we were following a year ago in books and on websites while Joana’s tummy grew. Now having the end product currently beating the stuffing out of a toy elephant next to me here, the recent work resonates even more than I expect.

It’s all a further reminder that I’ve been in Portugal for almost a year. And what have I learned in this past year?

Well, normally nobody comes near me in the street. Chuggers (which are very rare here) look the other way as I clearly look both foreign and poor. Also, people almost never ask me for directions. And if they do, it’s usually because they’re lost tourists who don’t speak a word of English or Portuguese, forcing me into explaining the best route to the university through the medium of modern dance. I could probably clean up as a city tour guide if I learned to speak Japanese and Russian. But for the meantime I’ll struggle by in my poor Portuguese.

Some Portuguese words are a right pain in the backside. Já is one of those words. Another is mesmo.

It’s probably unfair to blame everyone else, but it’s pretty much everybody else’s fault that my Portuguese is so bad. You see, whenever I go into a shop or a café or even the couple of times I have been stopped by chuggers, once my accent and struggle to remember to use the gender/tense/verb gives it away that I’m not a native speaker, most people just switch into English. And it’s not just young people overexposed to constant repeats on TV to Grey’s Anatomy and the A Team, but people who would have been schooled in an era where French was the second language. It puts me to great shame sometimes. I’ve even tried wandering from shop to shop, asking fascinating questions about available trouser sizes and such to try practice, but usually within minutes they’re telling me, in English, and in hope of making a sale, that my ass isn’t as fat as I think.

The best way to practice my Portuguese has been with very elderly people. I trap them in busy cafés – Vasco da Gama in Celas is a good spot. I do it by cleverly leaving one of the newspaper supplements visible on my table while I read the newspaper. I genuinely do manage to understand the written word, but sometimes an elderly person, looking for a bit of company in a busy cafe, will see me reading ask to borrow the paper or ask me for the time from the next table. Their faces are usually pretty priceless after about ten seconds and realising I don’t speak fluent Portuguese. They all but scream for help, but usually we manage a small passage of dialogue before we’re all exhausted from talking  s l o w l y  and  c l e a r l y  for one another to understand.

“Interactive Drunk” – Coming soon for the Nintendo Wii

Amongst other lessons, I’ve learned I’m not the worst driver in the world. Everyone drives on the wrong side of the road here, but they steer clear when they see me coming down the left hand side of the street with that determined look on my face that states I will not touch the brake under any circumstances. By now the police just ignore me as some sort of eccentric. There doesn’t seem to be too many proper eccentrics on the streets of Coimbra. That might be a complete misjudgement on my part and I may simply not recognise them due to cultural and linguistic differences. Even the drunks are quite dull and don’t engage in the manner of a cheeky scamp the way they do back home. I’ve only once encountered one interactive drunk (makes it sound like he’s a Nintendo Wii game) and that was while running one night. He decided to holler something at me, I waved in recognition of his ramblings and he took it as a signal to join me. Wouldn’t you know it, he spoke English! After about 100 meters of a slow jog I mentioned “Tempo run”. He looked puzzled and I said “Fast! Sprint! Rapido!”. He stopped running.

What I’ve learned after a year in Portugal, Part 2, will come soon. At the rate I blog, in time for my 2nd anniversary here.