A Day in the Life

I apologize for the delay, but the advantage of this is I have a lot to tell you! 

For starters, I got a new job! And overnight I went from having time more desperate to be filled than a clingy girlfriend, to barley finding the time to sleep. 

A weekday looks something like this for me:

I wake up around 6 am and walk a couple kilometers to school. There I observe as my classmates attempt to do math with these unusual strategies, approach english like a chemical equation, and discuss Brazilian literature. We also do normal things like exercise and eat snacks, but mostly I just try to talk to my friends there and they ensure that I learn all the profanity and hip slang.




<--- Division 


I finish school at 12 pm and then run home so I can have a few minutes for lunch before going to work at a Bilingual school called "safe step". Fortunately, it's only a 12 minute walk away. Unfortunately,  it's up a mountain that's only called a hill when you're not climbing it. 

I work from 1pm-5:15pm with the most beautiful babies in the whole world. My job is to play with them and speak to them in English. The most challenging part is my kids are barely old enough to speak Portuguese, so even the most basic gesture "sit" could be answered with tears or more likely, just ignored.

Now that I've been with them two weeks most of them will respond to "Bye" or " I love you" but the process is very slow. I'm easily having more luck teaching my coworkers english. With the kids I say a work a hundred times before they repeat it, with my coworkers it's once.

Which has led me, someone who's envied people raised bilingual for years now, to question how much easier it really was for them. That is to say, perhaps learning languages is always hard, I mean it takes most of us 12 months to say a word in our first one, but we forget the struggle when we're young. Or maybe are just less embarrassed to make mistakes. 

So that's it. I spend the first half of my day struggling to express anything in Portuguese. And the second part speaking English to people whom, if they understand anything, are too rude to reply. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I also have Portuguese lessons from 5:30-7:00pm . By the time it's all said and done I'm so desperate to be able to express myself that I start spinning and the words come out so fast I can barely understand myself.

If nothing else these past few months, I've learned there's other ways of communicating, of course hugs, smiles, elaborate hand gestures, and impressionistic dances. But also that sometimes you don't have to say anything,you can just listen...

and pray the teacher doesn't call on you. 

"Era Uma Vez...."

"Once Upon a time..." 

There lived a young woman who so desperately wanted to learn Portuguese . She traveled thousands of miles through the sky to a distant land where almost everyone speaks, sings and dances to the beautiful language.  Upon her arrival she met with a master as often as she could, but the language just kept slipping away. After a month of less than satisfactory progress she decided it was time for something drastic....


So drastic I'm almost embarrassed to tell you: 

I'm back in High-school.

I know, I know the disgusting place of crushed dreams and wasted hours staring blankly at a frozen clock. And while school is drastically different here, the same unpleasant atmosphere is undeniably present. 

So I'll explain. We've been discussing my options as to how I can live In Brazil next semester. With my current visa I have to leave every three months and I can only stay in the country for 180 days of the year. After drawing out all the options we discovered the easiest way for me to get a visa is to just enroll in school , and since I don't have a Brazilian high-school diploma- that's exactly what I need. The obvious advantage of the school is that I'm constantly forced to speak Portuguese which is the best way to learn the language .

Additionally it is already offering me some great insights into Brazilian culture. Here in high school you spend all day with the same class in the same room, but different teachers come and go. Also the day is much shorter, most students only stay in school for the morning or the afternoon not both. I've only been there two days but I'll be excited to learn how they choose to focus on history and the humanities in general. 

For my Portuguese lessons I've been writing a lot fairytales, and sometimes I surprise myself half way-through with where I want to the story to go.  Going back to high-school is a chapter I never thought I'd write.