iacta alea est
Sunday, August 7, 2005 • Posted by jcb
Almost forgot to mention, the Brasilian government granted us permanent work visas recently. It feels good to go through all of the regular legal channels and have some success in a timely fashion. Maybe Brasil’s much maligned bureaucracy is finally righting itself…. or not. Now that the government sees us as legal do we feel all together like we belong? Hard to say at this point. After seven months or so of living on foreign soil we are starting to grow accustom to feeling like fish out of water. Much stems from the language barrier we are trying to overcome. Trying to learn a language much less become fluent at this age is tricky business. We often ask ourselves, what is fluency? At this point our language skills are well past overcoming daily obstacles such as restaurants, shops and general street banter… although I still get handed a freshly opened coconut most times I ask for a Coke at the local lunch stands. Our next big hurdles are the telephone, of which I have had some success lately, and conversation covering more than the weather and why in the hell would we move to Brasil. Oddly we get that one a lot, although more frequently in Sao Paulo which is no surprise if you’ve ever had the pleasure. Learning for me, so far has come in fits and starts where as Witzy is frighteningly autistic in his madness. He’ll go from spouting complete nonsense (hardly unusual) to picking up a college level portuguese finance book and translating an entire passage… without a dictionary! At any rate, if we ever become fluent or even figure out what it means to be fluent, it is somewhat refreshing to be on the outside looking in for a change.
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Posted by: Humphrey at August 17, 2005 02:34 AM
Enough monkeys and enough typewriters…that boy will come up with some gems.
Witz scares the other autistic kids. Always has.
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