Lisboa continued….At lunch that first day with Isa and Lucia, in addition to explaining the functioning of the EU, Lucia also told me about a friend of hers who went to Brasil to live in a favela for a year (if you don’t know what a favela is, think “City of God.” If you haven’t seen the movie go rent it). The friend, a 20-something year old Portuguese girl, was kidnapped by the police. She had a black Brasilian boyfriend who the police also sequestered. They knew that if something happened to the girl, people in Portugal/Europe would cause problems for them, so one of them held a gun to the boyfriend’s head (knowing nothing would happen if he died) while a couple others escorted the girl to the ATM where she withdrew money to save her boyfriend’s life.
A few days later Isa and I met up with Lucia and a group of her interpreting school friends in the metro station. From there we walked through the city, stopping at a super tiny fruit/vegetable/beer store for bottles of beer that we opened in the store and sipped in the street on our way to a “park.” I say “park” because I don’t know how else to call it, but it was a small café with outdoor seating next to a strip of grass all next to a “paved” (i.e. white and black tiles hammered into the ground, just like all the sidewalks) area overlooking the enormous river Tajo. It was 5ish on a Tuesday, and there were several other groups of young people sipping beer, hippy types smoking weed, an angry guy on a guitar and two young pitbulls that occasionally broke into our circle of future interpreters sitting cross legged on the ground.
Lucia’s friends were from Portugal, Spain, Poland and Norway and were all fluent in at least four languages. I was definitely the slow one of the group, with my sort-of two languages and pitiful knowledge of the world. I did my best to follow the conversations (which were almost all in Spanish) and not look bewildered when they kept making inside jokes about Kofi Annan, whose name I recognized but only in the “I should know something about this person but don’t” way. On the way to the park I talked to Sara, a girl from Valencia, who asked me what the capital of Kansas is, adding that she was ashamed of herself for not knowing it. I assured her that not knowing about Topeka is nothing to be ashamed of, but she disagreed. But don’t get me wrong, my slight discomfort at feeling ignorant and slow on the language uptake was well worth the cool experience in the park that day. And I was even proud of myself at one point when Sara and co. had a conversation about “consoladores” which I followed quite well (thanks to Isa asking me in January how to say “consolador” in English).
The night before we left Lisboa, I taught Isa how to floss. She had mentioned to me a few weeks ago that she bought floss but never used it because she didn’t know how. Apparently flossing is a novel concept here. So I taught her that night, and she seemed somehow much younger than 28, maybe due to her baby blue matching pajamas with cartoony coffee mugs, or perhaps just how she shrieked gleefully every time she flossed a new tooth and saw what a difference it made. I’d never really watched someone else floss before, and it was a little gross at times, but her pure delight and exclamations that “de verdad quita la mierda!” made it worth it. At one point there was some redness on the floss. I told her it’s normal for there to be blood the first time and we both giggled.
No comments:
Post a Comment