Interesting Stuff

Well here we are, days after saying our blog posts would taper off, with another blog post.  We can't help it when something interesting happens!  Maybe we should say the posts may be "sporadic".

Gerrit is getting more comfortable with terror, confusion, and humiliation.  He is approaching salespeople and just plowing right into Portuguese rather than timidly saying in Portuguese "do you speak English?".  Often they stick with Portuguese, Gerrit gets about 1/4 of the conversation, and somehow the transaction is completed.  Meanwhile he has forced his brain to think of how to express things in Portuguese on the fly, and he's desperately picking out meaning from what they say.  Sometimes the clerk switches to English unbidden (is it that obvious?) while Gerrit tries to persist with Portuguese.  

Wednesday 3/26 we were buying a battery-powered weed-whacker and Gerrit screwed up his courage and spoke through the sweat.  After a while, the clerk said in broken English that his Portuguese was very good (!!), to which Gerrit laughed and replied "não verdade!" ("not true!") but he felt pretty proud.  He got questions answered and the deal done with a fair amount of pidgin in both languages, and was beaming as we left.  Pat is catching on too, understanding and speaking more, reading signs and ads.  It is really exciting for both of us.

The key is to let yourself make mistakes.  It's very simple: that's the way we learn, period.  Little kids don't mind making mistakes, but adults are terrified of it.  We get hot, we blush, we sweat, we stammer.  We have to let ourselves lighten up, laugh at the mistakes and learn from them (which is easier said than done).  A fellow student in one of our online classes was laughing about how he was telling someone in Portuguese that "he hurt his rabbit".  He had mixed up "coelho" (rabbit) with "joelho" (knee), and everybody had a good laugh.  What's wrong with that?  Just like when the Portuguese real estate agent speaking broken English to us some time ago mixed up "kitchen" and "chicken".  Generally, anyone loves it when they hear someone try to speak their language, even if it doesn't come out as intended.  So just get in there and blunder your way through!  And be slooow and simple with English beginners too.

In the evening of Wednesday 3/26 we went to one of our expat gatherings, the one in the cool craft beer tavern in historic Ponte de Lima.  That was also the night of a local festival, Serrada da Velha or "the burning of the old woman".  Never fear, no old women were harmed, but a huge bonfire of paper old women was lit.  There was a parade and then kids and adults threw their homemade old woman effigies gleefully on the fire.  The festival has pagan origins (maybe in witch hunts actually), and now symbolizes the destruction of the old to make way for the new.  Fitting for the start of spring!  It is also a fun break in the middle of austere Lent, and the Portuguese just love festivals.  There were several actors dressed as crotchety old women prior to the bonfire, hectoring the crowd and throwing water on them.  It was great fun!

Now that our passive solar water heater is working, it's amazing to watch it.  Wednesday 3/26 was clear and a moderate temperature (15 C, 59 F), and the solar panels were 70 C (158 F) by noon!  The hot water tank was a toasty 65 C (149 F) without any electric heating at all, and still over 60 the following morning for nice hot showers.  Gerrit is having fun trooping up and down the stairs to keep an eye on it.  For now we have the electricity to the hot water tank turned off completely.  We're also toying with the idea of putting photovoltaic solar panels on the roof to provide most of the electricity in the home,  which would feed into the grid when they're producing more than we need.  The power companies pay you over here for doing that, like in the US.  We'll leave a box by the front gate for the power company to drop the cash in.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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