Year in Portugal Brings
Soulful Music, Chicken-Foot Soup

Sarah Kresock, an RUHS student who is spending her junior year as an AFS exchange student in Portugal, supplied The Herald with this report on her year.

By Sarah Kresock

Bons dias a todos!

I’m writing to you from sunny, but chilly, São João da Madeira in Portugal. I am about five months into my exchange year, and so far it has been a year to remember.

After switching from my first host family, I now live in an area of my city called Milheiros De Poiares. Milheiros is a charming little town with some cobblestone streets, and a natural spring in which we fill up our water jugs every week. Although Milheiros is small, it is jam-packed with people house to house, but most of the people who live around me are our relatives, so we get to spend a lot of time all together.

The much larger, more urban part of my area, São joão da Madeira is about five minutes from my house by car, and quite the ride with the way that the Portuguese drive. Portugal has the tiniest, snaking alleyways for roads but that still doesn’t keep people from hitting the brakes.

I have already had a few close calls, and that makes me a bit nervous, but you learn to trust the people who are driving you, because you know that they have been doing it for most of their lives and have to deal with it every day.

My host family is wonderful, my host dad Vitor Hugo, isn’t the author of Les Misérables, but he is an amazing cook and he loves to bake. Whenever he is in the kitchen, he always calls me in so that I can watch or help out.

My host mom, Ana Paula, is the principal of the school in Milheiros, and she is also the conductor of a choir. She is always walking around our house singing something and she has an amazing voice, so I love to hear her. My host brothers and sister are so fun to be with. My brothers, Tomé, 18, and Pedro, 15, are very into soccer as it is a major passion for the Portuguese. My sister, Ju is my age and very talented. She has ballet, chorus, and guitar lessons every week and she is amazing at all of them.

Crunchy Chicken Feet

Portuguese food is among the best I have ever tasted and I have even tried some things that I never even thought you could eat.

One time I was pretty surprised to find a pair of chicken feet in my soup, but when I looked around to see what to do, everyone was just munching on the toes. Sounds, gross and it is, but actually isn’t too bad.

Some other interesting foods include: octopus, rabbit, a stringy type of melon called cabaça de xila, a hot drink called cevada, which is barley and very good, and last but not least, hallacas, a typical Venezuelan Christmas food (my first host family was from Venezuela.)

Forget the Clock

A typical day in Portugal can be pretty long. The Portuguese, I have noticed, like to ignore the clock and live by their own form of time. They usually stay up pretty late, which is also normal for children. Most young kids I have seen here don’t have a bed time.

I, however, usually wake up around 7:30 a.m. and find my way to bed most nights at 11 p.m. In the morning, I eat a quick breakfast of bread with ham/jam/butter/honey, and cevada.

I am off to school by 8:00 and I come home (depending on which day it is), at 1:30, or 6:25 p.m. If it is Monday, though, I get to school at 3:00 and stay until 6:00. My friends and I usually show up to class about five minutes after the bell rings, which is normal.

I have Portuguese lessons for about 90 minutes each week, plus extra tutoring each week. Portuguese is indeed a lot like Spanish. But the people here tell me that they can understand Spanish, but can’t speak it, and the people who speak Spanish can understand Portuguese but can’t speak it.

It is a very beautiful language and it is so amazing how learning a new language can be. You don’t just speak or understand it, you think in it, and you react to it instantly. In the beginning, I had to translate everything in my head, and then translate back from English to Portuguese, but now it just flows out!

I recently joined a spinning class with some of my friends, and that is a lot of fun.

My school, Escola Secundária Oliveira Junior # 3 is in São joão and a lot bigger than RUHS. I still have people I don’t know come up to me and ask me questions like "Why did you choose Portugal?" and what not.

But everyone I have met here has been very sweet and is very interested in my exchange. My teachers are pretty lenient, and very easy to talk to. Sometimes if they don’t show up for class, we can leave, unless we have a substitution class instead.

Carnival is right around the corner, and I am excited to see what it is all about here in Portugal. Carnival is a well-known festivity, most commonly with parades, which is celebrated all around the world. I recently participated in a special parade for the schools in my area for Carnival. A lot of the students from my school participated, and it was pretty exciting.

I few weeks ago my host mom took my sister and me to a Fado concert. Fado is traditional music of Portugal and is one of the most beautiful types of music I have ever heard. The main point of Fado is for the singer to let everything out and let his soul speak, which can be pretty powerful if you go to a concert. Many people when they got to Fado concerts begin to cry.

Portugal is a wonderful place, and soon I hope to travel to Lisbon with my host mom and sister to see the Portuguese-adapted version of "The Sound of Music."

Até Logo, Muitos Beijinhos, and Rollocko!

____________