Following what is around me, that's cool!

For the past 12 years I've been living abroad - the longest stretch ever in my life away from every day life in Brazil. Other foreign posts were at the most 3 years long. Another way to say this would be: "For the past 12 years I've been part of a minority", which is ok, which is fine, but… after a while, it does get you tired. Here in Angola, I am still a minority, and like in Hong Kong, an obvious one, even before I opened my mouth and words came out in English with an accent. The accent bit also happens here in Angola but I’m experiencing a feeling I didn’t know I was missing.

I can now mingle with the crowd, I can now understand everything that is going on around me… wow, that is awesome!!

In South Africa I was never an enthusiast to learn the Afrikaans, as the language is kind of a dying one, spoken in multi lingual South Africa and Namibia. Then in HK I had 9 years of a constant dilemma. If I learned the very totally hard Cantonese, the language spoken in that part of China, I could only practice it in HK, Shenzhen and Guangzhou (and in most Chinese restaurants around the world, for that matter) and nowhere else. The obvious solution to this would be learning Mandarin, which is what MANY westerns are doing now. They move to Beijing and immerse themselves in learning the language, which is a bit easier than Cantonese, but still a freaking difficult language. Learning Mandarin would be ok when going into China, Singapore, Taiwan, parts of Malaysia, but not in HK as of yet, so there you have… a dilemma I lived for the past 9 years and because of it, I ended up never learning Cantonese or Mandarin.

In terms of getting around and making myself understood in HK, I had no problems at all, as HK, until “recently” a former British colony, is almost completely bilingual, English and Cantonese. However, in fact I did loose a lot, really a lot, not following stories that were happening around me on the streets, busses, trams, wet markets and so on. In South Africa it was the same, the geographical areas where Afrikaans is spoken, I never understood what was being said.

Having said all that, I must add that the fact that Joel, the girls and myself, had this very helpful “shield” called “speaking a language few people spoke in those places”, was good and helpful, I must confess. Here in Angola, Joel and I are having to practice extra care in what we say, because here people DO understand us, LOL!

Of course, along these years, we were caught in big surprises, like the time when the girls had a Cultural Evening at their school, Island School in HK. Joel and I were sitting chatting away just before it started, thank goodness thoroughly behaving in our comments, when this 100% Chinese looking lady, sitting in front of us, turns around and in the most perfect Portuguese asks smiling: “Are you Brazilians too?”

So, back to Luanda…, yesterday at lunch time, I had so much fun, “participating” in the conversation of two Brazilians, sitting next to my table. One of them had this really soft round accent, a typical intellectual accent from Rio. As they were not gossiping, I could follow it. They were talking about their passion for reading books, of how they “dive” into the pages of the books, of how they prefer the books to their versions on screens, of how you become close friends of the character and then… how they like to “save” the last pages of great books, so that they take longer to finish reading it and stay closer to their friends for longer. That is exactly how I feel when a book is good, I read 1 or 2 pages at a time, just to make sure “my friends” stay around for longer, LOL!

I remember another time when I had a good time listening to what was going on next to me. It was a Sunday, a very hot summer Sunday in Rio and we had gone to the beach. We were not the only ones who had chosen to go to the beach that Sunday, I think the 11 million residents of Rio were at the beach in Leblon that Sunday. Next to us, were 2 men and 1 lady and suddenly, out of the blue, this absolutely gorgeous woman, those that resembles a guitar way more than a guitar resembles a guitar, gorgeous soft skin, spectacular skin color of a mixed race lady and as we were in a beach, she was wearing a bikini only. She knew she was gorgeous, actually way more than gorgeous, she was perfect! So, this woman walks pasts us and one of the man next to us, stops talking and just looks at the goddess, his jaws dropped, he didn’t blink… I guess, he probably thought he was in some sort of terrestrial paradise… at this drooling point, the woman accompanying him says:
- “hey Pedro, respect me, I am here, right next to you”.
To which he replies, still drooling in the most soft voice ever,
- “as for me I don’t care for religion, skin color, height or political choices, all I care for are the emotions!"

So here you go, don’t do like I did. Do your best to learn the local language of where your living home is, making your experience in that place so much richer. I believe that learning and living the little details of a society, understanding street life makes life much more thrilling!