Ola!

That´s portuguese for `Hello`!

I´m in a tiny village outside a maybe not tiny, but very small town that is well known for being quite unspoilt by tourists. "One of the few places left", the rumours go. And the rumours are absolutely true, in a narcissistic, warped kind of way. The rumours all come from British magazines, British websites and British advertizing in general. You can spend the whole day walking around, visiting places without seeing one single german, american, japanese, italian, brazilian, eskimo or swede. What you do see are brits. Swarms of brits! Why do British people ALWAYS have to go to the same places? It´s been like this since the beginning of the 20th century! Then they flooded the French riviera. In the 90:s and the 00:s it´s been Ibiza.
When I was living in Sweden I had a hard time thinking of anything more boring than going to a place full of swedes. Nowadays I´ve got the same feeling about the brits.

Nevertheless, it´s nice. I mean, you can´t possibly complain when you´re by an Algarve beach, swimming in an illuminated pool, drinking sangria under a bamboo hut! Doing so would just be like asking Karma to hunt you down in order to bite your ass! No, trust me, I´m not complaining at all.

Before I left England I accidently ran into a portuguese "do it yourself" language course in the library. "Learn portuguese in 6 weeks"! Well...

I´ve studied a lot of languages in my days. English, french, spanish, italian, german and please, let´s not forget my oh so serious courses in danish and norwegian at Lund University. Oh, and I tried to learn polish for 1 day. An finnish for another. And japanese for the impressive duration of a whole night when I couldn´t sleep and got stuck watching BBC learning zone (Mushi Mushi!).

So, surely, surely I could do 6 weeks in 6 days? Surely?
Well, Joanna was correcting my exams from week (day) 1 just before dinner, and even though SHE (quite obviously!) was more than happy to point out my insignificant mistakes, I´m very pleased to say that I got most things right. (Pretty much everything if you ask me...which you probably wont do. I suspect you would prefer to ask her.) All the nouns and all the grammar. Only a few ridiculous prepositions and pronouns were wrong. And for those I blame Portugal! Why create a language so similar to spanish, or italian (or catalan#)? Suit yourselves!
But I´m doing good! In 5 more days I´ll be speaking portuguese like there´s no tomorrow!. Try me! ;)

ATÉ LOGO!

# Don´t get me started about catalan! When I was living in Barcelona, just coming fresh from France, I was trying to make up for the lack of motivation I´d had when studying spanish in Malaga a few years earlier. The catalan seriously screwed up my whole learning process by shoving a whole new language in my face, mixing french, spanish and a whole bunch of unexplicable X:s! Just for the sake of it!

There´s no language that scares me anymore...