I can't believe I've never posted about açaí before (besides including it in the top 100 foods list)! Açaí is a berry/fruit that grows on the Açaí palm, which is native to the Amazon. It is usually served as a juice or a puree, sweetened with honey and mixed with yogurt, granola and bananas. It is delicious, refreshing, and has lots of healthy antioxidants. It is more common in the Northeast, but it can be found all over Brazil, and is a popular afternoon snack, served at ice cream stores or snack shops that specialize in smoothies and salgados (salty snacks).
In the past 6 months or so, we've noticed a sudden increase in the amount of these snack shops in Belo Horizonte. They are popping up everywhere, and they usually have the same kind of signage (a rectangular sign with images of fruits in the background) and the açaí included in the name of the store. I think that there is a new chain in town, but now people are piggy-backing on the idea, and without much creativity. In fact, I've seen at least one store open RIGHT NEXT to another new store. My oldest daughter loves to tell me all the names of the different stores, because some of them are just downright silly. Here's a list of what she remembers:
1. Rajaçaí--the açaí place on Avenida Raja
2. Megaçaí
3. Daçaí
4. Taçaí
5. Topaçaí
6. Refresçaí
7. Savaçaí--in Savassi
8. Praçaí
9. Peçaí
10. And our favorite, Thaçaí, because Brazilians have a very hard time pronouncing the "TH" sound.
If I opened my own açaí place, I would called it "Saci açaí" (pronounced "saw-see-ah-sah-eeee") and have a picture of Saci frolicking amongst the fruits, eating açaí. Anyone else have a names they can add to my list, or a creative name for an açaí business?
I love hearing how Brazilians pronounce foreign words. The above image is how Brazilians pronounce brand names. About a year ago I was listening to the radio, and I heard someone talking about the Brazil's "HONKING" in education, as in "o HONKING das escolas Brasileiras é...." It took me a good 5 minutes to realize that "HONKING" is the Brazilian portuguese pronunciation of ranking. Other good pronunciations:
delivery = deh leave a ree
Disney = jees knee
iPad = eye pad-gee
Tablet = tah bletch
Trash Pack (a toy my son likes) = trashy packy
rock and roll = hocking hole
Yesterday was Brazilian Independence day. On September 7, 1822, the Portuguese prince Dom Pedro (who was living in Brazil) cried, "independência ou morte!" and shortly after became the leader of the Brazilian independence movement. How do Brazilians' celebrate their independence? From my informal survey, it seems like most other holidays/Sundays: lunch with family.
We didn't do anything particularly interesting, since we had a birthday party invitation and my husband had to play a concert (state orchestra+national holiday=husband works). But two things happened on Friday that made me feel like celebrating this wonderful, crazy place that we are calling home.
My oldest daughter started a new school this year. It's been a challenging transition, because she actually now has homework and expectations about what she is supposed to learn. This is good. One of the expectations is that she has to write 3 short essays every week. The topics vary, and some of them are as short as 4 sentences. But it has been a very difficult process to convince her that she can do it. In fact, just yesterday she spent 3 hours to write about 20 lines. Arg. But the good news is that her school had a Honors Assembly on Friday, and she received 2 awards. The first was because she has the best grades in Math in her class, and we knew that she was going to get this award. The second award was a surprise to us. In preparation for 7 do setembro, her class had to write an essay about Brazil and what it meant to them as Brazilians. My daughter wrote the best essay! Not only is she NOT a Brazilian, but she has only been speaking Portuguese for 3 years!!
And secondly, at the end of the assembly, Dora got to hold the flag. They principal started playing the Brazilian National Anthem, and Beatrice turns to me and says loudly in English, "I LOVE THIS MUSIC!!" Ah, love my little Brazilian children!
What Brazilians mean: Anything from yes through perhaps to no
What Brazilians say: Perhaps (Talvez)
What foreigners hear: Perhaps
What Brazilians mean: No
What Brazilians say: No (Não)
What foreigners hear (on the very rare occasion a Brazilian says it): No
What Brazilians mean: Absolutely never, not in a million years, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever been asked
What Brazilians say: I’m nearly there (Tô chegando)
What foreigners hear: He’s nearly here
What Brazilians mean: I’ve set out
What Brazilians say: I’ll be there in ten minutes (Vou chegar em dez minutinhos)
What foreigners hear: He’ll be here soon
What Brazilians mean: Some time in the next half-hour I’ll get up off the sofa and start looking for my car keys
What Brazilians say: I’ll show up later (Vou aparecer mais tarde)
What foreigners hear: He’ll be here later
What Brazilians mean: I won’t be coming
What Brazilians say: Let’s stay in touch, ok? (A gente se vê, vamos combinar, ta?)
What foreigners hear: He’d like to stay in touch (though, puzzlingly, we don’t seem to have swapped contact details)
What Brazilians mean: No more than a Briton means by: “Nice weather, isn’t it?”
What Brazilians say: I’m going to tell you something/ Let me tell you something/ It’s the following/ Just look and you’ll see (Vou te falar uma coisa/ Deixa te falar uma coisa/ É o seguinte/ Olha só pra você ver)
What foreigners hear (especially after many repetitions): He thinks I’m totally inattentive or perhaps mentally deficient
What Brazilians mean: Ahem (it’s just a verbal throat-clear)
What Brazilians say: A hug! A kiss! (Um abraço! Um bei
What foreigners hear: I’ve clearly made quite an impression—we’ve just met but he/she really likes me!
What Brazilians mean: Take care, cheers, bye
What Brazilians say: You speak Portuguese really, really well! (Você fala português super-bem!)
What foreigners hear: How great! My grammar and accent must be coming on a lot better than I thought
What Brazilians mean: How great! A foreigner is trying to learn Portuguese! Admittedly, the grammar and accent are so awful I can barely understand a word… but anyway! A foreigner is trying to learn Portuguese!
The "deixa me falar" thing has been making me crazy recently! And I get the "your Portuguese is great!" comment all the time.
Hi there! My wonderful Portuguese teacher has given me some homework that I'm enjoying so much, I thought I'd share it with you. Mostly what she does in class is makes me correct all my bad pronunciation. And there's a lot. And she is a stickler. She doesn't let me get away with it. Here are some of the words I have a REALLY hard time with
trabalho (that nasty LH combo is really tricky for us gringos)
engatinhar (to crawl, NH is another challenge)
pão (bread, the nasal "ão" kind of sounds like ouuuwwww....kind of)
anything ending in M
and that's just a few. But here's the homework that I'm liking. Enjoy some nice music for your Friday afternoon:
I have lived in Brazil for 2 years, 5 months and 23 days. I have yet to take a Portuguese class. I've been getting by on what I vaguely remember of Spanish, what I've learned helping my kids do their homework, a bit of Pimsler, a bit of Rosetta stone, learning some songs for the Festa Junina last year and for Kindergarten graduations (amazing how music will help vocabulary and pronunciation) and a whole lot of luck. I can survive, but it's not easy. And I sound like an unintelligible 2 year old many times.
A few weeks ago Sebastian got an invitation to a friend's house, and when I went to pick him up I ended up staying at their house for 2 1/2 hours just talking with the mom, in Portuguese. She is one really cool person, and she recently returned from a month in Canada where she studied English. She's also considering getting her Master's in Portuguese so she can teach foreigners. And what do you know: she wants to give me free classes to see how it goes! I'm pretty excited, and hoping that I can make some good progress.
I shared last year about our decision to move Sebastian to the school where I work. Way back in September when I enrolled him, I asked the school's van driver if he could drive Sebastian. School transportation is one of those realities that one has to deal with here. If you have the ability, you send your kids to private schools. But, private schools don't offer (free) transportation. I wonder if free public transportation for school children is a phenomena unique to the United States. So if you can't walk to school or take the kids yourself, you have to hire a van.
Most of the time, these vans are operated by people who are not associated with the schools. In Belo Horizonte, you can go the BHTrans website and find companies that work with your child's school and service your neighborhood. However, Sebastian's school has it's own van (kind of). The owner's husband purchased a van, and he can be hired to pick up and drop off your child. How convenient! I already knew the guy, he knows the school, he's good with kids. Great.
So, back in December, I talk to him, and he tells me that they are probably going to have to buy another van, but again he reassures me it's no problem. This is when I should have been worried. And it very well may have been that he was giving me some big, Brazilian clues (inferred, implied) that I should look into other options. However, I'm not Brazilian. And my Portuguese does not include inferences and subtle hints. And Mineiros (Brazilians?!?) don't like to say no. So I took him for his word. He told me to contact him in January. I got his email. And like a good and responsible mom, I emailed him in January, assuming that it was still going to be "no problem."
He mentioned that he needed to make another route, and he would be in touch with me. Again, I should have seen the warning signs. But at this point I was still in the states, and I didn't know what else I could do.
We returned to Brazil two days before school started, so I knew that I wasn't going to be able to figure this out for the first day. I had already planned to drive to Sebastian to school (especially since I would be working there the first day). After teaching, I searched out the van driver, and tried to get an answer from him. And finally he was straight answer: there wasn't room in the van. They needed another van. He didn't know when that was going to happen. Then I started to panic--did he know anyone who could help me? Any suggestions, and he said he would help. At least as far as I could understand.
The next few days I probably made 50 different phone calls. I called all the numbers on the BHTrans website. I wrote down every number of every van I saw in the general vicinity of the school. I called friends asking for help. I talked to parents. And all the while I was calling the van driver, asking for help. No luck. I also spent between 2 and 3 hours each day driving across town to get Sebastian to and from school. Traffic has gotten worse. It was not fun.
After a week and a half, the driver tells me that they have an opening in the evening, and he can take Sebastian home from school. Great! I asked when he thought he'd get Sebastian home. "Oh, about 7:30 pm." An hour after school is done. Not great, but not bad. Unfortunately it ended up taking almost 2 hours for Sebastian to get home. We started getting worried, and Sebastian was miserable. And I don't blame him: who wants to spend that much time in a van?!
I spent another few hours making phone calls, and realized that we were going to have to go the route of a motorista (driver). I'd heard other people talking about drivers, and always thought, "I'd never be one of those kind of people." Well, never say never. On Friday, I finally talked to a motorista that wasn't charging an arm and a leg, and said he was willing to do it. So, hopefully tomorrow we'll be testing out this driver, and Sebastian and I will be riding across town in the comfort of someone else's car.
What have I learned from this? Unfortunately, I think that I've learned that I need to be a little more careful in trusting promises. I probably should have learned this based on thevazamentoexperience. I also (again) have realized that I need to continue to work on my Portuguese. I wish I could say that I've also realized that "it will all work out in the end," because it always does (by some miracle). But in this case, I just feel more frustrated than thankful that it has "worked out." But, if it all does work out, I can feel good that I was able to make all those phone calls in Portuguese and actually be understood!
I've been lucky enough to connect with the music teacher at the Elementary school in my home town in Cashmere, WA. I got to see her again in January, and observed her class a few times. Since she did me the favor of letting me sit in on her classes, I thought I'd return it by teaching her students a little capoiera. My kids have taken capoeira classes at school, so I asked them to help. We had a great time practicing with Grandma and Grandpa, and my kids were really excited to share.
However, I can now add to my accomplishments swearing at native Spanish speakers while trying to teach Portuguese. You may remember my language boo boo with the " song. Well, while talking to the first and second graders about capoeira, I asked them to make a "roda." Then I told them that "roda" meant circle in Portuguese, and asked them to repeat it several times with me. "Roda, roda, roda." I saw the Spanish speaking kids snicker. And then as they repeated "roda" several times (again), and started getting embarrassed, I was stumped. It wasn't until I got home that I remembered that "roda" is pronounced like "joda" which comes from "joder" in Spanish. If you don't know what that means, look here.
We were hanging out with family the other day, sharing some stories, and I remembered a "blog-worthy" story. Always looking for good material.
As you know, I teach music at Maple Bear Canadian School to young children. I love my job. I love the kiddos. I'm always on the look out for different songs to teach them. A few months ago, I was brainstorming a list of songs that I had learned as a child, and I remembered this one:
Any one else remember this one? We sang it at Church camp and I think I sang it at school with my 2nd grad music teacher. Cute, simple, harmless. Right? So I started teaching it to one of my 4 and 5 year old classes. I sing about the mountains, the fireside, the lights. No problem. Then I got to the "Boom di yadda, boom di yadda" part, and the kids start snickering. Huh? I sang the whole song again, and of course the only part that the kids sing is "boom di yadda," but this time they are full on cracking up. I don't get it. Later in the day, I go to another class, teach the same song. The same thing happens. It wasn't until my THIRD class, that I finally asked the teacher if she understood why they were laughing. She very kindly said, "it sounds like "BUNDA yada."
Oh great. BUNDA means "butt." And Brazilians kind of likebutts. So I was singing "butt-di yada, booty di yada, butt-di yada..." over and over. I've tried to change the lyrics to "oodi lada, oodi lada, oodi lada, oodi lada," but the kids still like singing about butts.
I told this story to my family, and as soon as I started singing "Boom-di yada," my 9 year old daughter was dying laughing (before I told them what Bunda ment). She thought it was hilarious. I guess I'll have to have her preview my song selections for the next year.
***update*** After consulting my dictionary (oops, should have done it first) and reading comments and then talking to our housekeeper, I've learned that this kind of "bolo" does not bring to mind cake. Even thought the highly educated coordinator at the school told me it meant cake, I stand corrected. But I'm keeping this post, mainly because I like the picture of the cake.
I learned a helpful phrase last week. I was talking to the coordinator at our school, and I asked her about microphones for the upcoming presentation. She told me that the sound guy had called her Monday, scheduled an appointment for Tuesday, and never showed up. She said he gave her cake, thinking that it meant the same thing in English. Huh? So she explained that if someone says they will come to a meeting/show up for an appointment/fix your leaky faucet/meet you for coffee and they don't show up, you'd say, "ele me deu bolo," or literally, "he gave me cake." I like this image, taking an unfortunate, far too common experience, and making it "sweet."
I wish that I didn't have so many opportunities to use this expression, but you remember the leak in the bathroom that I started mentioning back in September? Well, finally the source of the leak was repaired. Then we had to wait for it to dry. Then we had to wait for the painter/repair man to come. Then he came, but he has to come back to do another coat of paint. Well, during the past almost 3 months, we'll just say that I've had LOTS and LOTS of cake. And that was just vazamento (leak) cake. I've not mentioned anything about pest control cake. Or broken faucet cake. Or João cake. João from the rental company gives me the most cake of all. I should start calling him the bolo man.
Which makes me think I've got to make my list of people to call tomorrow to try to haggle them to show up or fix problems. Wish me luck!
Belo Horizonte (pronounced bell-oh oar-ee-zonch) is the the 3rd largest city in Brazil and is almost completely unknown to the outside world.
How to contact me
I can't promise that I will respond quickly, and I can't promise that I will have the answers to your questions, but if you'd like to reach me, you can email me at srkelz (at) gmail (dot) com.
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