In Which Portuguese Becomes Vaguely Intelligible

At some point, probably around when my sleep schedule seemed to correct itself and I began waking up at hours that would only qualify as a "morning period" to the Portuguese, I began the process of getting over and allowing myself to look like a complete idiot (if necessary) in Portuguese in order to get and enjoy what I want instead of the limited scope of things I've already done or tried. It's not so much that I've gotten over anything, as the way in which my cheeks feel flush with embarrassment and my mind races to correct whatever phrase or thing it was that sounded stupid, but I've just begun to make a significantly better effort at plodding along through the vaguely mortifying feeling of being unable to communicate the extremely basic things that you're trying to ask for or otherwise express, sometimes literally in front of your face. It feels like what I imagine drowning might, only there's no risk of death, so you just have to live with it until you come to terms with the fact that, indeed, there are some people in the world that think you are a complete moron and what are you doing here if you can't even get the pastry order right? It is perhaps human nature to think about these things too much and assume them to be worse than the situation actually warrants.

And so it was that I got sick of having only pastel de nata, as delicious as it is when made properly (which is not the case in many of the pastelarias that are so abundant here), and one day went into a pastelaria determined not to be intimidated by the sharp bom dia of the server immediately upon my entrance and first examination of the items on offer in the glass case. I was not going to use English, the way that might get me what I want more often but would not help any semblance of assimilation or sense of actually living here, much less my Portuguese language skills. I was going to look at the pastries until I had decided fully well which one(s) looked good to me, and then just point and order, regardless of knowing the name or not. (Incidentally, a Portuguese person I am well acquainted with told me that in common lore, a man that knows the name of more than a couple of pastries including de nata is considered to be definitely gay and not necessarily in a positive way. This was reinforced in further conversations with other Portuguese people.) The end result was that I got probably the two best pastries I have ever consumed in my life. That was nice on its own, and contributed to my mood enough with the excess of espresso I had consumed that the whole ordeal was, well, not one, but it was also really the first time I managed to get through a fluid customer service interaction (as opposed to the robotic thank-you-come-again sort that one has in the US extensively and here only when you order exactly what you want as soon as you walk in and then pay immediately) without major issues and with genuinely friendly reception from the server. Apparently the effort, as bumbling as I can be, is well-taken, because similar exchanges have only gone better since then and now waiters no longer need to switch to English to clarify what the fuck exactly I was trying to obtain.

This all goes down the drain if I'm with native speakers, though, especially those who speak quickly and quietly typical of these people, and especially not at 10 in the morning before I've had any coffee and am still not home after not expecting to sleep elsewhere the night before. Portuguese is still sort of like that though – half the time it's intelligible and I feel like I've made great progress because I understand everything and the other half it might as well be Romanian, I have no idea what is going on, and I am just as frustrated as the native speaker twisting his tongue through eccentric English to get to a point simpler than it seems. That had better change with the amount of work I am pouring into this.