Traveling to Brazil via the Azores

In a rather roundabout way, I'm going to Porto Alegre in January because of my granny. Her parents both emigrated to New England from the Azores at the turn of the century. As for my Azorean background, my granny was always telling my cousins and I to "senta-se" (sit down) when we were running wild around the house. Of course to me that sounded like she was talking about Santa Claus and I was vaguely confused and amused, though I understood the sentiment. I also recall going to a Portuguese Festival held in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Provincetown was a beautiful mix of kitschy tourist shops amidst leather stores. I don't remember the Portuguese part. My granny, great aunt and I sat on a park bench and watched statuesque drag queens walk by.

And so, while backpacking around Europe in my late teens, when I ended up in Portugal, my curiosity was piqued. The Azores islands were hundreds of miles away from Portugal, but I was closer to them then I'd ever been. The Portuguese did not react well to my attempts to address them in Spanish. I had to revert to English mixed with words picked from the Portuguese-English dictionary. I had no idea how to pronounce them and the more I listened to it, the more I was fascinated. According to a friend of mine, Portuguese sounds something like, "Bej mej maj neej baaj neej maaj." Like running your fingers across velvet.

Upon return to college in Rhode Island, I signed up for an intensive Portuguese class. My professors were all Brazilian. I thought Brazilian Portuguese was the most beautiful language I'd heard and I started to fall in love with the language, the music, the cultures, and took all the relevant classes I could fit into my schedule. After graduation when I was back home gardening, I made friends with a Brazilian teenager that I met in the town library. We took long walks on the beach in middle of winter and he patiently let me stumble through Portuguese sentences. Later, teaching English at the community school, my most vocal and fun students were Brazilians. I gardened for my day job and a number of them were house painters. Every once and a while we'd run into each other at job sites and greet each other with a joyful mixture of broken English and Portuguese.

Unfortunately, my Portuguese fell out of use when I moved to Texas, although my Spanish of course gets daily use. When I found out about the opportunity to intern in southern Brazil, I jumped at the chance.

The truth is that I didn't know much about Porto Alegre. As many have confirmed, it's not the first place you think of when you imagine Brazil. And so imagine my bemused surprise when I first googled the city and read (on Wikipedia) that: Porto Alegre was founded by Azoreans. Of course that's where I had to go! What better way to start to make a story come full circle? And beautifully, around the same time I'll be in Brazil, my granny will be returning to the Azores with her grown children and their spouses.