The First Few Days

THEME TUNE: 2080 by YEASAYER

The airport
is only a few kilometers from the centre of the city. So the plane swept down over skyscrapers, the river, patches of forest, white buildings, cars. It was beautiful sure. "2080" in my ears, I felt .... well, shit-scared, to be honest. Like Xavier in Auberge Espanol says,

"When you first arrive in a new city, nothing makes sense. Everythings unknown, virgin... After you've lived here, walked these streets, you'll know them inside out. You'll know these people. Once you've lived here, crossed this street 10, 20, 1000 times... it'll belong to you because you've lived there. That was about to happen to me, but I didn't know it yet."

And there I was, on this plane, above this city, that I was about to fall in love with. But I didn't know it yet. All I knew was that I was about to shit my pants.

The hotel, My room..
Was later dubbed Poo-Room. Looked on to a slimy shaft (yaa! Slimy Shafts!) where open windows blared out TV novelas. Later became friends with the mousey lady who owned the hotel.

Que Sorte!
What luck! On the second day I rang a number on a list of numbers of "donas", that is landladies, handed to me by the school. And one of them picked up, gave me the number of a man called Thiago who lived in the house and told me to go and see it. By the end of the evening, I had the keys to my appartment in my pocket!!

So school..
Well it took place in a stuffy converted apartement near Marques de Pombal. 4 hours a day with some wonderful teachers. The classes were full of interesting characters: including those setting off to Angola with Oil Dreams. English students as well, in abundance. I know that it would have been easy to stay friends with them, but they are all leaving in 4 weeks and my portuguese would not improve with them either.
So I meet Christiana. This sounds like a cliche, but when I first arrived at the school and we all sat in the classroom to take the beginning test, I sat next to her. I looked at her once and had this image of us being close friends and we were having a squabble, for some reason, in this imagination. It was very odd... but I knew we were going to be close. And we were!

There is not much else to write about school, I am afraid; except that Portuguese grammar is more complicated than all the Latin Langugages combined, I believe. Really, the put articles in the most unnecessary places, and after some verbs they don't put one, and there is the "personal infinative" and the different forms of imperative, depending whether you are talking formally, informally, positively or negatively. There are a thousand and one rules, and a thousand and one exceptions.

The afternoons
Whizzed by. I would eat in the house with Serena, my new housemate. She is finishing her erasmus here, and is the kindest person I could have wished to have met. She is maternal, and italian in that soft, family-led kind of way. Some awesome dishes come out of the oven when Serena is home. Plus she can make those shapes out of balloons, like butterflies or umbrellas, the ones clowns do. So I would finish lunch with her and then go out into the city.
I think I have walked the length of Portugal in the first two weeks. Me and Christiana, or just me, or whoever was with me, would just walk and walk. We did the usual touristic things, saw some cutting-edge modern art and visited some great cafes.

Now for the bitesize chunks, because I don't like this style.