Gaijin

Literal translation of my latest homework in Portuguese. Both because it saves me the effort of re-writing the same stuff and because it may give you readers an indirect perception of how I’m progressing in the local language. You will notice I still can’t write as I would like to - but I’m confident it will come with time.

Last Friday I forgot my homework papers in the office, in São Paulo, some 130 km far away from here. If I had brought them along, I’d have done the essay that my teacher assigned me. Nug I haven’t. So I will write something on this weekend, which is unfortunately even harder for me. It’s harder because I have got hundreds of ideas and sensations in my head right now, all of them trying to get out and be laid on this piece of paper or maybe on my blog - but all of them also being complicated and a bit confused, even before the language barrier.

If I were writing in Italian, French or English, I could tell with good enough precision all the richness of thoughts, events and emotions of these two days. In Portuguese, it may already be a major result to tell about facts, in the same order in which they happened.

We had established a departure hour at eight pm last friday. As an adopted Frenchie, of course, I thought that eight pm meant eight pm, and I was ready at eight. Not quite the idea. At about nine thirty we started discussing about the remote possibility of leaving, in some future time not yet fully specified. After discussions, shopping, oil, street food and other preparation activities (in a reasonably broad meaning for the word “preparation”) we managed to leave São Paulo at about midnight. Heading to Joanopolis, in the countryside, to spend the weekend in a colleague’s country house.

We spent all the time - night and day - talking about everything and nothing, playing “sinuca” (snooker - another funny word that I’ll add to the same list as “uísque” and “maiô”) and actually drinking a little too much.

Those have been the hardest days since I arrived in Brawil, from a communication standpoint. A true permanent excercise, with extremely intense moments: I don’t think there’s something tougher than playing drinking games in a foreign language.

But they have been the most enjoyable ones, as well. Not only for churrasco, which was excellent, nor from snooker that I found out I like quite a lot - what I’ll bear in mind is the sensation of being at last “at home'’ here in Brazil, circled by new friends, in a new “routine” that’s starting to feel every day more and more natural.

Of course I miss my European friends enormously. I miss them all so much that all the time I went on thinking “Pity they’re not here, they’d love this place”. But I don’t think I can keep missing my previous life for long: it wouldn’t be healthy and would not help to integrate here. Europeans will wait for a year. Now there are new friends here, who are part of a different life that I shall not compare to the other. I’ll have to open up more with them, and accept this fact as a new challenge and a winning trade off: initial difficulties with distance in exchange for an entire universe to discover.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under General, Brazil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.