A word used all the time. Sometimes more than three times in 30 seconds.
So much so that it makes you doubt the real meaning of the word.
Buses here don’t stop at every stop ! You have to wave them down, otherwise they’ll drive right past you before you even realize what’s happening, so you have to stay alert. What’s more, just like in France, they sometimes run late, which is fine because we’re used to that, but what can throw you off is that they’re sometimes early !
And when they’re ahead of schedule, they don’t wait to stick to their schedule, so you really have to be careful.
Cars here let pedestrians cross. You don’t have to wait 45 minutes for some kind soul to decide to let you cross
or pray that you’ll still be in one piece when you get there. And that goes for major roads and crosswalks around roundabouts too !
Here, they believe so. There are no controllers on public transportation. No one jumps over subway turnstiles or tries to cheat the system in any way. When you go through the checkout, the cashier doesn’t look inside your bag to check if you’ve stolen anything (on my first day, thinking she was asking me to show her the contents of my bag (because, of course, I understand Portuguese perfectly), I showed her, and I think she’d never had anyone do that in her career because she laughed so hard !). Portugal a country of the Care Bears ? France, a country of freaks ? Who knows.
The advantage (and disadvantage) of being in a foreign country is that no one understands you when you speak
your native language, so you don’t have to censor what you say. But it turns out that quite a few Portuguese understand and speak French… So to all the French people reading this rag, be careful before you start
to “jouer les langues de putes” in public !
- WHERE IS THE GRATED CHEESE SECTION ?
If there’s one thing that every true French person always has in their refrigerator, it’s grated Gruyère cheese.
We put it in absolutely everything, in most of our culinary preparations. So when I arrived, it was one of the first things I looked for. After 20 minutes of intensive searching, I finally found it. There is no grated cheese section, there is only one brand that makes very small packages…
Oh, and the term “Protugaish” didn’t come out of nowhere !
