Spent a lot of time this week helping Nuno with classes similar to ones we did before. I think I feel a lot more comfortable being in the audience of children, or just more so in the audience of people with an inclination to learn in general, now that I’ve been more exposed to these kinds of scenarios.
The rest of my time this week was spent further working on the game, also in collaboration with Nuno. We’ve reached a point in the development process where Nuno has started to generate the Portuguese content that will be used in the game, and I’ve been implementing this content alongside refining the systems that make it work to streamline the implementation process and make it even more foolproof in the future. I would say it’s been going very smoothly, and that’s helped me to reaffirm my practice and expertise.
As it might be evident from my mentioning of Nuno so many times already, their expedition to Latvia has concluded, and Nuno, Tiago and Carlos have returned back to us safe and sound. For a moment, regardless of its brevity, it brought the office closer together as they shared stories and snacks from their travels over coffee break. I’ve been playfully deemed Mr. Pickles for a while now due to an early habit of eating nothing but pickles from a jar for lunch during my first or second week, but I was still pleasantly surprised when a few days after their arrival Tiago brought me a jar of pickles that they had all got for me at the Central Market in Riga as a gift. It was really sweet of them, and I was so excited to have received it that I almost finished the whole jar during the following lunch break. If the sweet, subtly spicy flavor and tender, crunchy texture wasn’t enough proof, then I can confirm that the fact that they bought it from an old granny selling pickled goods behind a stall makes these real, authentic Latvian pickles! I shared a few of them with other volunteers and people at the lunch table, and I was glad to see them enjoy it as much as I did. Needless to say, I’m very grateful for the gift.
In my spare time I’ve been devoting more time to studying Portuguese with the use of flashcards and some listening exercises. A week or so ago I started to notice that I’ve begun to mais ou menos understand what other people are saying when talking with one another, meaning that I’ve already built up a small confident vocabulary over these past few months. I think this realization has given me the slight push I needed to finally commit to making a habit of studying regularly, and I’ve already naturally begun to do so every morning, as opposed to just lying in bed and staring at the ceiling for an hour. I can even say that it’s become a bit of a hobby of mine, and I’ve been looking into ways I could take it further.
Another thing that’s become somewhat of a habit, amongst all of us volunteers, is hanging out after work: either window-shopping at the Forum or watching movies together at the volunteer house. While we don’t do it every night, it’s still nice to be spending more time with everybody, and I only hope that we don’t tire out of doing so.
