A Sign, a Park, and a Summer in Braga

GRIP: Legal Research at University of Minho Law School (Braga, Portugal)

Cover: Picture from my first evening out, offering pasteis de nata, with a sign reading: “Teach me something in Portuguese and I will give you a pastel de nata”

My greatest motivation for choosing GRIP in Braga, Portugal this summer was an opportunity for immersive Portuguese study. And so, on my very first full day in the country, I brainstormed some potential strategies for improving my fluency. What I came up with and put to the test on that very first day wound up becoming a summer-long project that brought me endless adventures, deep connections, and serious improvement to my language skills.

A friend told me about the Portuguese people’s love for their national pastry (pastel de nata), so I went to a pastelaria, bought a dozen, and put up a sign in a local park offering a free pastel to anyone willing to chat with me in Portuguese and teach me something new. To my present surprise, my sign received immediate interest, and loads of people stopped to chat, but almost none were all too interested in the tasty reward. People were just friendly. They wanted to chat, and they were plenty excited to help out a young foreigner who showed interest in their language and their culture.

From that day forward, I left the pasteis out of the equation, but kept heading to different spots in Braga and beyond with a sign inviting strangers to chat, keeping track of everything they taught me in a journal. By the end of the summer, I had spent more than 30 afternoons practicing my Portuguese this way and met hundreds of people. The experiences were wonderful. While many people stopped for little more than a quick chat, almost every day someone stayed for upwards of an hour. From an older Braga native who offered me a job, to a huge Brazilian family who insisted I stay in their spare room, to a group of East Timorese students who invited me to join their volleyball group, my sign brought not just conversations, but connection and adventures.

I regularly ran into people I’d spoken with before on the streets of Braga, and strangers would sit down at my sign saying they’d seen me out somewhere else doing the same thing, or that a friend had already told them about me. In just over two months, I felt I became better known around Braga than I am in my own hometown.

One of my biggest takeaways from the hundreds of conversations I had with people this summer, is the power of language to build connections. While the obvious fact that sharing a language with someone is fundamental to being able to communicate and get to know one another, the actual act of discussing language (a somewhat meta undertaking) is such a powerful means of connecting with others.

The way someone speaks, their accent, their slang, says so much about who they are and where they come from. Asking someone to teach you how they speak is like asking for a window into their life: for the stories of how they got where they are, the jokes that make them laugh, and an understanding of who and how they are. And when you’re asking to learn those little parts of someone so you can make them part of your own vocabulary, your own accent, your own humor, you’re showing a level of respect and admiration for another person like no other.

That’s why I think my sign became such a powerful way to connect with people and improve my language skills this summer. People loved watching me learn their language and culture, and I loved everyone who took a moment to share a piece of themselves with me. I’m grateful to Penn Abroad for making this summer possible — I experienced so many wonderful things through GRIP, and it’s brought me one step closer to my next goal: studying abroad in Brazil this spring. And I know that if I have the privilege of reaching that next goal, my little sign will be a faithful companion through that journey too.