Archive for March, 2008

How many days since the last post now? Eegad! If any of you are regular readers, and we really have no clue but have to assume, from the number of comments posted, that you could all squeeze into a Mini Cooper for a trip to Dairy Queen, we apologize for not posting more regularly.

This post is, therefore, a warm-up for a veritable barrage of exciting Portopean (European with a Portuguese emphasis) news and happenings.

Basically, we’re living life as it comes here in Lisbon.
Susan is starting her third trimester (woah!) of the school term (whew!).
Len is working on some water and droid simulation work from home.

And for you schools that study our page for your mandatory international exposure curriculum, here’s a tidbit about Portugal that I find interesting:
Apparently Portuguese people didn’t have sandwiches before America ‘invented’ them. Okay, maybe England. Or someone in Germany. Some Earl.
Decades ago Portuguese people used the word “sandwich”, borrowed from English.
But that was problematic since the Portuguese alphabet does not include the letter “w”. (it is kind of silly when you think about it, “double U”?) So pronouncing this weird foreign word was challenging.
So about 50 years ago (I’m making that number up) they decided to Portuguese-ize ‘sandwich’ into the new, officially Portuguese word “sandes”. Which, by standard Portuguese pronunciation sounds like “sandesh”. You can see that they basically just removed the troublesome “w” syllable in the middle, which people were probably doing automatically in struggling to say the word.
How is our Portuguese coming, you may wonder? We know how to say sandwich. That’s all I’m sure of at the moment.

In case you’re wondering whether I’ve changed much in the time I’ve been away from the U.S., well, it’s hard to say. I’ve certainly been living in my own little universe lately (thus the lack of communication on this blog), but there are certain things about me that seem to be constant. I know this because the things that my new friends make fun of me for are the same things that my old friends make fun of me for. Things I’ve been made fun of for lately:

I’m still a generous laugher- everyone is about 80% funnier around me.

I trip a lot when walking around (but don’t worry, I rarely fall down, and I haven’t broken any bones lately). Lisbon’s streets & sidewalks are quite uneven and I’m still quite klutzy.

I still talk too loudly when I’ve been drinking.

I’m still a home improvement perfectionist- I helped with some painting at my school and insisted that we paint the wall behind the bookshelves (when the shelves had already been temporarily taken down, of course), just in case the shelves had to be changed later, or didn’t fit exactly back where they had been. And it was just the right way to do it, dammit!