A new endeavor

Howdy all,
As many know I am living in Portugal a country where they speak Portuguese.  In an effort to learn and document my understanding of the language. I will be posting about the 90 grammar lessons found in my grammar book.  So if you are not careful you may learn something.  Of course there is much to say about the language and I am not pretending to be an expert (note I did not say fluent) speaker.  I would say that I am already fluent (in a small range of topics I can hold my own in Portuguese) but I am not fooling anyone with my accent (I have heard it described as a bit Rio and a bit Spanish and a bit Italian) but there it is.
I am not going to worry about my accent.  I figure my accent is the way that I can tell people to be gentle, it may not be dignified to have the giant "L" on the car but as long as the coffee does not get spilled we still get to pass. Or at least the Governator does not have to worry about it so why should I?

How it all started or I really shouldn't eat so many sweets

So if it can be said to start anywhere it started with a dame..that dame may be my wife, as she prefers to be called, but a dame none the less.
So we get married and I follow her because she gets a job in a college town in Indiana and as I wasn't terribly excited to make military ammunition so it wasn't that hard to leave. Besides it gives me time to pursue an errant master's thesis.

So a new puppy, several week trips to my alma mater to edit the thing and I have a newly minted master's thesis and we are about a month pregnant. My wife has a job that will end right around the time that we are due and little old me is jobless and trying to reconcile the fact that that condition runs counter to ever moral fiber in my sensible Midwestern soul. Such a thing, pregnant and jobless was a state for 16 year-olds and pot heads so I head out and try to do the most sensible thing I can - find a job that pays as much money as possible. Which I do and accept the position despite finding the offices completely sterile and walking out from the interview with the boss thinking, "he is a jerk but I have worked with jerks before and I can lead up". The cost of this decision: about 7K per year.

That sounds like a lot - I wouldn't want to leave that money just lying around - but I ended up gaining about 20 pounds out of the deal which I have only just recently lost. I wouldn't have run screaming but I failed to get in touch with the employer I turned down which was a real mistake when on my second day the senior engineer in the department - 5 years experience on the job - and my trainer tells me that she may not be back as she was going to give her two week notice. I thought that responsible adults stuck with things like this; it didn't even occur to me that this particular plant hasn't found its footing yet and that such low morale is not something an engineer can fix - in this case it is a tone that starts at the top and hopefully the plant manager will figure it out.

To recap: took the worst fit job for me and then proceeded to have a son (kids are awesome) and do all the first time parent stuff (here is a tip: it is a lot like woodstock: I don't really remember it but I have pictures) when 2 years ago my wife came to me and said, "There is a job opportunity in Lisbon, Portugal, should I apply?" Having no idea what I was getting in to I said yes. 16 months ago we packed up an 18 month old child, a two year old dog, sold our cars and set about living out of a suitcase for a while. It ended up being six months as we had already made plans to say goodbye to dear friends and family around the US; to spend Christmas with my wife's family in the States; and our hilarious introduction to our first Portuguese neighbor - 'the dragon lady' - meant we started looking for our second place to stay within moments of locating the first. Did I mention that while there is a down economy in the US there is a really down economy here, that I had a stable if somewhat despotic job and that neither one of us spoke a lick of Portuguese? No? Well, it makes for interesting times.

Portuguese - the language

I was reading The Language Hacking Guide website put together by Benny Lewis. I went ahead and bought the book he has put together based on his experiences learning to become fluent in a language within three months as an adult.

I am about half way through the text in English and I would describe it as good but not fantastic. I would say his 'new' idea is not to let the polish of speaking in a native fashion get in the way of enjoying connecting with people in another language. Then he follows this up by identifying (correctly in my mind) that the difference between the polyglot and the monolingual is not some innate talent or brains but rather treating language learning as a project with specific, actionable and time sensitive goals and a classroom setting may or may not be helpful towards those goals.

So the first step is broadcasting one's goals, so here they are for the month of March:

1) Complete grammar book, Gramática Activa nível A1/2 by end of month. That is 35 additional worksheets and I must complete them with 95% or better.
2) 1 random interaction on the street in Portuguese every week day for a month.
3) Find two additional language partners - enough to meet 4 times a week

Caving in the Iberian Peninsula

Caving in Portugal and Spain.
Today we went to the cave complex at Maire d'Aire(grunta). This is a cave in the Serra de Aire and Candeeiros about an hour north of Lisbon via the A1. Tickets were around 6 Euros.

Over the past weekend we went to the Caves in Nerja on the Costa del Sol in the south of Spain along the Mediterranean coast.

I would describe the two caves as similar in kind. Spain has a well developed (perhaps over developed) complex complete with an amphitheater in the cave and the obligatory gift shop and restaurant. In Portugal the caves struck me as decidedly less developed. Both are worthy of a visit. The Portugal caves do not have prehistoric drawings but you don't get to see the drawings in Nerja so that doesn't really matter. In Nerja there is the obligatory display showing an artist rendering of how the people who lived in the cave lived and played in the stone age including some colorful drawings of funeral rites (haunted caves haunted by cavemen [and women and maybe a cave dog]). In Portugal there is a glass case containing some animal bones that where found in the cave. I recognized some grazing animal jaw bones however it was pretty much a leftovers from the dustbin and no explanatory effort.

The other big difference is humidity. In the Nerja cave it was a bit damp with some collected water. In Maire d'Aire this is really an underground river so it rains underneath. Nothing to worry about - just don't wear stuff that cannot get wet. The other thing - and this was a little fun - is that Portugal emphasizes that humans are visitors in this world, there is some obligatory safety lighting but the lights are on a timer. IF you lollygag you will find yourself in the near darkness. I don't think this is to protect the cave fauna (which was not present) but to prevent any flora from the outside setting up shop and contaminating further down the watershed.
The difference between the two experiences was stark but probably indicative of the differences between the countries.


As far as taking a child to go in the cave it was fine but I or my wife was carrying him the whole way. He liked feeding the goats and donkey so the petting zoo was definitely a win.

I got to figure out just how badly my Portuguese has gotten over the past week of not speaking because there was a short 5 minute film about the discovery and exploration of the cave in the nineteen forties and fifties that was totally in Portuguese. I had gotten the high points from reading about the cave in the guide book but it was still hard. Fortunately our guide spoke wonderful English and was able to give us the run down of the cave in English after explaining to the Portuguese family what was going on. It was essentially the same thing.