Things to Which I Have Not Yet Adjusted

There's a bit (or more than) of truth in all of this sarcasm, so take it with good humor.

1. Air conditioning. Why is the United States so cold in the middle of a hot summer?
2. The enormity of everything. We're not exactly hurting for space, are we?
3. Public niceties. Why is everyone smiling at me? I don't know you people.
4. Bad English everywhere. It's like I didn't leave a foreign country, except these people have less of an excuse.
5. Food portions. How is it that restaurants can afford to serve this much food to people per dish?
6. Prices. How is it that Listerine only costs $3 for 1.5L? That would be nearly 20€ in Portugal.
7. Coffee. What is all of this liquid, and what have you done with the espresso that's supposed to be in it?
8. Suburbs. Where did the city go? I can't find it.
9. Drinking. Why must I be prohibited from doing this? Life is not the same without beer and 2€ wine.
10. Geography and climate. Why is it so dry here, and where did the beach go?
11. Dogs at home. Why are these creatures so fat and smell bad? Stop licking me.
12. Customer service. Why are you so efficient, and why are you so friendly? You must be getting paid a lot to care so much.
13. Restaurants. See: food portions. Also, why can't I just pick where I sit? And why are you in such a hurry?
14. Diet Coke. Why do you suddenly taste so foul, what has my exposure to Coke Light and Coke Zero done?
15. Punctuality. No comment.

Things Everyone Should Expect to Hear from Me Upon Arrival

A small post in light of many recent long ones.

1. What do you mean I'm not legally allowed to drink in this country?
2. What do you mean the buses only come once every 30 minutes?
3. Where is the nearest Chipotle?
4. What do you mean I have to drive there?
5. What is that in metric? (also: what is that in Celsius?)
6. Why is a shot of espresso more expensive than half a liter of coffee?
7. No, they don't speak Spanish in Portugal.
8. What do you mean I can't watch this content in my country?
9. Olá-oh, uh, hi.
10. When does the grocery store clo–what do you mean it doesn't?
11. The drivers are so polite here!
12. Why are you eating dinner so early?
13. Why is there so much to choose from?
14. Everything is so big here!
15. It's so amazing that everyone understands what I'm saying here.
16. Where are the bagels?
17. I can pay for this with my credit card, really? Are you completely sure?
18. Why are there so many bills, where are the coins?
19. Yes, I know what I'm doing after graduation and no, I'm not telling you about it.
20. Ciao.

Permutations of the Linguistic Paradigm

After five months of living and learning a new language, I breathe somewhat easier with the knowledge that my language skills have improved over the course of this time enough that any sort of multilingualism I may possess has become more tangible to myself almost as much as it seems to be to others. But what that really means is that I have grown an awareness of what exactly it means to be multilingual in practical usage, just such a thing no longer being only a theoretical concept that is not in use except in a classroom or as a topic of light conversation. Using multiple languages each day has opened up new approaches to the task of learning them, forcing me to realize the extent to which I can actually speak other languages versus simply being a good student of them. Being surrounded each day by individuals who are using English as a second language has given me somewhat more insight into the expectations one may have of other individuals speaking their language; I find myself in the role not just of communicating with my friends and acquaintances, but also in the perpetual role of being a teacher, explaining words and colloquialisms, phrases and grammar, that seem to me quite simple but to those not otherwise familiar clearly does not make sense. Taking this in reverse, I understand my position as a non-native speaker in each language in which I command some level of proficiency – taken in this light, my fear of speaking incorrectly is shed and in its stead I find myself more concerned about having the adequate means of expressing the thought of which I am trying.

This became readily apparent to me in Paris, being there as I was functioning entirely in French — if not perfectly expressive French, mind, but indeed in no other language — and passing my time and interactions in a manner somewhat similar to that in which I find myself when interacting with people who speak English not necessarily well, but adequately enough to keep talking to them. "Tu parles très bien français!" is the equivalent to the "your English is very good, really!" which we never cease to tell foreign speakers as we listen to them excuse their deficiencies in saying something because their English is poor. Indeed, even in Portuguese, "estás a falar português muito bem!" is not so much to say that I am speaking Portuguese that well, it is just an encouragement to keep doing so. When in Paris, my French grew and retooled itself both to catch up from not having used it and also because I was learning so very many words and connotations in context, I learned the very painfully obvious lesson of the necessity of being around only that language in which you would like to be speaking or learning in order to do so. While I have learned a remarkable amount of Portuguese in the five months I have been here, my lack of being continually surrounded by it has inhibited my capabilities to speak.

Happily, to this end, I have found myself these last weeks much more surrounded by Portuguese than I had otherwise been, the seminar in Brussels being a crowd of Portuguese students (save, more or less, myself and one other) speaking in their native language and switching into English only occasionally, as well as various times in which my group dynamic has shifted to a majority of Portuguese speakers who are confortable in the knowledge that I understand what is going on and can speak their language, switching to English only when directly addressing me or when it becomes convenient. I can leave Portugal now knowing that I will not drown if I am not speaking my own language and that those who enjoy my company still do so even when I am less talkative because I am absorbing their language and not imposing my own to dominate the social order. In such situations, I become the student in place of the teacher of language, and I derive no small pleasure in doing so each time this barrier cracks and it happens without feeling forced or unnatural. This, I believe, will be the only way I can come to feel comfortable enough to just speak casually in Portuguese the way I do in French. Time is the only other factor that is necessarily, in which we will see what will happen. I have six months of down time now, so it would incumbent on me to make good use of it.

The Essence of "Déjà Vu"

Welcome (back) to Paris. Sound familiar? I decided to come back nearly as last-minute as I did going to Madrid, having had issues attempting to book my flight with Vueling and their poorly designed online reservation system. I ended up taking Aigle Azur instead, an airline which approximately no one seems to have heard of before, but which also seems to be perfectly decent anyway, except for having had to pay an exorbitant amount for my ticket three days prior to flying. Oh well. Any company would be expensive in that case, I suppose.

So I'm in Paris, but the trip as it has developed has been an extremely different séjour than last time, there has been no sense of wandering aimlessly, of being a tourist figuring his way through a grand city, of learning how to be and what it means to be, in an almost literal sense, alone in the world. Instead I am visiting (and staying with) friends, seeing as many of the numerous people I had become acquainted with the last time around as possible and certainly meeting plenty of others. The experience has allowed me to be much more connected with the city on a personal level; I am no longer overwhelmed by the busy nature of commerce owing to its size, instead with friends I can breathe easily and enjoy new places in any given part of town without over-thinking anything. I can order my coffee and gelato without thinking anything special of it just for the sake of having been coffee and gelato ordered in a city often considered a living museum. I have taken no pictures whatsoever with my camera despite having brought it. I have instead been received as though I were at home, enjoying speaking a language in which I have no inhibitions for want of experience and confidence, one in which I can express myself adequately well and more or less completely, one in which I need not switch to my native language in general when I find myself short of understanding something.

Thus lies the difference between Paris and Lisbon for me, but although linguistically life may be easier, let me not mislead you into thinking that Paris is so much the more homely for me than Lisbon. That would be a disservice of an order of magnitude, as I will explain. I am not Portuguese in any given sense; I am neither yet a full-time resident nor was I born with any kind of cultural inheritance that might make up for the legal disparity. Nowhere is this more true than when I am going about living my life in Lisbon however I may do so, observing all the time how typically or not I am American and drawing comparisons of that in direct relation to native Portuguese people, everyone noting well the distinctions involved when a foreign person arrives to integrate themselves fully, slowly as it may happen. This is to say nothing of the linguistic issue. And yet, being in Paris for me has allowed me to see from a perspective of appreciable cultural as well as physical difference — much more so than Madrid, which is close enough in relative terms to Portugal physically as well as culturally —the extent to which I have adopted a Portuguese spirit and feel most at home in Lisbon. Mannerisms of all things, from the hours at which I prefer to dine to linguistic quirks that fit more flexibly in situations than English or French, have become my own in an inadvertent way, myself only noticing that I behave in such a manner when outside of the environment where such things are routine. It has taken stepping completely outside of so-called Iberia to realize the way in which I have become Portuguese in some way.

I feel completely at ease and at home in Paris, able to communicate fully and effortlessly, not having any problems navigating the city however large, transitioning seamlessly into my cultural surroundings such that it is no one's immediate assumption that I'm not from or at least very well acquainted with the city. And yet, Paris is not home. It may never be, in a literal sense, but in a more philosophical way there are pronounced obstacles that render it foreign. I have written about the ways Denver and Lisbon are similar, and I believe that at a profound level this impacts the way I feel toward Paris. I'm not from somewhere so large, nor have I ever lived somewhere nearly so large, and so much as I am content in it and prefer it to its natural opposite — I adjust extremely poorly to sparsely-inhabited areas —, I am not a product of it. It is too large and too expensive to become quite so intimately familiar with even after a long time; it is, owing to its size, almost inherently impersonal. It is a city saturated with tourists and people chasing their own dreams of Living in Paris, their version of being a privileged youth vagabond "finding themselves" in Europe, people from everywhere but France figuring out their own abstract ideas of what it means to be French and trying to be accordingly so. For better or worse, there is a distinct lack of cultural fixedness in Paris, the clichéd concept of a typical Parisian being something that exists only as an element of cultural mythology so far as I have discerned it, Paris cosmopolitan and fluid in reverse correlation to Lisbon's provincialism and rigidity.

This is all to say that I have become more deeply attached to Paris than before, more personally connected to it, but I will be happy to return to life in Lisbon, to life at home. I miss Lisbon already, the way that someone without a wandering soul misses the creature comforts they have from their lives wherever they may be based. In Lisbon I have found something of a base, a place from which I can quench my thirst to know and discover more of the world yet unknown that itself has become so of my own doing. I may always feel a bit like a wide-eyed child seeing the reality of the world for the first time despite that being very much less the case as time goes on, but I at least have somewhere to return to, relax, and feel the comfort of being myself completely uninhibited. Paris is a delight, but a delight as a guest.

From Portugal to Paris, Continental Affairs

June is proving to be a busy month with a seemingly endless amount of papers, new seminars, traveling, and money to be taken out of my wallet by governmental agencies and other quasi-official things that are necessary, if expensive. I'm leaving Lisbon for Paris for five days shortly, having arranged almost as much at the last minute this trip as I did Madrid, being limited only by the fact that flights become exorbitantly fucking expensive the closer to the day you purchase them you get. I managed to find people to stay with and I can already feel the excitement and connection to the city I left with prior to departure – in other words, the trip will be much the opposite of how Madrid went. More on that will necessarily come later, but for now I have other, more pressing concerns to attend to.

The much more consequential news is that I have, as of this Monday, enrolled in a Portuguese language class running from February to June, marking the first segment of both my return to academic life in the post-graduate period but also to Portugal in a definitive way as I had been hoping to work toward. There are many things remaining to do, but the work is not for want of being done: having begun the enrollment process (something I keep trying to call 'inscription', despite that being the wrong word, because in Portuguese the word is inscrição), I will then, in consecutive order, pay the enrollment fee and get a document for SEF (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras, or the Portuguese version of border control and immigration office), get Portuguese health insurance, and meet with SEF to extend my residence beyond the end of September as it was granted for my current academic program. It's a lot of running about and sitting in offices mostly not doing anything except for spending money for the pleasure of sitting in offices not doing anything. It's a bureaucratic way of saying that I'm enough of a special snowflake to stay in this bumbling little country, and I'm not bothered by any part of the process – indeed, I've spent enough time sitting around in offices waiting for things to happen and become organized and resolve themselves that I'm at a bit of a loss if such things are not actually happening.

I know what you're thinking. "Good job, you really buried the fuck out of that lead there."

So in order to clarify, what this means is that I'm moving to Portugal. The details are progressing forward as they naturally would in the order that they should and with all of the hiccups that come naturally with such things. There is a lot of work involved, a mind-numbingly large amount of work involved to put in toward moving. The process of moving anywhere is never easy, much less so moving somewhere an ocean and national boundaries away. It is a monumental change in life, this is something that can not be understated in any way, yet at the same time, I am plodding along through each particular step of the way of this without becoming overwhelmed in the process, without losing my sense of self, and without losing sight of the things that are important and give meaning to and reason for doing anything I do in life. I have not lost track of my ongoing process of learning Portuguese and integrating my lifestyle into the Lisbon sphere, nor have I lost track of my intellectual pursuits and academic responsibilities, the necessity of putting work in to finish basic classes in order to graduate in December, and so on. By doing everything one step at a time, one bureaucratic office, one meeting, one piece of paperwork, one social interaction at a time, I have figured out how to breathe and be, for the first time, my own person on my own terms equal among those around me with no exceptions. I am not magically independent at the stroke of a pen, the likes of which you might see in a movie or hear in a pop song, but I have a sense of personal legitimacy that seems to have reached a point of saturation both within myself and those around me. It is a rewarding path to follow.

Just the same, as the reality of being truly rooted in Portugal begins to sink in, the idea of somberly parting from dear friends on an indefinite basis fading quickly with the knowledge of return in six months' time, I find myself with mixed emotions toward both Lisbon and Denver as places I consider home. At a relatively superficial level, the two cities are remarkably similar: they are of roughly equal populations both in the city proper and including the suburban environs, they are similarly provincial with a streak of cosmopolitan and cultural brilliance if you look in the correct places, they are in similar economic positions, and so on. Such similarities have struck me at a profound level, making me realize that at least part of the reason I feel quite so much at home in Lisbon is that it is inherently familiar in its character. Lisbon is a city at the nexus of a culture always trying to pit itself as adequately well-accomplished and relevant much as Denver has a similar complex from its geographical isolation within the United States. With Denver being my home by upbringing and Lisbon my home by matter of choice, I have already found myself with a form of dissonance, realizing at the same time as I have come to love Lisbon the positive aspects of what I have in Denver. The impact of moving — the prospect thereof, rather — being what it is, I appreciate Denver as a home of mine in a way not entirely possible before. I do not miss my friends or family in the sense of a painful, longing lack of their presence, but I value their continued presence the more so given that sticking around with me doing the things I'm doing can be an exercise in great frustration at times. On the other hand, of course, I feel much the same about Lisbon, having made highly valued friendships with people which will continue to grow all the more upon moving back (although in the case of G, perhaps the most prominent of these figures, it is ironically not quite the case, since he will go back to Brazil at the end of the summer). I believe this sense of feeling alive and the connection with everything around me is what I've been chasing after for all these years.