Mary Lou's Portugal Journal #27

Ola amigos,

I hope you are doing well. We're both happy and in good health here.

Since I last wrote, we attended a harvest party with a bunch of friends and acquaintences up in the Douro Valley. A bus load of 60 of us were taken up to a small family vineyard where they fed us multiple times during the day, poured all the wine we could drink, had music and dancing, and taught us the correct way to cut the grapes and gently place them in baskets. Some brave souls in our group then climbed into a vat and stomped some grapes (we weren't among them). Honestly, we didn't spend more than 45 minutes in total cutting grapes off the vines because they were too busy entertaining and feeding us. Fortunately for us, the weather was beautiful and somewhat cool.

The organizer of the event told me that I earned a PhD in grape harvesting.

The last week of September a good friend from Pacific Grove, CA., Becky, came to Porto for a visit. Lucky for Becky (😂) we had just received an assignment from our 6 year old granddaughter Isa, in Miami, who wanted us to take her Flat Stanley around Porto as part of her school assignment. For those of you who don't know Flat Stanley, he's a paperdoll that most American kids at sometime or another have to take around and photograph him enjoying activities, trips, etc.. So being the dutiful grandmother, I printed a copy of him and carried him around for the next few days while showing Becky around town. I captured many photos of him enjoying the sites. While we were walking around Mercado Bolhão, I had Flat Stanley in my hand and suddenly I heard someone yell "Flat Stanley!" It was a young adult woman traveling with her parents from the states who recognized him from her grammar school days.

Here's Flat Stanley having a casual lunch at Mercado Bolhão with Becky (L), two women from Germany in the middle and a woman from El Salvador (R) who were all so willing to help me on this misson.

Following Becky's visit we both started school again. Nick is in a more casual conversation/cultural class while I've been studying like crazy for my new Portuguese language class. It's a much more intense program that basically crams all of A1 and A2 together into a 150 hour online program, spread over 10 weeks, which means I will finish before the end of the year. 🎉🎉🎉 Classes are 4 hours in length, and my weekly schedule varies from week to week. There are 20 students: six Americans currently living in Portugal, two students in Russia, one in Sri Lanka, one in Belarus, one in Algeria; while the rest of the students are from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan but also currently live in Portugal ... so quite an ecletic group. Our instructor is very good, but English is definitely not as easy for her, so we help her with her English translation while she helps us learn Portuguese. Participation is mandatory and part of our grade. We also have to be on camera throughout each class. Everyone's goal is to earn an A2 Certificate for future citizenship, so the government tightly controls the parameters of the program. We have daily diagnostic tests (mini tests to determine whether we are learning the current topic) in addition to bigger tests that cover each section of the book. Thus far, I've done very well on the first two big tests and hope to do as well on the remaining four. I have four good friends in my class, and we are all very happy with this program. It won't be long before you won't have to hear about my language classes anymore! 😉

I did manage to renew my Portuguese driver's license recently and managed to speak mostly Portuguese during the appointment. Overall, I'm getting a bit more comfortable trying to speak the language when we're out and about, however, it will be a long time before I'm fluent.

Tomorrow we are heading to Lisboa for a few days and have tickets to see the Dutch violinist/conductor André Rieu. Lisboa has been suffering from some huge riots/protests this past week, and a number of cars and buses have been burned over a police shooting. Hopefully, nothing more will happen while we're there.

I hope everyone has voted early. We did, and so have all of our friends here. Fingers crossed for a good outcome.

Adeus, abraços e beijos, MaryLou