Aiming High, or Welcome to Poor Southern Europe

Top 35! Aiming high! On the bright side, at least we're not in Poland.

I had to throw that photo in, just in case anyone didn't believe me from the last post. They are so proud.

It turns out that my classes are pretty much all graduate level classes, which Ana ...Sofia? Maria? Bela? Catholic name something or other... advised were probably not as difficult as undergraduate classes, not the least of which being because there are some that are actually offered in English. Taking classes in Portuguese here is fine too, but we have to get special accommodations for tests and the like, so I'm trying to keep it to a minimum. The upside to this means that I may not start classes of substance until March, the downside of this is that I will probably be taking Portuguese anyway, negating that gain entirely. Not too bad, though. I should probably keep up with the português as much as possible.

 Which brings me to my main point(s), summarized in my favorite format:

• Portuguese people are generally very cosmopolitan and have an excellent grasp of English.

• Of the dozens of people I've managed to meet in the span of just one week, people ranging from a DJ to a former vice president of Northwestern University and beyond, everyone has the same concerns with the economy and desire for their country to correct itself. They all hate Merkel/Merkozy.

• Portuguese people insist they are worlds different from the Spanish and are vaguely offended by the notion of people thinking they're similar, which is truer than not.

• Portuguese people are rather short and rather skinny.

• People are laid back and will talk about anything with you in any of the numerous instances you may find yourself seated at a table with them, drinking a coffee or listening to a cat being strangled to death the worst fado performer on earth.

• People tend to be educated, but it's not actually necessary for a job here the way it is in the rest of the developed world. Many people have never gone to college but have typical middle class jobs that don't pay nearly enough akin to the rest of the world, because if you have a job here you're fine, the problem in the economy is with those who don't.

• Portugal isn't really as inefficient as many of its south European kin, at least according to them, they just have a little problem of embezzlement and corruption in the government.

I don't have much more to write because I'm too busy doing the things I'll write about later. Ciao!

Midnight Observations and Other Miscellany

• Portugal is kind of strange because every time I feel like it's not an inefficient southern European country, something happens to reaffirm that we are still Mediterranean in character if not in physical location, as well as the reverse happening whenever I start to get irritated by the fact that I willingly chose to live among lazy southern Europeans.

• Portuguese is precisely as easy as I thought it was, and I have somehow managed not to make a bumbling idiot out of myself using it more than a respectable number of times. Dealing with Brazilians, on the other hand, skews the distribution.

• Our wonderful host university, supposedly the highest ranked in all of Portugal, and most certainly with the greatest prestige, can not seem to get its shit together. I went in a few days after getting here to talk to the person who is supposed to be in his office all week on a regular schedule to get set up as a student at the university but instead left empty-handed with no one knowing when or if he might come into the office at any point during the week.

• The soldes phenomenon of government-regulated (read: mandated) sales in pretty much all stores exists outside of France, as it turns out, and I happened to arrive right in the middle of them. Hello, Zara.

• My apartment has no climate control whatsoever like a true, typical cheap apartment building constructed in the '90s, but the location is as good as they get and the rent is low to compensate. Can't have everything I suppose.

• Given the previous, my apartment is less of an apartment and more of an igloo. Wearing layers in the house almost doesn't work between the hours of sundown to midday and taking a shower is an exercise in something resembling idiocy, futility, and extreme lack of sex appeal.

• The hills of Portugal are stunningly beautiful and great for your ass.

• The city is kind of grungy and ...well lived-in, but it's got a character second to none. As well as views. Holy crap, the views.

Até já!

Reciprocity in Bureaucracy

It came to my attention around the beginning of the visa application process that, in fact, students never used to need to even bother with the visa process as recently as give or take five years ago and that this policy has been enacted by many (most?) member states of the EU/Schengen Area on a policy of reciprocity. This means that because the United States makes everyone else, even in Western, closely allied countries, fill out endless paperwork and jump through stringent hoops, well, so too are Americans going to have to do exactly the same if they want in those countries for longer than 90 days. This renders the visa process a little bit less serious, as evidenced by the terribly translated and proofread visa application form (among other documents), and a lot more tedious. I'm not saying I don't get it, but thanks for that one, America, all of us going to these countries are so terribly grateful.

Upon learning that a girl going on the program to Germany doesn't need the same kind of visa and can just show up and register herself, I threw in a joke about how this is really just Europe's geopolitical South's revenge for all of their duress. I'm not so sure that needs to be a joke.

I am still waiting for my background check to come back from the FBI so that I can submit all of my visa materials. Six weeks and counting.

The timeline for visa approval is apparently three to six weeks, but often shorter because the process isn't actually that strict for American citizens provided you aren't, say, a felon. That's great, at least in theory, except that there is ambiguity over whether or not we send in our passports from the get-go and then it's approved and mailed back to us, or whether we send in a copy, get the visa approved, and then send in our passports. In typical Latin style, no one really knows except for the contacts at the consulate that only our study abroad office seems to have contact with. You could otherwise be waiting approximately forever for clarification. This becomes problematic only when the lack of start and end dates for the semester in Lisbon is factored in, because Católica doesn't feel like it's necessary to let that information out except in officially signed and sealed documents. Add to that the necessity of this information for filling out the visa application form itself and being able to book travel, for which must be accounted as part of the documentation, and you have a nice, big clusterfuck mess that doesn't get any better when you realize that the days and weeks are melting away, leaving the deadlines significantly tighter for getting the visa and getting the hell out of this country.

Our documentation from Católica, semester dates and all, came in finally, so we happily (joy!) no longer need to worry about that.

In related news, all of my hyperventilation over the course of this process over housing and the fact that I don't want to end up living in a suitcase on cobblestone sidewalks by a river because I can't afford housing and no one bothered to lend a helping hand in finding lodging arrangements and I'm going to starve because everything is expensive and what if the airline loses my luggage and I have no clothes, then I'll be really screwed and then what if ... where was I? Oh, right. So we had an orientation meeting to go over the various bureaucratic processes that getting there entails, from the university to the government and everything in between, and we also met with one of the students on exchange here from the same program. I can now rest assured that Portugal is nowhere near as expensive as Alpine France (or Paris, for that matter), I will not have to worry about living in a hovel 2 kilometers from a transit stop an hour and a half away from anything of interest, and plenty of other information that will no doubt come in handy. This is the point where normally I would be excited, but I can't get the background check out of my head, and so all of the elves and faeries shitting themselves joy will have to sit contained until I mail off my visa application, at which point I'm sure I will spend all of my time learning as much about Lisbon and Portugal (and Portuguese) as possible in my impatience to leave.

At least even the Germans had a difficult process with their visas.