'Onde está a praia?'

Hey all,

Already a few weeks ago, I thought it would fun to write a short blog entry on this (but didn't get to it yet): languages and, in my specific case, Portuguese. A language that, despite not having just fallen into my lap (I did actually have to make some effort to learn it and still do.. ;)), has made itself present in my life in a more long-term way than I could've imagined back in the day... before I made myself ready for all those overseas adventures, that naive soul, haha..!

Recently while surfing the internet I came across a video of Shakira, the famous singer, giving a short press-conference in Brasilia after meeting with the president of Brazil to discuss the latter's new plans about education for young children. And to my amazement, Shakira was speaking about all these development plans and her enthousiasm about it in... fluent Portuguese!! I did briefly read somewhere sometime ago that it's among her lingual talents, but I didn't actually pay too much attention to that then. But when I heard her talking in Portuguese for several minutes non-stop, with a slight accent of course, but a complete confidence, I was like, woah hang on a minute!! hahaha...

Exactly where and how Shakira, whose native language is Spanish, learned Portuguese as well, I don't know (but would be interested to find out), but coming across this video was in any case like an extra little boost for me that learning Portuguese might actually be really useful! Ok, it's not one of the 6 main UN languages, but I can already tick off 2 of them anyway. And considering Brazil's incessant economic growth and BRIC position, as well as its dominant size within South America, I'd say that it's in fact almost a surprise that Portuguese isn't more popular already. Chinese is, after all, already extremely popular to learn among many people whose eyes are set on the Far East... but why should Portuguese be lagging behind? ;-)

Mid-June, the new University College alumni magazine arrived at my doorstep. This year I wrote an article to be published in it, and guess what it's about? Yeeees, learning a new language, haha! Actually, I wrote up a little personalized guide as to how one might be able to learn a new language in another country in a short while, based on my experience in Brazil. And I philosophised about it a little, too... well, all I've got to say right now is I hope people enjoy(ed) reading it, and who knows it might come in handy for someone someday =)

In fact, I find that knowing Portuguese comes in handy - and funny, in the case below - at rather unexpected moments. For example, a couple of weeks ago I tuned in really randomly to Shania Twain's website (yes, another famous singer), and found a live streaming of a press conference she was giving - but no, not in Portuguese, hahaha! In English... but next to the video there was the twitter account running busy with all these people around the world watching the video at the same time leaving comments. And I found, to my surprise, that it was basically full of Brazilians, some of them even exchanging messages back and forth about the video, all in Portuguese. Some rather entertaining stuff. That was just the randomest thing ever though! I never realized that of all the places, Brazil in particular would be so big on Shania ;)) She's like one of my fav singers from way back in the day, when I was still living in Russia even (so that's at least 10 years!!), and to go to her website and find all these Brazilian Portuguese comments in the twitter thing was just really hilarious for me.

Well, I've come to the end of my post at the moment. I'm not entirely sure what exactly my point is here, I just wanted to babble a bit and share some funny and curious things here on my blog hahaha. And I guess, for me the point is to reinforce and reassure myself of learning Portuguese further, which I will do sem duvidas ;)

Thanks for reading! Hope you'll come back again to check out my blog =)

PS As for the title, it's a word play on the UC alumni magazine's illustration for my article, which had a dude in swim shorts and an iPod, with 'donde esta la playa' written in the speech bubble, hahaha... and as I'm still going to write about some Brazilian beach adventures here soon, I thought, why not head in that direction already ;-)