Voce Fala Portugues?

O Atrevido led the way with a few particularly introspective posts. I figured I should follow his lead. A few days ago I could sense that a slight feeling of frustration was slowly creeping its way into my Brazilian experience. There was a nagging sensation that something was holding me back.

I think of myself as a people person. I like sharing my experiences with others. I also have a deep respect and affinity for language. I take pride in the way I use language. I consider it more than just a way of communicating relevant information. Language is an artform and I feel that it must be utilized with the respect and effort that any legitimate artform deserves.

So when I'm just relaxing with English speaking friends, I love to play with words, stretch them, re/invent them. Language is dynamic and should always be treated with the creativity and flexibility it is capable of exhibiting. Sarcastic humor, verbal jousting, spirited wordplay; all things that I enjoy. Unfortunately...these things are very hard to successfully transfer into Portuguese. Or, at least at my level of Portuguese.

Hence the frustration. I have found myself in a place whose beauty deserves only the most spirited verbal imagery, and I am shackled by substandard vocabulary and a less than a healthy command of Portuguese grammatical structures and syntax. I want to relay my new experieces here in Salvador to my new Brazilian family and friends but often find myself falling back on simple phrases and sentences that can't even begin to relay what I'm really thinking.

But alas, foreign travel is not for the weary, and I have always adapted to new surroundings and circumstances well. Through the result of myriad historical circumstances, I was raised in the linguistic tradition of Anglo-Norman Europe and left ignorant of the intricacies of Iberian wordplay until a very late age. Fate is a cruel master indeed. So, now that I find myself trapped, without the full array of lingual tools on which I usually rely, what is a self-defined wordsmith to do? Maybe it's time to expand my horizons. Communication is not limited to words and sentences. So while I slowly improve upon my Portuguese, I guess I will have to find other forms of communication to help get across my sentiments. Fortunately, Caranaval is a perfect time to try and develop these alternate forms of communication. Actions speak louder than words, and as I've been told (and have begun to witness, in extremely dramatic fashion), almost all actions are allowed during Carnaval.