¡Hola otra vez!

Last night we got back from Portugal where our group spent the weekend traveling. Up until this trip, I can honestly say I have never been interested in studying Portuguese culture or language, simply because I never knew anything about it or came into contact with it. However I absolutely loved the beautiful city of Lisbon, the small villages we visited up in the mountains, and the very rich and unique food we found in restaurants scattered about the city. We spent four days and three nights in Lisbon, taking small day trips to visit the countryside and beaches. I didn’t expect to gain such a love for Portugal so quickly but everything was just so beautiful and exciting I couldn’t help but absolutely adore it.

My first impression of Portugal was from a linguistic perspective. I was really shocked how different Portuguese sounded from Spanish. I’ve always heard that Portuguese and Spanish are so similar that if you speak Spanish you can pretty much understand Portuguese, but I now believe that is simply not the case. Reading signs of stores and menus in restaurants wasn’t too hard but listening to waiters ask me for my order and I was absolutely clueless. The only language item that I picked up all weekend was ¡Obrigada!, the Portuguese version of Gracias/thank you. I pretty much just said Obrigada wherever I went because it sounded pretty and was fun to at least pretend I knew any Portuguese. One extremely interesting thing about Portugal, however, is that it seemed that wherever we went, speaking Spanish was looked down upon. More than once I was asked to speak English if I couldn’t speak Portuguese and if not English, French. They explained to me that there was an existing tension between the nations and languages so it was safer to speak English than to risk offending the Portuguese. I complied with this social rule but definitely missed speaking Spanish all weekend.

In Portugal we saw a beautiful palace, spent a day in Obidos (medieval village in mountains), went to the beach on the coast, went out at night to the Bairo Alto (strip of restaurants and bars where the young people flock), and listened to street performers singing Fado (traditional Portuguese music). After this experience I plan on taking elementary intensive Portuguese next year so that I can get a basic background understanding of the Portuguese language.

¡Obrigada por el viaje Lisboa!

Siobhan Elvin
UMass Amherst 2014 – Spanish