A week has passed since my arrival. Quite an exciting week, of not only new faces and smiles, but also challenges and hurdles. The main challenge being – the Portuguese language!
“Eu falo mal Português” is probably my most common attempt at creating my own sentence in Portuguese. I’ll leave its meaning up in the air, but my most frequent usage of it is in self-mockery after attempting to say something else in the language. That being said, trying to learn and understand Portuguese is extremely fun, and I take every emerging opportunity I can to try and say something in it, much to the annoyance of my housemates…
These neanderthalian attempts at Portuguese were stretched to their absolute limits, though, when Sofia and I had to assist Nuno at a school for a class about human rights. One of our tasks was to write down the various students’ nominations for fundamental rights, all entirely in Portuguese, on a whiteboard. Safe to say, we weren’t the best equipped for the job, much to the intended amusement of the students. But it was a wonderful and effective exercise.
Speaking of ‘exercise’, that is probably the best way to describe traversing the many mountainous streets of Lisbon and beyond. We visited on two separate and drastically different occasions with two separate and drastically awesome people. Mimi, a regular at the office, was excited to introduce us to many of her favorite places, this time settling on the culturally-rich Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. On the other hand, Savas, a Rato veteran and fellow housemate of ours, introduced us to the Lisbon nightlife and all of the wackiness that it entails.
It was time well spent getting to know not only the culture, language and the area, but also our fellow colleagues and volunteers that we will be sharing most of our time with.
