(viva la) vida, ou celebrating (o aniversário da Carol!)

I’m back to working, well, part-time and doing all sorts of ELT-related jobs, from teaching a few of the school’s one-to-one students and filling in for colleagues to fulfilling Cambridge English speaking examiner duties like examining kids and attending meetings. I’ve also been trying to move into another flat for over a month now, wasting time and money on bureaucracy and putting a lot of effort, physical effort, into taking most of my stuff to what’s soon, all being well, going to be my new place - on foot, in suitcases and rucksacks of various sizes (well, let me give credit where it’s due and add that my father, besides helping me with the whole process in various ways, spent over a week in my current flat and carried more rucksacks and dragged more suitcases than I did - and he’s nearly 70, and I really love him).

I believe all this has kept me away from Wales and from Welsh, that is, from writing about the country and studying the language. I equally believe I haven’t done either of these things for so long now simply because I’m back to being the standard, lazy me I am as well. Lastly, I do not discard inspiration as a core element to my writing, much on the contrary: I may sit and sweat in front of this screen for hours and nothing will happen unless, unless. Much like what’s going on right now. I’ve considered writing about my first day in Cardiff this year and how I became acquainted with Charles, who walked me back to the hostel after class, for everything seems confusingly distant on the first day of your second visit to a city after a very brief first one, or about the first planned event on my cardiff2016 spreadsheet, a play named Meet Fred (from poster: ‘When threatened with losing his Puppetry Living Allowance, Fred’s life begins to spiral out of his control. Contains strong language and puppet nudity.’), which, as part of the Hijinx Festival, introduced me to the fabulous idea of inclusive theatre (and you can watch if you're in Swansea - Welsh: Abertawe - on the 17th of this month).

Just saved by the bell, or rather by Liz and Facebook (in Welsh: penblwydd hapus, Carol!...), I’ll give you one of the posts I’ve been most looking forward to myself, the first of at least three, all starring the now ofloveforwales-blog-famous The Other Brazilian Girl At The Hostel. Here’s how I (very fortunately) met Carolina Ribeiro, who left what we would consider a small town in São Paulo state (you mentioned Mococa, am I right, Carol?...) to work as an au pair in the United States, in South Africa and, more recently, in England - and who’s got both a YouTube channel and a blog (link? Carol, link!) about her travels. You can imagine she’s also got plenty of experience, like Liz (another real-life character I must write more about here), and you can’t really imagine that, but she’s got quite a few things in common with me too (again, just like Liz - no wonder I got to the conclusion that the three of us form, well, something I’ll be telling you about in one of the trio of posts-about-Carol I intend to write soon - thank you so much for the inspiration which has been eluding me for so long, really, thank you, Carol!), surprisingly (I tend to think of myself and my life as, respectively, plain and uneventful, neither of which can be applied to either Carol or Liz and the lives they’ve been respectively leading).

‘Hey. How was class today? Well, I gotta go now, but you two can talk, you’re both from Brazil, so… See you girls later!’, or something along these lines, was how Australian roommate Linda introduced Carol and me to one another. I didn’t have my contacts on, having just taken them off to get ready for bed, so I said hi, perhaps really ‘hi’, as we sometimes aren’t fast enough when switching from language to language, and looked vaguely in the direction of the girl sitting on the floor by the locker. She looked a bit like me, dark-haired and fair-skinned, one of the many average Brazilian types, but seemed a lot younger - a traveller in her twenties (it’d take me quite some time to find out she’s actually a balzaquiana like me - not a baiana, a balzaquiana, a term we use to refer to a woman in her thirties, after the French author’s, Honoré de Balzac, novel ‘La femme de trente ans’), also an English teacher, oh, a paulista (someone from São Paulo state, yes - those from the city, São Paulo city, the state’s capital, the largest city in the country and one of the ten largest in the world, bigger than London, are called paulistanos and paulistanas, we have masculine and feminine adjectives, yes, besides adjectives which don’t change according to gender, such as ‘paulista’) as well, interesting. It was from coincidence to coincidence that we somehow reached the subject of our grandmothers - I told her how mine (on my father's side) had died and how guilty I feel for not having said and done what I now wish I had, and Carol explained she can relate, having lost her father, but was fortunate to not feel that way about her own granny, who nevertheless was then ill and 100 years old already!

Since life is full of coincidences, or whatever you’d rather call them, Carol got a message in the middle of our chat, informing her that, well, her grandmother had passed away. The evening, which had started much better than we both thought it would (we later admitted that Linda’s enthusiastic words on the two of us being from the same country hadn’t gone down too well: it might be some silly prejudice we both have against our own fellow country people who happen to be able to afford to travel abroad - silly to an extent, I’d say, and Carol would agree with me, as both of us have run into enough of them outside the country to know some are, indeed, highly inconvenient, as in loud, rude, snobbish and immature. Luckily, others are funny, kind, friendly and wise like Carol herself - and Lucas, our other compatriot at the hostel then, whom she’d introduce to me later in the weekend), was suddenly going to end sorrowfully. I still don’t know what to do in such situations (and I say ‘still’ because, as I’ve mentioned, I’m a balzaquiana, yes, I should’ve learnt one or two more things, at the very least, than I have so far - maybe this is why I still refer to myself, and think of myself, as a ‘girl’ instead?... -, including how to offer people proper comfort when they lose a loved one), so I just said I was sorry, I reckon, and, after some minutes and with Carol already in bed, put out the lights ‘so you can rest better,’ I recall saying as well.

She would need her rest the following day, when she was going on a Doctor Who tour of the city (link chosen sort of randomly), being the huge fan of the show that she is. And she did go, and she did well to do so, puffy eyes and all, as it certainly helped her cope with the situation a little. It was still on this visit (gladly, there was another one, and she took me to the bay to do other Doctor Who stuff, which I never thought I’d enjoy so much - thanks again, Carol, it was such a lovely day out!...) that she joined Jess, Liz, Charles, Ioan and myself for some wine-in-the-park (poor thing, we’d said we were going to a pub or something - but I can assure you that we enjoyed ourselves way more than we would have had we gone somewhere else), on that night which didn’t end so well for me (not that I care, I did have loads of fun anyway - and even managed to wake up early to go on a trip to a festival the following day, I couldn’t believe I’d made it, and neither could any of those who’d witnessed just how much I’d drunk the night before. Well, it must’ve felt as even more of a surprise when I told those who hadn’t accompanied me to Burger King how it had really ended). Anyway, meeting Carol was definitely one of the highlights of my trip, which is why you’ve seen and will continue to see her name so often here. Also, as Liz explained to me, with the help of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (which I’ve got on DVD, but I’ve yet to watch, BTW), there’s something to meeting a fellow countryman/woman while abroad that… That… Well, I know I was really happy to be speaking my own language again, for instance, and not to the nice fellows from the Portuguese bakery Nata & Co. (any Brazilian reading this who understands me when I say I sometimes can’t understand the Portuguese because of, well, their ‘accent’?...).

*Obrigada, Cris, prima linda, tio Paulo e tia Miriam, por toda a ajuda de vocês também, sem a qual o aluguel nem teria saído in the first place. :*