Traveling with a Brazilian
Warning – boyfriend gushing below!
Roberto and I have taken lots of trips together over the past 2 years. We traveled all over the US when he was still here, traveled around Brazil a lot, and visited Europe, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and Argentina. We have settled in to a nice comfortable travel style where we compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses: he drives and I navigate (ALWAYS!), he carries the heavy stuff and I hold onto the important stuff (netbook, ipods, passports, reservations), and when we buy drinks we put them in each other’s backpack pockets for easy access. We make most decisions together and we both have a go-with-the-flow attitude when visiting places, often making spur of the moment decisions.
While I am grateful for such a good travel companion in general, I also get to enjoy some benefits and unique aspects of traveling with a Brazilian. These things would likely not be the case if I were traveling with another American.
Note that while many of these topics are characteristic of Brazilian culture I’m not trying to generalize or stereotype – really I’m just talking about traveling with MY Brazilian, and can’t speak for the rest of them!
The Language Thing
Of course, I rely on Roberto like crazy when I travel to Brazil. Sadly, I am not coming along as far as I’d like with learning Portuguese partly because he’s just so darn good at translating everything for me. I would truly be lost traveling in Brazil without his help!
But he’s even super useful outside Brazil! His Spanish is also very good, so I can thoroughly depend on him in Spanish-speaking countries too. This really helps when we run into people who don’t speak any English, or quickly exhaust somebody’s English phrases. This has the added benefit that Roberto can have more in depth conversations with locals, get better travel advice, and really just warm people up by speaking their native language.
I usually sit back and listen during these conversations, understanding maybe half of what’s being said in Spanish and not much more in Portuguese.
Of course, being fluent in a couple romance languages doesn’t help much outside Europe and the Americas. We’ll both be equally lost when we travel to other places like Africa and Asia.
Conversing with the locals…
Brazilians are Everywhere!
We’ve run into Brazilians in the most random of places. There was that family from Sao Paulo we met on an airboat in the Everglades, the group of Capoeira dancers in front of Sacre-Coeur in Paris, and the group of Brazilian women sitting behind us on the motorboat in the Bruges canals.
This is fun because, they are always delighted to find other Brazilians and start sharing life stories. Usually they’ll talk to us both in Portuguese and I’ll follow along as best I can nodding and smiling until Roberto gets around to telling them I’m American. Then typically one of them will address me in English and tell me about their sister/uncle/friend/primo who lives in Miami/NYC/Boston.
It’s nice to feel a sense of community among Brazilians who meet out in the world. It’s a bit different from meeting Americans because I don’t think we have the same kind of pride in our culture as Brazilians do. Not to say we aren’t patriotic – it’s just different with American cultural influence being so far reaching. Brazilians don’t have a familiar churrascaria in every major city the way we have McDonald’s, so they seem to find much more joy out of meeting people from back home.
The Common Thread – Soccer
Since the rest of the world loves soccer for reasons us Americans can’t seem to understand, traveling with a bona fide member of the soccer-loving community has its perks. For every region we’ve traveled to, Roberto seems to know enough soccer facts to engage the locals in an in depth conversation about their popular teams’ rivalries and recent matches, best players and coaching woes, and that country’s performance in the most recent world cup and their predictions for 2010.
Bonding over a soccer match in the DR.
What this means to me? Well, Roberto’s bonding with folks over their passion for soccer is a great way to meet people and make friends. He’s broken the ice through soccer with just about every cab driver we’ve ever had, often then moving into some great tidbits on what to do in the area and what to avoid. We’ve had tons of fun getting to know waiters and bartenders through soccer which usually leads to free drinks and chef “experiments” not to mention great advice on local nightlife.
I think some of the waiters in the touristy areas enjoy us (Roberto) making an effort to get to know them, and talk about something meaningful to them rather than which tourist sites we should see next.
In General
In general we’ve found that foreigners (this was true in the US too) are often super intrigued by Brazilian culture and want to learn more. They have ideas of a beautiful and exotic land with gorgeous people and a fun loving culture (well that sounds about right!). Brazil isn’t often in the forefront of international news so these assumptions live on. This is an interesting contrast to American culture, which most other countries are exposed to plenty. There’s no mystery to being American.
It’s been a great experience for me to travel with Roberto and begin to understand global perceptions of Brazil, the US, and international relationships from various perspectives. I like to think of it as an unexpected perk of having a multicultural relationship!
