Evolving Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre like all the world´s cities is a ragbag of the great and the dire. I love living here quite like I love Lemmy from Motorhead, warts´n´all, but there´s room for improvement. Much smaller than London it offers many things we Londoners don’t have and we can learn from the way of life here as no doubt Alegrenses learn from our gross and gourdy metropolis. Obviously the first thing that should change in Brazil is the huge gulf between rich and poor which leads to crime and destitution the world over, but apart from that here is my list of things I think PoA could do with and without…

Do with:

garam masala - bring your own or see if you can find it in the public market!

Curry: If an Alegrense says they like spicy food they´re telling black lies, there isn´t one good Indian restaurant in the whole town. Not one. Where are the nosebleed vindaloos? Can I even get an authentic chicken tikka masala? Visitors, bring your own gram masala and colman´s mustard with you. See also branston pickle and cheddar cheese!

Bus timetables – Bus shelters, half-pipes of corrugated iron, line the streets but you learn more about jesus and strip joints than you do the times and destinations of the sadly characterless buses. Import those retro buses from Argentina, they´re far more exotic, and put up timetables.

where are we going?

Cycle lanes – When I first arrived here in 2011, a manifestation by cyclists for better facilities and safer roads made world headlines when a maniac plowed into it with his car. Fortunately no one was killed. Since then there still aren´t cycle paths on the road and motorists are as selfish as ever. Why not go green and replace the lane slaloming taxis with rickshaws or make them solar powered with max speeds of 20mph?

Monkeys – I don´t get why anyone would be proud that Porto Alegre doesn´t have monkeys and think us foreigners ignorant or rude for expecting them. Since when was having cute little monkeys a bad thing? The mata atlantica used to belong to them, species like the blond capuchins are all endangered now so reintroduce them, it´s not like you don´t have enough trees.

More saliva – I love sharing a chimarrão with strangers but why not share ice lollies and cutlery as well?

Others: sound time-keeping, cheaper dvds and snow at Christmas

Things PoA can do without:

Giselle Bundchen – If you blindfolded a newcomer to Brazil and took them from Salgado Filho airport to the centro historico, the shock of so many ugly people would make them think they´d entered the twilight zone by mistake. Porto Alegre has more than its fair share of beautiful women, enticing us ugly expats to your shores, but be honest, you have a plethora of different people of all shapes and sizes and too much body consciousness to sustain them. Be proud of everyone not just the size zeros and vacuous supermodels.

The Beatles and ACDC – Okay, they´re great, I get it. But while universidade sertanejo and Brazilian funk deservedly take the flak, the gaucho mobsession with these two bands is chatissimo (really boring). Putting your baby in an ACDC t-shirt makes ACDC less cool and makes you a moron.

This building – 

unfinished since 1956

Maniac Taxi Drivers: If you want to feel like a princess here, take a taxi. Within minutes of hurtling down the road you will feel like Princess Diana. The fast lane in Brazil is whatever lane your taxi happens to be in.

Others: rip-off internet shops, stripclub flyers all over the pavement (use blue tack) and the facebook page for estrangeiros/foreigners in Porto Alegre which is oddly unfriendly and snooty.

But what can we Londoners take from Porto Alegre?... I will blog about that soon!

Practicing Portugese in Porto Alegre

´Rua Lima e Silva,´ I repeat for the third time. ´Por favor!´ The cab driver understands and we set off.  ´American?´ He asks. ´Não Búlgaro,´ I say. ´Eu sou da Bulgaria´. The cab driver turns round in astonishment, ´Sêrio?´ - we almost crash and I grab the puta merda handle. ´Sim,´I reply. ´Da Sofia´… I smile to myself, now I have a captive listener to practice my Portugese on. In the following 10 minute cab journey, I manage to articulate the enormous differences between Brazil and Bulgaria in the food, weather and geography all in my best pigeon Portugese! The cab driver is genuinely interested as I tell him my own story of how orphaned in the Great War I grew up in a forest, making a living as a chess hustler until I was given a place at the prestigious Sophia University of Espionage. All lies of course, I´ve never even been to Bulgaria and am pretty sure their currency isn´t Dumplings, but we´re not talking English, we´re talking Portugese, the language I´ve spent the last 2 years learning and until I invented my alter-ego Englebert hardly ever got a chance to use.

Typical reaction when I try to speak Portugese

You see being a native English speaker in Brazil is a blessing and a curse. One´s as surrounded by friends wanting to practice their English as a lightbulb besieged by moths. You´re held in very high esteem: you´re an ambassador, a philosopher, a wordsmith and raconteur. You´re all these things and more, while you´re speaking English. When you open your gob and mangled Portugese comes out, then you can see the smiles drop, interest snap, you´re suddenly a dolt, a burden, a malfunctioning robot. How many times I´ve had my friends beg me to ´Speak English!´?  How many times do they let me get halfway through an anecdote before detonating my grammar mistakes, leaving its ending hanging in the air? I have one friend with superlative English who translates everything I say in Portugese back to me in English. ´Me passa um copo´ ´Pass you a cup?´  Yeh, thanks mate.

Oooô lariá laiô obá obá obá

One night I was invited by some friends to watch them play Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, surprisingly, it´s as popular over here as say football. For five hours, I listened and understood almost everything they said to each other in Portugese. For five hours, I journeyed through towns of vampires, battled giant worms and watched spells being cast and mice having sex. All in Portugese. The only time the magic of the roleplay was interrupted was when one of the gamers would speak to me, and when they did they spoke in English! Come on guys, what the hell? 

Some of my friends have begun humoring me with the odd five minutes here and there, and for those brief spells my shackles are lifted and I can see the light of day, but then it´s suddenly over and it´s back into your hole you wretched troglodyte. And thus Englebert was born, the bane of shopkeepers. As myself I would shyly mumble for paracetamol only for the shopkeeper to look in a bread oven and tell me ´no more´, leaving me to shuffle off dejected. But Englebert doesn´t give up, he talks over those who would speak English at him. He wants not your pity. ´Uma maça´ ´An apple?´ ´Não eu quero uma maça, droga!´

People here seem taken aback that you´re trying to learn Portugese. In London, we´ve developed a facility for understanding peculiar pronunciations of the Queen´s.  Porto Alegrenses and Brazilians will also need this listening skill because while English is now the world language, many non-English Engleberts will descend in great waves upon this city in 2014 and 2016. Moreover, they need to be considerate of the few lonely expats who already live here and see grasping the lingo as the key to a richer life in this wonderful city.

Some tips for practicing your Portugese:

- Go to the church, synagogue, mosque or espirtualist temple and join in with prayers out loud

-Teach English to beginner students where a bit of translation is acceptable

-Find a Brazilian girlfriend or boyfriend, preferably someone who has never tried to decipher the lyrics of their favourite band

- Go to Subway or a supermarket where you can assemble your own sandwich

-Commit to memory the following volumes: dungeons and dragons – livro do jogador and livro dos monstros